Effects of providing domain information on facilitating hypothesis generation in inquiry learning

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of providing domain information in an early stage of an inquiry process, together with an aligned hypothesis scratchpad, on inquiry learning, and hypothesis generation in particular. Participants were provided with basic domain information that was adapted to their prior knowledge (experimental condition) or received no introduction to the domain (control condition) before writing their hypotheses. Sixty-nine secondary school students from two countries were randomly assigned to the experimental or the control condition. These two conditions were compared on hypothesis generation, the subsequent inquiry processes of data recording and drawing conclusions, and knowledge acquisition. Results indicate that the supported students could specify more testable relations in their hypotheses, and could write hypotheses with higher levels of informativeness about variables, conditions, and relations. No differences between conditions were found on data recording, drawing conclusions, and knowledge acquisition. Limitations and directions for future research are presented.