PREPARING STUDENTS FOR INQUIRY 

Helping students develop understanding of subject matter requires that teachers know what students already understand. Some of these understandings can serve as foundations for building new understandings. The ideas that students hold often don't match the ideas of science, yet teachers can use them as beginning points for building new understanding. 

Teachers can only use students' prior knowledge if they know what it is. We will make use of what is known from the literature. For instance, in chemistry, we know that students are likely to hold a continuous model of matter rather than a particulate model. Drawing from Moje,Äôs ethnography of one urban community and from other previously published ethnographies and qualitative studies (e.g., Heath, 1983; Moll,1992), we will begin to identify prerequisite understandings that students have and need to develop to take part in these learning activities. Contextualization activities help relate the ideas to be learned to students,Äô prior ideas. 

We use related curricular strategies to help students master the target learning outcomes. Benchmark lessons challenge students to make predictions or explain findings. The central goal is to elicit curiosity and help students uncover interesting problems in phenomena (Hunt & Minstrell, 1994). For example, in the structure of matter unit, we might use a demonstration of burning steel wool to capture students, interest. Students believe, because of their everyday experiences, that the burning of a substance results in loss of mass. However, when burning steel wool, the resulting material because heavier. This benchmark lesson can help capture students' interest to explore further what happens when a substance burns. Benchmark lessons can also help students learn difficult concepts, illustrate important laboratory or analytical techniques, or develop investigation strategies needed in investigations (Krajcik et al., 2000). 

Staging activities,specifically prepare students for investigations (Reiser, et al., in press). One type, bridging activities, is designed to elicit students,Äô prior understandings and helps students connect those intuitions to the task at hand (Edelson et al., 1999). For example, prior to having students work with scientific visualization software to examine data about global climate change, students color a world map with their predictions about regional temperatures, and then discuss the discrepancies between their predictions and observed data. Another important goal of staging activities is to introduce inquiry and analysis strategies in a structured activity prior to the open-ended investigation. For example, before working with an interactive ecosystem database, students are given a subset of data about one of the animal populations, and asked to search for patterns and construct graphs to communicate the discovered patterns (Reiser et al., in press). In general, these benchmark and staging activities help establish the original driving question, motivate the inquiry, elicit and build on prior conceptions, and help students master some of the requisite knowledge and skills required for the main investigation of the unit.

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