UNDERSTANDING INQUIRY-BASED

SCIENCE LEARNING

MODULE 3A SCIENCE EDUCATORS’ PROFESSIONAL

DEVELOPMENT

PART OF FOUR MODULE SERIES

UNDERSTANDING INQUIRY-BASED
SCIENCE LEARNING
The module presents an overview of student-inquiry based science
learning in an angle enabling the docents to practice the science
learning philosophy. The topics covered in this module include
1. Inquiry-based Classroom Science Learning
2. Phases of Students’ Scientific Inquiry
1. INQUIRY-BASED CLASSROOM SCIENCE
LEARNING
Doce Phone email As an analogy, although the
nt Numb
Nam er school’s science committee
e has the list of the docent’s
Aaa 111 dkfj@rerer.com phone numbers and also
Bbb 222 dfdf@yjjj.edu
email addresses, it chooses
Ccc 333 ykyn@hhy.org
the email as the preferred
medium of communication to
send details about the lab
schedules and training dates
to the docents.
• The reason for the choice of group
email is communication efficiency.
Similarly, the choice of student-
inquiry centric educational
practices have proven their worth
serving as the most efficient modes
of triggering lifelong scientific
learning.
• Jerome Bruner’s spiral (Figure 1)
Figure 1 Bruner’s spiral taken from
indicates an effective learning ResearchGate showing how growth and
system where students continue to knowledge can build over time; provision of
effective learning environments contributes
learn on top of the earlier built heavily to this process

knowledge.
• The science classroom hands-on
experiments and observation imposed
by the student-inquiry-based learning
process paves a major role in
cultivating critical thinking in young
minds.
• Critical thinking abilities are
considered essential for the next
generation’s real future.
CENTRAL QUESTION IN INQUIRY-CENTRIC
SCIENCE

• Here is the definition for inquiry-based learning given by Edutopia,

part of a research based organization dedicated to K-12 education.
• Inquiry-based learning uses a central question to frame a curriculum
unit or module. Students answer this central question for themselves,
discovering and learning through a series of guided discussions,
experiments, and hands-on activities over several class periods.
Figure 2 shows an example of how the yearlong sixth grade NGSS
Mattos science curriculum is built around a central theme Water Cycle,
Weather, Climate Change Over Time and distributed over several docent-
led labs.

Lesson 1: Watercycle
Lesson 4: Air masses

Lesson 2: Coriolis Effect

Central Q?
Lesson 5: Oceans on move

Lesson 3: Air pressure Lesson 6: Watershed Design

Figure 2 Year-long grade level NGSS Mattos
Curriculum Built on Central Question and the
Lessons distributed among several class
periods
LEARNING CONNECTIONS
The docent-led NGSS Mattos science labs are part of an integrated
education system as shown in Figure 3 that provides big and deep scale
learning.
School
Curriculum

Field Trips
Mattos Docent-

SCIENCE Led Labs

Year-long
Project

Figure 3 NGSS Mattos Docent-led Lab Curriculum Connections

with other Science Education Components
DOCENT-LED SCIENCE CURRICULUM
The curriculum has been
designed
– To utilize the students’
underlying knowledge gained
over a time period School
Curriculum
– After considering the subject
connections achievable through
regular grade level school
curriculum
– To build the subject knowledge necessary to
understand the essential concepts behind the
students’ long term science project. The project enables
students to build on many skill sets like managing projects,
keeping logs and apply scientific thinking as if like real scientists
at work, since, they record data readings through first hand
observation. As much as in real scientific discoveries, the
students are unware of the experimental outcomes during the
project phase.
– For students to expand, evaluate and test their science
knowledge by taking field trips related to the NGSS
grade level curriculum.
2. PHASES OF STUDENTS’ SCIENTIFIC
INQUIRY
The grade level individual lesson plans are available through the
website NGSS Mattos. The docents may refer to BSCS 5E
Instructional Model to find a detailed approach towards facilitating
inquiry-focused labs. However, this section enumerates a simplified
approach of the phases involved in teaching inquiry-centric science in
elementary school classrooms.
A 50 minute student inquiry-centric lesson may assume three
essential phases by which, it can serve to make the intended subject
meaning in young minds:
Phase 1: Lesson Connection
Students attune their minds towards learning the lesson-intended
scientific concepts
Phase II: Hands-on Exploration
Students work individually or collaborate in a team of two-three
partners to observe, find evidence and indulge in scientific
understanding process
Phase III: Concept Synthesis
• Broader and deeper science connections of the day’s lesson are
conceived.
• The scientific analysis, synthesis and conclusions arrived at by the
classroom community are hooked on conceptually to the central
inquiry question.
WHY INQUIRY-CENTRIC SCIENCE?
• A 1999 report from the U.S. Department of Education
found that 69% of U.S. 12th graders never or hardly ever
designed and carried out their own scientific investigation.
• The docents either through leading or assisting with their team of
other docents are highly encouraged to practice student inquiry
based science learning in order to help grow the scientific
investigatory skills of the elementary schoolers.
• In future when the elementary age group grows up to be high
schoolers, they are bound to have challenge labs like “Building a
Mars Lander” in x minutes. In x minutes, the team has to work
through various phases like Design, Select and Prototype, Test and
Evaluate and Communicate and Reiterate. The lab work done at
Mattos are building blocks of many futuristic skill sets we expect
our children to acquire.
DOCENTS’ ROLE IN THE PHASES OF INQUIRY

The student inquiry-focused lesson

planning and the lab facilitation for any
NGSS Mattos science lesson
irrespective of the grade level may be
carried out by following the three-phase
approach as a bare minimum.
PHASE I - STUDENT CONNECTION
This is the phase where the students connect with the parent team
(docents) and engage themselves into the subject they are about to
introduce.

1. Students need to center themselves

Greeting the students communicates approachability especially as a
peer’s parent. Frantically arriving right on the subject may
not guarantee a successful lesson engagement in most cases.
The greeting phase which lasts for a minute or so will help with the
student emotional readiness to listen to the docent.
2. Clarify learning objectives
• Presenting the central inquiry question and clarifying the learning
objectives of the hour is essential to help the students to orient
themselves towards putting the right kind of effort,
exploring on their own to progress towards the intended
learning.
• During each docent-led lesson, the students answer the inquiry
question that is central to the grade level NGSS curriculum
through hands-on discoveries. Framing the central question
according to the audience is an art that challenges the
leading docent to be highly creative in the process of
engaging the students get interested and hooked on to the
lesson topic.
DOCENTS INTRODUCE CENTRAL QUESTION
• As an example, imagine
framing the first grade
curriculum central
question Light,
Shadows, and Seasons
ESS-1(1-2), PSS-4(2-3).

• ESS-1(1-2), PSS-4(2-3) are

the topic relating NGSS
standards.
•
• Wikipedia’s definition for light could be:
Light is electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum.

• You are right, the definition will not help our first grade
audience! Frantically throwing the central question at them
without proper guidance will not help with the student-
lesson orientation process.
• One of the simple strategy is to give the
learners, context to think. Here is a
hypothetical introduction “In everyday life,
we experience day and night. In the
morning, you are waking up, you are looking
out through the window, how do you
recognize that its day and not night
anymore?” By asking this, we have hit our
central question for that day’s science
docent period. We have framed the
question regarding day and night such a way
that it could strongly lead the student
group’s thinking towards light.
• Research findings from The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience says: It is
easier to learn something new if you can link it to something you
already know.

3. Connect to science outside the activity

• McComas (2015) asks the science educators to use real-world
application of interest and relevance to engage students in the
instruction. Hence connecting to the science outside the activity
triggers stronger cognitive cycle, provided the connecting tasks or
facts are interesting for our grade level audience.
PHASE II - HANDS-ON EXPLORATION
• Raghubir (1979) discovered that students
exhibit higher levels of cognitive ability
when they actually gained knowledge
through the laboratory rather than simply
using the laboratory to verify what
teachers and textbooks have stated.
• Docents study the background concepts (Figure
3) needed to facilitate the hands-on experience.
However, direct lecture based transfer of
subject matter is highly discouraged in the
inquiry-based learning approach.
• Students usually take best control of exploring with the hands-on
study materials to answer the central questions.

• During the process of exploration, they need guidance (not the

step by step instructions on what to observe) as to how
they can lead their thoughts arose from the observation
towards answering the central question.
Explorative Learning Guidance
The following bullets talk about how the docents can provide
possible conceptual guidance for the children during their
exploration.
– The example hands-on exploration process in a first grade
lesson involves using flash light, white paper, and stick to observe
and explain the stick’s shadow
– The lesson title “Observing and explaining how direction and
angle of light can cause shadows to change” is a clue for the
docents to lead the audience
– The first grade audience will most likely not comprehend the
topic right away and show learning independence during the
exploration phase when the docent has said the clue through
mere vocal means.
- Instead, there are another visual and interactive tools to choose from.
- The link shadow formation contains an animation that shows a pole.
Depending on the user clicked Time button, the animation window
reveals the shadow of the pole corresponding to the direction of the
sunlight as it is bound to traverse from East to West in a given day.
- The whole lesson plan encompassing the shadow activity is available in
the NGSS Mattos website.
- The flash animation not only serves as a visual clue explaining an
interesting phenomenon on how the sun casts shadows for
our 6-7 year old audience, but it serves as a model of guidance for
students to carry out individual observation with stick and flash light
resembling the pole and sunlight respectively.
Docents also play a vital role in
making table rounds and
working together with the
children as learning partners.
“Do you want to measure the
shadow length while I keep the
stick straight without falling from
the top?”
• The video on an inquiry based instructional model narrates a funny
and thought provoking event in one of the teacher’s classroom:
One day, as the teacher stopped at a student and asked a question
while making rounds, the student had apparently replied “Please
excuse… This is not the time. I’m still on my exploration phase”
That was a classic example of how students can vigorously engage
in scientific inquiry through hands-on exploration.
• Hands-on activities done in isolation without providing the
needed technical information and linking the concepts of
central inquiry will not be beneficial in creating enduring
subject knowledge among students. For example, letting the
children counting the rings of a tree section as one of the lesson
bound activity and moving on to the next hands-on activity without
completing a satisfactory discussion among the student groups
about the plant kinds, growth nature, example species etc will result
in fragile derivation and storage of science knowledge among the
learners.
PHASE III – CONCEPT SYNTHESIS
• There are usually two-three hands-on activities designed and suggested
by the curriculum in a lesson hour. As the docents iteratively link the
scientific concepts with the students’ findings from the hands-on
experience, through brief and active discussions after every activity,
the lesson conclusion or the wrap up should provide deeper and
broader scientific thinking.
• The fourth graders for example need not know about bio-
remediation philosophy of the nature while they are working on the
food chain at an earlier part of the hour. They finally learn to
understand that the existence of diverse creatures in the nearby
Tule ponds or any wetlands serve a major purpose of water
purification before they leave the lab. This kind of inquiry strategy
develops active knowledge building and the brain processes are
triggered to continually acquire new information and synthesize
concepts even outside the classroom.
Docents are creative as their ideas come to life!
RESOURCES

• Brain science. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140512101527.htm

• Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/practice/inquiry-based-learning-science-classroom
• First Impressions.https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/firstday.html
• McComas, W. (2015, September 14). Laboratory instruction in the service of science teaching
and learning. Retrieved from http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=50980
• Raghubir, K. P. (1979), Research reports: The laboratory-investigative approach to science
instruction. J. Res. Sci. Teach., 16: 13-17. doi:10.1002/tea.3660160103