Running head: JOURNAL ARTICLE 1

Scientific Inquiry Journal Article Assignment

Chiaki Yoshida
Ivy Tech Community College

JOURNAL ARTICLE 2
Until this course started, scientific inquiry was a totally new word for me. As I did not
know the meaning of scientific inquiry, I looked up the term in an online dictionary. Wilfred
Franklin, a biology laboratory instructor at Humboldt State University in CA, wrote in his web
page that scientific inquiry is inquiry based approaches to science education focused on student
constructed learning as opposed to teacher-transmitted information. Then, I recalled a good
example for that. When I was a middle school student, I did an experiment in a science class. It
was an experiment to know acidity and alkalinity with litmus papers. I remembered that various
solutions such as lemon juice and thinned ammonia were prepared in beakers and we dripped
droplets of various solutions on litmus papers to see changing of colors. I just followed what the
science teacher instructed us with tools prepared by a teacher in an unfamiliar laboratory where I
rarely visited. Although I did not know about the meaning of scientific inquiry at first, I knew
that it was different from what I experienced in the science class.
To know the meaning of scientific inquiry, I chose an article from a journal named
Science and Children issued in September 1999. This article was written by two writers, Hedy
Moscovici, an assistant professor at California State University, and Christine Cardy, a
fifth-grade teacher at Carl Cozier Elementary in Bellingham, Washington. The title of article is
Developing Inquiring Minds: Students use chromatography to separate the colors in leaves.
In this article, Moscovici and Cardy write that many elementary teachers tend to involve
their students in activitymania which means implementation of a series of disconnected, short,
hands-on experiences these days. However, what Moscovici and Cardy suggest in the article is
that classes of scientific inquiry should be not activitymania but the practice of inquiry. In classes
of scientific inquiry, students should decide to investigate scientific questions with their interests.
Their interest questions should be a springboard for scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry is
implement the practice of inquiry (Moscovici & Carty, 1999).
There are five steps when students implement scientific inquiry: planning, experiments,
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data analysis, and finalizing the conclusion and discussion. Eventually, students are required to
write laboratory report including a hypothesis, needed materials, a procedure, and results.
Students should understand scientific inquiry by completing those five steps (Moscovici & Carty,
1999).
In addition, students should use inquiry in the classroom with being organized into
groups of four to six and a group consists of five to seven students. Students should use scientific
inquiry as group activities in the classroom to solve scientific questions. Each member plays an
important role for the scientific inquiry. Each student has responsibility such as a writer, an actor,
a reader, and an observer. In the article, Moscovici showed his students information about color
change on autumn trees. With students interest in natural color change of trees, students
themselves created questions and planned their experiment by group. (Moscovici & Carty, 1999).
Position Statement of National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) clearly describes
regarding scientific inquiry. The scientific inquiry means activities through which students
develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas. In the process to learn the strategies of
scientific inquiry, students ask questions and use evidence to answer them. Students implement
investigation and collect evidence, make an explanation from the collected data, find conclusion.
Those are the same ideas as the article I introduced as the third and forth items in the previous
paragraph (National Scientific Teachers Association, 2004).
Now I understand that the scientific inquiry was not an easy experiment without
understanding as I experienced when I was a middle school student. After I read the article in
Science and Children and NSTA Position Statement about scientific inquiry, I clearly acquire
how scientific inquiry should be implemented by students. Scientific inquiry includes several
academic steps: students ask questions to scientific phenomena, build a hypothesis, collect
evidences, develop an explanation, and find conclusion. According to National Institute of
Medical Science, it is reported that different types of questions require different types of
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researches and investigations. Scientific inquiry is flexible. It affects scientific students skill
(Fuchs, 2005). Eventually, students write a report to communicate their conclusion to others. As
teachers, we can help them successfully learn scientific inquiry for each step as described in
NSTA Position Statement. It is one of examples to give them useful scientific terminology so that
students easily tell scientific contents. (National Scientific Teachers Association, 2004).
When I read both the article written by Moscovici and Cardy in Science and Children
and NSTA Position Statement and compare them, I noticed that the core concept is identical. It is
that students find questions, and do experiments to find answers. All elements such as question,
experiments, and answers are created by students themselves. The article shows four detail
advices for teachers to help students learning about scientific inquiry: teachers should be
reflective for each scientific inquiry in a class, teachers should encourage planning group inquiry
after group negotiation, teachers should give resources for students challenges, and teachers
need to have rubrics for assessment which can facilitate individual growth (Moscovici & Carty,
1999). Those advices put what NSTA recommends science teachers in Declarations into effect
(National Scientific Teachers Association, 2004).
When I ask myself at the end of this assignment what I learned about the scientific
inquiry, my answer is that the scientific inquiry is activities by students to develop understanding
of scientific ideas, which includes several academic steps such as questioning, making
hypothesis, implementing investigation, collecting evidence, analyzing the data, finding a
conclusion, and making a report to tell the conclusion to others. Those are not just to follow
teachers instruction like I did. Those ideas of scientific inquiry may help students understand
and be interested in science.
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References
Franklin, W. (n.d.). Inquiry based approaches to science education: theory and practice. Web
Page. Retrieved from http://www.brynmawr.edu/biology/franklin/
InquiryBasedScience.html
Fuchs, B. (2005). Doing science: the process of scientific inquiry. National Institute of General
Medical Sciences. Retrieved from http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/
nih6/inquiry/guide/nih_doing-science.pdf
National Scientific Teachers Association. (2004, October). Scientific inquiry. NSTA position
statement. Retrieved from NSTA website:
http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/inquiry.aspx
Moscovici, H., & Carty, C. (1999, September). Developing inquiring minds. Science and
Children, 38-43. Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/Chiaki/Downloads/Scientific%
20inquiry%20journal%20article%20assignment%20(1).pdf