Inquiry as well as argumentation are both central to scientific reasoning. Most educational studies tend to focus exclusively either on the inquiry process or on argumentation. The present study aims to examine the development of inquiry skills and argumentation in conjunction with one another. A sample of 50 Chinese students, aged 10-12, participated in an entirely remote intervention due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions, each an equivalent two weeks in duration and four hours each day from Monday to Friday. One condition focused on argumentation and the other on inquiry-enriched argumentation. The results demonstrate that an online intervention can produce comparable positive cognitive outcomes to in-person interventions.
Additionally, students who received a supplemental inquiry activity exhibited fruitful outcomes in argumentive development and were capable of recognizing that multiple factors can work in concert to affect an outcome. However, the half-hour daily inquiry practice may not be sufficient to render full mastery of multivariable causal inference skills. Students in the inquiry-enriched argumentation condition employed more evidence in their essays as a result of targeted practice in evaluating claims in relation to evidence, a critical feature of the inquiry intervention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/w415-ms62 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Xiao, Si |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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