Three Criteria to help Students to Design their own Experimental Procedures for Inquiry-Based-Learning

Methods and SamplesDesign-Experiment (Brown 1992),

Didactic Ingeniering (Artigue, 1991)

Eric SANCHEZ, Patricia MARZIN, Réjane MONOD-ANSALDI, Daniel DEVALLOIS

Two labwork courses (1h30)

An immunology labwork involved the design of experimental procedures in order to assess the Antibody-Antigen (Ab-Ag) model. The students had to show that the Ab-Ag link depends on the spatial combination of the two molecules.

A palaeontology labwork, consisted in the determination of the procedures to characterize the prognathism of an homininea cranium. Students had to define and measure a facial angle.

Inquiry-Based-Learning (IBL) “… an approach to learning that involves a process of exploration, that leads to asking questions and making discoveries in the search for new understandings” (National Science Foundation, 2000)

Labwork consists in linking theoretical and perceptual aspects. The scientific models are intermediaries between these two registers (Bunge, 1975; Walliser, 1977)

Research questions

(a) What kind of situation do teachers have to implement in the classroom in order to allow the students to design the experimental procedures by themselves?

(b) Which information must be given to the students in order to help them to carry out an autonomous work?

Background, Aims and Framework

contact : eric.sanchez@inrp.fr BP 17424 - 69347 Lyon Cedex 07 - France

Result 2: The teaching design might allow the students to assess the relevance of their experimental procedures

Relevance : the experimental procedures must fit the preliminary research question.

Reproducibility: the experimental procedures lead to obtain high-quality results without variation for a given situation.

Communicability:another student can use the written procedures to realize the same labwork.

(e.g : exchange of the written procedures)

a task tree to describe the experimental procedure

Result 3: The teaching design might allow the students to assess the reproducibility and the communicability of the experimental procedure

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Data sources of the research include audio, video-tape, and written documents from 108 16-18-year-old students. These data were used to assess the success of the students in designing their own experimental procedure, to identify the strategy employed and the difficulties faced.

Projet COPEX, ERIDOB 2008 Utrecht – The Netherland

Results 1: the teaching-design might focus on the experimental tasks that relate to the scientific model

(e.g : Collaborative Learning)