Education and science undergraduate students' conceptions of inquiry: relationship to perceptions of strategic demands of inquiry learning and instruction, and epistemic beliefs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The primary purpose of this study was to investigate education and science undergraduate students' conceptions of inquiry and their relationship to epistemic beliefs and to fields/programs of study. The secondary purpose was to examine differences in the students' perceptions of strategic demands of inquiry learning and instruction based on their levels of inquiry conception as well as fields of study. Data were obtained from 145 education and 67 science majors using three questionnaires: an open ended questionnaire, McGill Strategic Demands of Inquiry Questionnaire (MSDIQ), and Schommer's Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire. Open coding and constant comparison analysis of the participants' inquiry definitions yielded 13 categories of inquiry conceptions which could be grouped into three superordinate categories: inquiry as a learning process (three subcategories), inquiry as an instructional process (five subcategories), and inquiry as a research/scientific process (five subcategories). Frequency counts revealed inquiry as a learning process as the most prevalent and inquiry as a research/scientific process as the least prevalent of the superordinate categories. Data analysis also revealed that participants with sophisticated epistemic beliefs have well informed and multidimensional conceptions of inquiry compared to those with naive epistemic beliefs. Moreover, more indistinct definitions (vague and/or ‘I don't know' responses) were found in the naïve epistemic belief group's definitions than in the sophisticated epistemic belief group's definitions. Field of study related differences were also observed in inquiry conceptions. While education majors emphasized on describing inquiry as an instructional process and mostly as an endeavor in a school/classroom context, those of the science majors emphasized on describing it as a learning process and mostly as an out of school/classroom endeavor. The students' perceptions of strategic demands of inquiry learning and instruction were measured using the three sub-scales of the MSDIQ: planning, enactment, and reflection which respectively comprised of six, six, and two factors. Series of one-sample t-tests revealed that the students had in general a good deal of awareness as they perceived 11 of the 14 factors as highly important strategic demands. Further ranking of the means of the factors indicated time and task organization, expanding data or information search, and social context of the solving the problem as the top ranked and co-construction, linking ideas including view of the future, and communication of results as the bottom ranked strategic demands. From MANOVA analysis, no differences in the participants' perceptions of strategic demands were evident for students at different levels of inquiry conceptions. But, MANOVA analysis based on the participants' fields of study revealed that education majors had better perception of strategic demands pertaining to the factors of the enactment and the reflection sub-scales than the science majors. The study has implications for the practice of inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education in general and for teacher education programs in particular.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".