Investigative Research Projects for Students in Science: The State of the Field and a Research Agenda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract One of the ways in which students can be taught science is by doing science, the intention being to help students understand the nature, processes, and methods of science. Investigative research projects may be used in an attempt to reflect some aspects of science more authentically than other teaching and learning approaches, such as confirmatory practical activities and teacher demonstrations. In this article, we are interested in the affordances of investigative research projects where students, either individually or collaboratively, undertake original research. We provide a critical rather than a systematic review of the field. We begin by examining the literature on the aims of science education, and how science is taught in schools, before specifically turning to investigative research projects. We examine how such projects are typically undertaken before reviewing their aims and, in more detail, the consequences for students of undertaking such projects. We conclude that we need social science research studies that make explicit the possible benefits of investigative research projects in science. Such studies should have adequate control groups that look at the long-term consequences of such projects not only by collecting delayed data from participants, but by following them longitudinally to see whether such projects make any difference to participants’ subsequent education and career destinations. We also conclude that there is too often a tendency for investigative research projects for students in science to ignore the reasons why scientists work in particular areas and to assume that once a written report of the research has been authored, the work is done. We therefore, while being positive about the potential for investigative research projects, make specific recommendations as to how greater authenticity might result from students undertaking such projects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".