At ECER 2019 this doctoral research reported on the nature of practical activities in the Irish upper second level biology classroom as ‘recipe-based’; students are expected to follow instructions to produce a pre-determined phenomenon (Abrahams & Reiss, 2012). International research accords with these findings (Abrahams & Millar, 2008).  Abrahams (2009) found that teachers have an awareness that a large portion of the practical work they teach serves no other purpose than to act as a diversion from the normal routine of lessons. These findings were corroborated in the Irish classroom scoping stage investigations conducted in 2018, indicating that recipe teaching does not lead to any understanding of the scientific concepts that should underpin practical activities. The lack of continuity between practical activities further compounds this issue because students are not given opportunities to relate one experiment to another.

At curriculum level, there is no theory specific to practical activities written in the policy documents for senior cycle science.  At ECER 2021 a new theoretical framework based on Dewey’s theory of enquiry, was presented by this researcher, as an alternative to the current provision (Dewey, 1997).

Following Dewey, genuine enquiry is an act of complete thinking involving both induction and deduction. It is a double movement towards inductively understanding a scientific principle, bridged by the inference of an hypothesis, and then deductively using the principle to develop, apply and test further ideas (Dewey, 1997). With recipe teaching, induction is misrepresented as a set of instructions to follow and deduction is absent entirely yet, “only deduction brings about and emphasises consecutive relationships,” so learning becomes more that a “miscellaneous scrap-bag” (ibid., p.97).

There is no continuity of experience for students.

Following the theory, freedom in thinking occurs when students are presented with “forked-road situations” where they not only make choices, but their choices involve inference - “a leap, going beyond what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant” (ibid, p.27). The experiment is no longer an end-in-view, it becomes a vehicle with which to search for a natural end, leading to a connectedness and a continuity of experience within the body-mind (Dewey, 1958). Through this lens, students learn an experimental technique inductively. The learning is then scaffolded by their teacher, who encourages them to ask questions that peak their interest and to pursue those questions through experimental investigation using the technique they learned. Not all students will ask the same question, so there is no pre-determined answer. The view of knowledge shifts from the recipe style end-in-view (knowledge that is had, already known) to the enquiry-based natural end (knowledge that we seek) which is the crux of scientific enquiry.   

Not only that, but each practical activity a student conducts is connected in some way to previous and subsequent activities so that learning becomes a continuum of experience for the student.

This is what distinguishes this theoretical framework from other enquiry frameworks (Bybee, 2014, Pedaste et al., 2015). Its specificity to advanced practical work at the upper secondary level, placing deductive application at its core, future-proofs this work at a time of curricular transition at upper senior cycle.

Following the ethos of the Design Based Research (DBR) methodology, of bridging the theory-practice divide, the theory of enquiry developed here has been translated into a practical Framework for Teaching Enquiry Activities (FTEA) which has been successfully trialled in two settings; the upper secondary biology classroom and a third level university laboratory module.

Research Question

How does the teaching and learning of practical biology activities change when teachers understand and implement a Framework for Teaching Enquiry Activities in their classrooms?

This Design Based Research (DBR) project comprises one macrocycle of research divided into three meso-cycles (Mc Kenney & Reeves, 2018): 1. Needs and content analysis 2. Design and development of a working innovation 3. Summative evaluation At ECER 2019, the first meso-cycle, involving a review of the literature and a scoping investigation to identify the status of practical work at upper secondary biology level in Ireland, was presented. The FTEA that was developed as a result of the second mesocycle was presented at last year’s ECER conference. This presentation describes the final iteration of the development of the FTEA, where it is trialled in its target setting. The purpose of DBR is to develop usable innovations and the most salient test of their usability is when they are trialled successfully in their target setting (Van den Akker, 2006). The findings of this trial will be outlined in this presentation. Following Nieveen & Folmer’s (2013) Evaluation Matchboard, the completed prototype is subject to a ‘Tryout’ in the target setting. Two target settings - the upper secondary biology classroom and the university laboratory - are utilised here. Recommended evaluation methods were utilised to collect data; interviews, observations, artefact analysis, questionnaires and testing (ibid, 2013). In the spirit of DBR and of ‘the complete act of thinking’ data were both inductively, qualitatively analysed using Template Analysis (King, 2012) and deductively, quantitatively analysed using Millar’s PAAI tool (2009) for effectiveness and my Enquiry Observation Schedule, developed specifically for this research. The quality of the FTEA was determined by measuring its actual practicality and its actual effectiveness in the target settings (Nieveen & Folmer, 2013).

The findings of the Tryout stand out in stark contrast to those of the scoping stages of this research project and are described here: 1. The scientific method of enquiry was embedded in every lesson. Students observed in the target setting were making observations, asking questions based on those observations, developing hypotheses, designing their own practical activities, collecting and analysing data and presenting data to the class. 2. From student interviews, it was clear that students hands and minds were occupied by this type of practical activity. Abrahams and Millar (2008) describe how recipe teaching renders students capable of ‘hands-on’ work, but ‘minds-on’ work often eludes them. However, when lessons are scaffolded for enquiry using an inductive-deducting double experiment outlined in the FTEA, students can understand the scientific processes they are using along with the scientific principles underpinning those processes. 3. During this phase of the research, there was a transformation in how practical activities were conducted. There was clear evidence of students working together to develop questions and designing experiments to answer those questions. Student conversations with their peers centered around scientific ideas (in contrast to the scoping stages where they centered around ‘chit-chat). Teachers were asking questions at higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), leading to student thinking at higher levels. There was continuity between practical activities so that students could draw upon ideas from previous lessons to provide solutions to problems they encountered. Students were able to explain what they were doing and why they were doing it. Understanding was embedded in every lesson. None of this was evident in the scoping stages.

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