Scaffolding during Science Inquiry

Prior studies on scaffolding for investigative inquiry practices (i.e. forming a question/hypothesis, collecting data, and analyzing and interpreting data [21]) revealed that students who received scaffolding were better able to both learn practices and transfer these competencies to new topics than were students who did not receive scaffolding. Prior studies have also shown that after removing scaffolding, students continued to demonstrate improved inquiry performance on a variety of practices across new driving questions over time. However, studies have not examined the relationship between the amount of scaffolding received and transfer of inquiry performance; this is the focus of the present study. 107 middle school students completed four virtual lab activities (i.e. driving questions) in Inq-ITS. Students received scaffolding when needed from an animated pedagogical computer agent for the first three driving questions for the Animal Cell virtual lab. Then they completed the fourth driving question without access to scaffolding in a different topic, Plant Cell. Results showed that students' performances increased even with fewer scaffolds for the inquiry practices of hypothesizing, collecting data, interpreting data, and warranting claims; furthermore, these results were robust as evidenced by the finding that students required less scaffolding as they completed subsequent inquiry activities. These data provide evidence of near and far transfer as a result of adaptive scaffolding of science inquiry practices.