Science education reform emphasizes learning science through inquiry as a way to engage students in the processes of science at the same time that they learn scientific concepts. However, inquiry involves practices that are challenging for students because they have underlying norms with which students may be unfamiliar. We therefore cannot expect students to know how to engage in such practices simply by giving them opportunities to do so, especially if the norms for inquiry practices violate traditional classroom norms for engaging with scientific ideas. Teachers therefore play a key role in communicating expectations for inquiry. In this dissertation, I present an analytical framework for characterizing two teachers' enactments of an inquiry curriculum. This framework, based on Gee's (1996) notion of Discourses, describes inquiry practices in terms of three dimensions: cognitive, social, and linguistic. I argue that each of these dimensions presents challenges to students and, therefore, sites at which teachers' support is important for students' participation in inquiry practices. I use this framework to analyze two teachers' support of inquiry practices as they enact an inquiry-based curriculum. I explore three questions in my study: (1) what is the nature of teachers' support of inquiry practices? (2) how do teachers accomplish goals along multiple dimensions of inquiry?, and (3) what aspects of inquiry are in tension and how can we describe teachers' practice in terms of the tradeoff spaces between elements of inquiry in tension? In order to study these questions, I studied two eighth grade teachers who both enacted the same inquiry-based science curriculum developed by me and others in the context of a large design-based research project called IQWST (Investigating and Questioning my World through Science and Technology. I found that the teachers provided support for inquiry along all three dimensions, sometimes in ways in which the dimensions were synergistic and sometimes in ways in which the dimensions were in tension. These findings have implications for the design of inquiry science learning environments and for our understanding of what it means for teachers to be "cultural brokers" between students' everyday experiences and classroom science inquiry.

Last modified

• 09/10/2018

Creator

• Carrie Teh-Li Tzou

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BT7J

Subject

• Education and Social Policy - Learning Sciences

Keyword

• Education

Date created

• 2008-05-09

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright