Inquiry, modeling, and metacognition: Making science accessible to all students

Our objective has been to develop an instructional theory and corresponding curricular materials that make scientific inquiry accessible to a wide range of students, including younger and lower achieving students. We hypothesized that this could be achieved by recognizing the importance of metacognition and creating an instructional approach that develops students' metacognitive knowledge and skills through a process of scaffolded inquiry, reflection, and generalization. Toward this end, we collaborated with teachers to create a computer enhanced, middle school science curriculum that engages students in learning about and reflecting on the processes of scientific inquiry as they construct increasingly complex models of force and motion phenomena. The resulting ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum centers around a metacognitive model of research, called the Inquiry Cycle, and a metacognitive process, called Reflective Assessment, in which students reflect on their own and each other's inquiry. In this article, we report on instructional trials of the curriculum by teachers in urban classrooms, including a controlled comparison to determine the impact of including or not including the Reflective Assessment Process. Overall, the curriculum proved successful and students' performance improved significantly on both physics and inquiry assessments. The controlled comparison revealed that students' learning was greatly facilitated by Reflective Assessment. Furthermore, adding this metacognitive process to the curriculum was particularly beneficial for low-achieving students: Performance on their research projects and inquiry tests was significantly closer to that of high-achieving students than was the case in the control classes. Thus, this approach has the valuable effect of reducing the educational disadvantage of low-achieving students while also being beneficial for high-achieving students. We argue that these findings have strong implications for what such metacognitively focused, inquiry-oriented curricula can accomplish, particularly in urban school settings in which there are many disadvantaged students.