François Lombard

Good student questions in inquiry learning

Acquisition of scientific reasoning is one of the big challenges in education. A popular educational strategy advocated for acquiring deep knowledge is inquiry-based learning, which is driven by emerging ‘good questions’. This study will address the question: ‘Which design features allow learners to refine questions while preserving student ownership of the inquiry process?’ This design-based research has been conducted over several years with advanced high-school biology classes. The results confirm the central role of question elaboration as an interactive process that leads from vague to complex and adequate. To make this happen, the inquiry process must extend over a long time, learners and teachers should share a knowledge improvement goal, and text produced by students should be structured by question–answer pairs addressing a single concept using authentic resources. Further features are discussion with peers, teacher feedback with respect to answer elaboration and conceptual differentiation, and finally, teacher guidance that should fade out in successive inquiry cycles to ensure student responsibility.

A Method to Reveal Fine-Grained and Diverse Conceptual Progressions during Learning.

Abstract Empirical data on learners’ conceptual progression is required to design curricula and guide students. In this paper, we present the Reference Map Change Coding (RMCC) method for revealing students’ progression at a fine-grained level. The method has been developed and tested through the analysis of successive versions of the productions of eight cohorts (N = 100 total) of high school biology students groups, involved in a year-long inquiry-based learning design. Concepts and causal links expressed in students’ gradually refined explanations of biological phenomena are charted onto reference model maps. Trends within variability in all cohorts are measured by a consolidated Prevalence Index (cPI) counting the occurrence of each item across all versions of the students’ explanations. Results of a case study presented reveal great variability in patchwork progressions. Learners’ diverse and often surprising conceptual paths challenge the view of learning as a linear process. For example, some items consistently appear later, thereby offering empirical evidence of slow spots that require attention. We discuss possible causes, educational implications, and show that our method offers crucial insight into the process of learning as it happens. We finally argue that RMCC also could become a follow-up tool for interested teachers.