Designing Science Lessons for Asking Scientific Theory-Inspired Questions: Focusing on Meta-Understanding of Theory

Abstract

The goals of science education include developing students’ capability to engage in scientific inquiry. Asking questions is one of the elements of scientific inquiry. A scientific question is a question that can be answered through experiments and observation, or a theory-inspired question. We focused on the latter because there has been to no study dealing with instructional scaffolding for generating theory-inspired questions. We conjectured that fostering students’ meta-understanding of theory would be an instructional scaffolding for generating theory-inspired questions. We implemented a curricular unit for 37 sixth grade elementary school students, adopting the curricular unit designed by previous studies. We also developed a written assessment instrument for assessing students’ meta-understanding of theory and students’ questions. Results indicate that the curricular unit fostering students’ meta-understanding of theory may support them in generating scientific questions.