Pupils' thinking whilst designing an investigation

Abstract

Reflection on one's thinking, metacognition, is seen to be important in learning and development of reasoning ability. The Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education (CASE) intervention programme, which claims to improve pupils' reasoning ability, includes the fostering of metacognition. This study was done to find out if pupils who had been taught through the CASE intervention were more metacognitive than others when designing scientific investigations. In the study pupils were asked to design an investigation on solubility, explain how they arrived at the answer and react to a presented design. The results showed that pupils find it easier to correct a faulty design than create one. Pupils who had done CASE were better able to design an investigation and better able to explain their thought process than those who had not done CASE. Non-CASE pupils tended to rely on recall of conceptual knowledge and had poorly developed encoding and monitoring skills. The paper discusses the significance of these finding to the teaching of scientific investigations.