Reprinted from Connect
Vol.18 No.4, March/April, 2005
Focus on: Science Kits in the Classroom
Grade Level: 6-8
Grade Level: Professional Development

Autonomous Investigations

by Anthony Cody

Who asks the questions in the science classroom? As a teacher, I want to direct learning, but as a facilitator, I want my students to feel ownership of their own investigations. Several years ago, I decided to put the students in charge of developing their own investigations, using kits of materials that I gathered. My hope was that they would be able to explore with these materials, and then develop questions they could answer through experiments that they would design. This did not yield the results I had hoped for, as I will describe. So I adapted my teaching to a more structured approach to inquiry.

I teach at Bret Harte Middle School, an urban school in Oakland, California, with a large and diverse student population. I teach sixth grade math and science, with class sizes ranging from thirty to thirty-four students.

Teacher-designed kits

I prefaced the kits work with several activities from the FOSS Variables module, including an investigation into pendula. Students were taught how to collect, record and organize data, and how to write a conclusion summarizing their results. As we proceeded, we defined terms like "variable," "control," "data," "average," "range." We also did more open-ended sequences building on the concept of density and completed a guided inquiry sequence in which the students suggested experiments to discover why an ice cube sank rather than floated. I hoped they would be able to apply this experience to the experiments they would need to design using their investigation kits.

The kits contained a variety of materials. I had thirty-five separate boxes of materials for students to choose from. Each box had a theme, for example, electricity, Capsela materials (a modular toy, consisting of motors, gears and wheels encased in plastic capsules that snap together), LEGOs®, seashells, fossils, optics. I attempted to structure the use of the investigation kits to encourage the students to develop questions. I allowed open exploration for a few sessions; I wanted this to lead to a point at which each student could develop a solid question to investigate. I hoped that by giving them a high degree of autonomy, they would be more invested and creative in their work than when doing more traditional science lessons.

The work with the kids began auspiciously. The students chose the kits that interested them and dove in.

A record of events

Here is what I wrote in my journal the day we began:

I distributed the Investigator’s License, which is a list of responsibilities they agree to as a condition of working with these kits. The list includes having a question in mind when investigating, keeping accurate records, preparing a report following major investigations, and keeping track of equipment in their kit. Then I allowed students to find their kits in the cupboards. It looked like Christmas, with each child discovering a new set of toys. Some of the students wanted to start right away. Before long, Lakisha was planting seeds in a large egg carton. She needed a bit of direction to label the different pots with the type of seeds she had planted, and draw their location on a separate sheet of paper. Malou and Leilani were soon blowing bubbles onto their tabletop, and Jimmy and Pete had attracted a clump of students anxious to see them demonstrate a magic trick from their kit. Cathy had constructed a LEGOs® lever system, John and Caleb a hydraulic device. About five different groups were busy working with electricity or electronics.

The groups with very simple kits seemed a bit at a loss. The girls who had chosen mapping and found maps, tracing paper, compasses and aerial photographs were allowed to switch. Another pair who had chosen the stethoscope kit were likewise unhappy, and switched. I am hoping that as the students get more comfortable working on their own, these kits will be chosen and explored more vigorously.

Thinking about the kits, there are some that are more technological, such as the electronics kits. The students using these kits may have a hard time coming up with "experiments" in the way an inquiry approach would suggest. I expect them to produce reports more along the lines of "this is how a burglar alarm works." They will know as a result of building one. Once they have created something like a burglar alarm, we can open it into more of an investigation, by posing some questions: Does it matter how long the wires are? What the wires are made of?

Others, such as the crystal kit, seem natural for inquiry. Since it involves a recipe, the students can vary ingredients or conditions and record their results, looking for patterns. Some, like the plant kit, are pretty wide open. With seeds, soil, fertilizer and small microscopes, it offers many avenues for a student to pursue.

Next Wednesday, they will have another chance to use the kits. I hope to move them from exploration to the beginning of investigation. They will still be primarily exploring, but I will ask them to begin thinking about questions they might pose, variables they might change, experiments they might do. I will look for students doing this to hold up as examples. If students are to this point, I will supply them with Investigation Logs to use to record their experiment design upon. By the end of the period, I expect to have several of these completed so that I can share them with the class, so they know what I am looking for in this phase. I will also stress the importance of keeping careful records of what they are doing as they proceed, so that they can learn from their experience.

Several weeks later, I was having misgivings about my approach. I wrote:

We are at a critical stage in the work with the kits. The students have been exploring for about two weeks. Very few have thus far settled on a real question to investigate. So today we spent half an hour writing about what their questions are. I had them fold a paper twice, to make four sections. In the first, I had them write: "I have done . . ." the second, "I have learned . . ." the third, "I wonder..." the fourth, "I plan to . . . ." I had them discuss in groups their results, but I am afraid these eleven and twelve-year-olds were not really capable of helping each other much. So I basically did a roll call, and asked each student their topic and their question, and how they planned to answer it.

Evaluating the questions

A few of the students had workable questions, but most of them needed some modification. For example, one student said she wanted to find out "how plants drink and eat." I suggested she choose something to focus on, such as, how much fertilizer do plants need? Or how much light or water, rather than looking at everything at once. By the end of the period she had gone from having four plants, and a very vague question, to a setup with eighteen seeds planted, with three different amounts of fertilizer on them.

Another group working with a Lego gears kit said their question was "how do gears work?" "Unacceptable," I said. I told them they had to find something to compare—some way to change the setup. For example, they could look at what difference the gear size makes in how the gear works. This approach seemed most successful with a couple of students working with a Capsela kit. I suggested the students investigate how different things affected the speed.

By the end of the period, the students working on this told me they thought weight was a critical factor, and they were going to make different models, weigh them, and see how fast they went. This was their idea. A number of the students working with electronics were rather at sea, so I augmented their kits with some light bulbs and resistors, and made electric meters available to them. Some of them seemed to be making some discoveries with this material, but they will need some monitoring, and some assistance in developing their record-keeping practices.

Four steps

My goal was for the students to complete four steps. First, I wished for them to engage in exploration with the materials. Second, I asked them to define questions to answer through investigation. Third, I wished them to conduct an experiment using a control, and obtain measurable results. Lastly, to complete their investigation, I expected a conclusion or report summarizing their results.

When I surveyed the students to find out their feelings while they were working on the kits, almost all of them said they liked the experience. One girl wrote, "What’s great about it is seeing my partner and I being successful at making our project work." Another student wrote, "It’s fun to put the wires together and when it works you get so happy. When it doesn’t you go to investigate more so it’s fun." The students indeed felt ownership of their materials, and the joy they experienced from their successes was genuine. However, the majority of students had been largely unsuccessful in defining investigable questions. Very few were producing anything that could be characterized as an experiment. As we continued working with the kits I exhorted them to define the question they were trying to answer, but they were vague on what I meant, and were unable to do so.

One topic for the class

I felt I had to modify my approach to get closer to what I felt were genuine investigations. I decided to back up, and give the students a fresh topic to investigate, but provide more guidance, and have the whole class tackle the same issue. I chose dry ice as the focus of our inquiry. I began by giving the students the chance to explore the behavior of the dry ice in an open-ended fashion. I then asked them to generate questions based on what they had observed. There were a wide variety of questions, some of which were investigable, others not. I had the students categorize the questions according to whether they could be investigated and we thus generated a list of investigable questions. The students then selected questions from that list as the focus of their investigation. Once they had a question, they were challenged to write an investigation proposal describing the experiment they wished to do. This investigation proposal asked for their question, hypothesis, procedure, materials, and the form of data they would be collecting. Most of the students were able to do this, although the quality was quite varied.

Certain questions were more popular than others, so I got numerous proposals that were similar, which I then synthesized and edited to create lab activity sheets that could be followed. I indicated which students’ proposal had contributed to the activity, so the students felt they were doing investigations authored by themselves or their peers. The investigations included measuring the rate of sublimation under different conditions, and the nature of the gas the dry ice produced. The whole class, organized into cooperative groups, did each of these experiments. Individual students were responsible for recording data and reaching conclusions.

Students seemed to feel more success with this approach and I did as well. The investigations built an understanding of the properties of dry ice, and students felt ownership of the process as a result of the role they played in authoring the questions and designing the investigations.

As the year concluded, I felt satisfied that I had succeeded in guiding my students to develop questions and complete a scientific investigation. I discovered that my students were unable to navigate this process without clear guidance, but with direction, students were enthusiastic and productive.

The dry ice activity sequence is shared at http://tlc.ousd.k12.ca.us/~acody/dryice. Html

Another excellent resource which presents a guided inquiry into dry ice is the GEMS guide, Dry Ice Investigations, available from Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Copyright © 2005 Synergy Learning International, Inc. All rights reserved.

Anthony Cody - Anthony Cody is a National Board certified teacher in Oakland, California. He has taught sixth grade math and science at Bret Harte Middle School for eighteen years.
List all articles by Anthony Cody