Science Videos Paper

I chose to watch two videos from the “Learning Science Through Inquiry” website. I watched “Workshop 1:What is Inquiry and Why Do It?” and half of “Workshop7: Assessing Inquiry.” I chose these two videos because I still didn’t really understand what inquiry exactly was, and I was curious as to how to assess students when using inquiry. After watching the first video, I have a little better understanding of what inquiry is. For me, it reinforced what we have been learning in class about the whole inquiry process. In this video, they emphasized that inquiry is a student-generated investigation that starts with student curiosity. This curiosity is activated by some event in nature however, and the role of the teacher is to get students wondering about something. This fits in with the I-AIM model’s first stage, which is engage. As a teacher, you pique students’ curiosity by engaging them in new experiences or drawing on their prior experiences in order for them to pose a question. This also fits in with the EPE Framework (Experiences, Patterns, Explanations) since it uses experiences to generate curiosity. This was seen in the classroom example during a 1st grade inquiry project on sharks. After completing a unit on spiders, students concluded that spiders were misunderstood animals. The teacher noticed that students in her class talked about sharks in the same way as spiders, for example, “They are scary and mean animals.” Students built upon their prior knowledge of spiders being misunderstood animals and wondered if sharks were too. The students kept science folders of their daily questions, discoveries and compositions about the topic, as they began exploring the shark phenomena. Explore is the second stage of the I-AIM Model. The students shared these folders during a “Folder Walk” with their peers and the teacher. This informed the teacher about what the students were wondering and thinking about. For example, one 1st grade girl wondered why shark fins stick out of the water. During this part of the inquiry process, students are also looking for patterns (EPE) in their experiences to formulate hypotheses. For example, some students began to think that sharks are fish. During this exploration, students looked at real-life artifacts provided by the teacher, to further their thinking and generate more questions and ideas. The artifacts helped to keep the investigation authentic and real to students. They talked about their ideas in small groups as they messed around with the materials. This allowed students to develop explanations (EPE and I-AIM) and share them with others based on the evidence in front of them. I saw this in the example classroom when students looked at baby sharks that were preserved in a bottle in groups, to see if what was in front of them was indeed a shark and why. Even though one of the students pointed out the fact that it said “shark” on the bottle, the teacher asked, “Do you always believe what is written?” The student said, “no,” so the teacher said, “well how do we know this to be true then?” This showed me that in inquiry, students try to not only formulate their own explanations based on experiences, but also how they connect evidence (experiences) to explanations. It is very important to learn to ask, “how do we know this is true?” since a lot of what we learn about things is told to us from books, news broadcasts, etc.

I saw a lot of the apply stage of the I-AIM model when watching the video on assessment. This video stressed that it is important to get as many ‘different lenses to look through’ to effectively evaluate a student, since students prefer to express their ideas in various ways (talking, drawing, writing, etc). There are many different ways to go about doing this such as embedded and ongoing assessment, as well as formal assessments where students help to assess one another. I really liked how the 1st grade teacher looked at her students’ journals on a daily basis and their portfolios to track their inquiry process. This shows the teacher if the students understood what they did today as well as inform you on your own teaching performance. The teacher also kept her own journal of what she noticed students were learning and took notes on them. This helped to get to know her students. She decided to share it with her students so that they could receive feedback of their learning since feedback helps you learn. A more formal way of assessing students was to have students create projects of their choice that reflect what they learned through the inquiry process. This required students to apply what they learned to explore and explain real-world examples and to ask more questions about the topic. For example, a third grade group of boys created a bait box project after completing an inquiry on worms. This was a more effective way than unit tests to find out what students know. It is also more engaging for them to develop practical applications of what they learned. It is also more meaningful for students if they help to think of the ways that they will be assessed. For example, when the class created a rubric together. 1st graders even did it with some time and modeling, as shown in the video. One very important thing to keep in mind with assessment is to many sure it is tied to the learning goal. I learned that you should assess in an ongoing way so that you can make sure students are meeting the learning goal throughout the process, because if you wait until the end, it will be too late since you will be moving on to the next thing.

During this whole inquiry process, the students’ role is to be a problem-solver while the teacher is a facilitator. I noticed that throughout both of these videos, the teacher was there to facilitate and guide them by helping them out if they got stuck in their learning. They often did this by asking the student “why?” or give them some new idea to think about. I think it is important to note that the students were the ones making up their own questions, constructing their own knowledge. The teacher encouraged the students to evaluate their ‘thinkings’ critically. They did not just tell them if they were right or wrong, nor give out facts. Instead, teachers just gave students a lot of time to think. I will keep this in mind when I teach.

By watching these videos, it has shown me that inquiry can start at a very young age. I had previously held the misconception that young children can’t do inquiry and that inquiry-based teaching would be too difficult to do with young students, but when in fact most of the examples given in these videos were from a 1st grade class. This has shown me that inquiry can start early, and no matter what grade I end up teaching or how diverse my students are, I can do inquiry with my students. Also, the first grade teacher talked about how she participated in inquiry on her own outside of the classroom. I think this is a good thing that I should try to do as a teacher since if I do it outside of the classroom too, I will be more likely to help foster and use it in my classroom with my students.

One thing is for sure; I will definitely not just teach out of the textbook or lecture to students. After watching these videos, I now know how much more beneficial it is for student learning to have inquiry-based science teaching. Students had real ownership of their learning and assessment during inquiry.