John R. Frederiksen’s research while affiliated with American College of Education and other places

A prototype Web-based environment, called the Web of Inquiry, was developed that built on previous work in science learning and technology. This new system was designed to meet constructivist-learning principles, support self-reflection, and meet specific interaction goals within the classroom environment. The system was tested it in fifth, sixth, and seventh grade (ages 10-13) classrooms. Mixed methods results suggest that the system met many of the initial design goals and also identified areas that could be improved in future iterations of the system.

We argue that science education should focus on enabling students to develop meta-knowledge about science so that students come to understand how different aspects of the scientific enterprise work together to create and test scientific theories. Furthermore, we advocate that teaching such meta-knowledge should begin in early elementary school and continue through college and graduate school and that it should be taught for all types of science, including the biological, physical, and social sciences. KeywordsMetacognition-Scientific meta-knowledge-Theorizing-Questioning-Hypothesizing-Investigating-Analyzing

The scientific enterprise is a form of collaborative learning that enables society to develop knowledge about the world – knowledge that is useful for predicting, controlling, and explaining what happens as events occur. Creating scientific communities in classrooms, by engaging young learners in theory-based empirical research, is a highly challenging yet important educational goal (Anderson, 2002; Blumenfeld, Soloway, Marx, Krajcik, Guzdial, & Palincsar, 1991; National Research Council, 1996, 2007; Schraw, Crippen, & Hartley, 2006). To achieve this goal, and enable students to learn about the nature and practices of scientific inquiry, the development of metacognitive knowledge and capabilities is crucial. In this chapter we outline the metacognitive expertise that is needed to understand and regulate inquiry processes as students undertake research projects, and we elaborate why developing this type of expertise is important. We present evidence that students’ learning of scientific inquiry can be enhanced by providing them with explicit models of inquiry goals and strategies, while also teaching them self-regulatory processes. This approach is particularly effective for lower achieving students.

This research addresses the effectiveness of an interactive learning environment, Inquiry Island, as a general-purpose framework for the design of inquiry-based science curricula. We introduce the software as a scaffold designed to support the creation and assessment of inquiry projects, and describe its use in a middle-school genetics unit. Students in the intervention showed significant gains in inquiry skills. We also illustrate the power of the software to gather and analyze qualitative data about student learning.

For the past thirty years, we have been developing and evaluating alternative, computer-enhanced approaches to science education. Our approaches have evolved over this period to address changing pedagogical goals, motivated by our changing visions of what is important in science education and by our growing knowledge of what young students are capable of learning. These changes in our instructional goals parallel the three approaches, described below, for developing students’ abilities as learners. In our work, we have shared Ann Brown’s vision that a primary goal of education should be to help students believe that anyone can learn how to learn, and to bolster this belief by teaching them how this is possible (Brown, 1987, 1988; Brown & Campione, 1996). One way of accomplishing this is to help young learners develop an understanding of cultural forms of knowledge used in society, such as types of scientific models (Collins & Ferguson, 1993), how to reason with them, and how to use them as a tool for understanding new situations and phenomena. A second way is to help students develop a rich understanding of how one learns through self-directed inquiry, in which they examine their current knowledge in the light of new information and observations, and analyze new findings in order to improve their knowledge. This can be accomplished within the context of their learning to do scientific inquiry. Yet a third way is to help young learners develop a process theory of mind. By this we mean enabling students to see their individual and collective minds as incorporating sets of widely-applicable and useful processes, including cognitive processes such as questioning and analyzing, metacognitive processes such as planning and reflecting, and social processes such as collaborating and communicating. Our goals, therefore, are for students to come to appreciate how having an understanding of forms of knowledge, inquiry processes, and theories of mind can together enable them to solve problems, work well together, and gain new knowledge. In learning the nature of these processes and how to use them together, they will be learning how to learn.

To examine the impact of engaging students in curricula that apply a consistent approach to scientific inquiry across multiple topics and grades, we conducted longitudinal studies in two urban middle schools. In one school, the major emphasis on inquiry and reflective-assessment began in the sixth grade and continued through grades seven and eight. In the other, the major emphasis began in the seventh grade and continued through grade eight. There were significant improvements in students' inquiry capabilities across grades in both schools, with benefits to starting the emphasis earlier, in the sixth grade. The findings reveal that students were able to transfer and to continue developing their inquiry skills in studying new topics and doing science fair projects. Engaging in inquiry to investigate a variety of domain phenomena also helped students understand some difficult epistemological ideas about the nature of science. Overall, our research indicates that it is possible for schools to develop students' capabilities for scientific inquiry and reflective-assessment in a form that they can apply across different science domains. If a consistent approach is applied across a number of years and a variety of topics, the effect is cumulative and thus highly beneficial for students.

To examine the impact of engaging students in curricula that apply a consistent approach to scientific inquiry across multiple topics and grades, we conducted longitudinal studies in two urban middle schools. In one school, the major emphasis on inquiry and reflective-assessment began in the sixth grade and continued through grades seven and eight. In the other, the major emphasis began in the seventh grade and continued through grade eight. There were significant improvements in students' inquiry capabilities across grades in both schools, with benefits to starting the emphasis earlier, in the sixth grade. The findings reveal that students were able to transfer and to continue developing their inquiry skills in studying new topics and doing science fair projects. Engaging in inquiry to investigate a variety of domain phenomena also helped students understand some difficult epistemological ideas about the nature of science. Overall, our research indicates that it is possible for schools to develop students' capabilities for scientific inquiry and reflective-assessment in a form that they can apply across different science domains. If a consistent approach is applied across a number of years and a variety of topics, the effect is cumulative and thus highly beneficial for students.

This paper provides an overview of our work on the nature of metacognitive knowledge, its relationship to learning through inquiry, and technologies that can be used to foster and assess its development in classrooms, as students engage in collaborative inquiry. To illustrate our theoretical ideas, we present examples from our Inquiry Island software. It provides learners with advisors, who contain knowledge, advice, and tools aimed at supporting students’ metacognitive development in the context of doing inquiry projects. Our pedagogical approach includes having young learners take on the roles of various cognitive, social, and metacognitive advisors as a way of enacting and internalizing the forms of expertise they represent. We describe a sequence of learning activities, and indicate how students respond to them, using examples and findings from a 5th grade class. Our work shows how such learning tools and activities can foster the development of metacognitive knowledge and skills needed for collaborative inquiry and reflective learning.