The art of scientific inquiry

It was kind of like “MythBusters,” the high school science edition.

Tyler Berzina's Millard West AP physics class was reviewing Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction. You know, the one that says a magnet moving inside a coil of wire creates a current.

He pulled out an emergency flashlight. Shake it for 20 seconds, the package says, and it will produce 30 minutes of light.

“How does this thing work?” he asked.

By the end, the 17 seniors had diagrammed circuits, learned about diodes and determined that one model was a fraud powered by watch batteries.

Myth, busted. Lesson, learned.

This was inquiry at work: asking questions, making discoveries and testing those discoveries.

Instead of everything being laid out by the teacher, the students learned by asking and answering their own questions.

Inquiry is getting more emphasis in science instruction, and it's a skill that educators in both Nebraska and Iowa want more students to be able to use. Increasingly, educators in both states are working to make sure more students acquire it.

The skill is considered important to helping students analyze what's going on in the world, from sorting through the climate change debate to judging whether a flashlight will work as advertised. It also can help spark interest in science.

In Nebraska, the State Board of Education last week approved a proposal that would increase the graduation requirement in science to three years and, for the first time, specified that coursework include scientific inquiry.

State science standards that lay out what students need to know and be able to do have long included inquiry. That's not likely to change as Nebraska educators, including Berzina, work to update the standards in preparation for a new statewide science test in the 2011-12 school year.

Iowa finished reworking its core curriculum, including science, last year.

The inquiry-based approach, however, hasn't yet arrived in every classroom.

It can be tricky for teachers to balance providing information with helping students pose questions and find answers. Many teachers weren't trained to apply it, and the breadth of scientific knowledge can result in schedules too crammed to allow diving deep into any one topic.

Last month, President Barack Obama announced an “Educate to Innovate” campaign to help move American students from the middle to the head of the pack internationally in science and math over the next decade. A National Lab Day in May will promote inquiry.

“There's a resurgence, a real interest right now in improving (science education), both at the state and federal levels and from the corporate side, because scientists play such a critical role,” said Francis Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “It's not that we're trying to create more scientists, but to raise the scientific literacy of everyone.”

Currently, however, most national and state science standards contain too many topics for teachers to adequately cover in a school year, Eberle said.

Several national reports in recent years have called for focusing on a relatively small number of major concepts and gradually expanding on them.

Jim Woodland, director of science for the Nebraska Department of Education, said rewriting standards should help narrow the list. “One (thing) we hope will happen is to free up teacher time so students will be able to do more inquiry projects,” he said.

At the same time, the state is trying to help teachers get better at teaching science, he said. For the past four summers, Nebraska has tapped federal funds through the No Child Left Behind Act for summer science institutes.

Brenda Zabel, chairwoman of Westside High School's science department, said inquiry works on a continuum.

There's still a place for the teacher-led “cookbook” experiments that parents might recall — following step-by-step instructions for adding chemical A to chemical B and recording observations on a prepared data sheet. From there, teachers may provide varying levels of guidance.

At the other end of the spectrum are experiments like Berzina's, in which students had to figure out what questions to ask and how to test them.

During the recent class, he handed out two different models of magnetic induction flashlights. Students began dissecting them with screwdrivers.

Several students checked whether a purported magnet would stick to a metal dry erase board. “That's good,” Berzina said. “Can you even make that assumption?”

One girl walked over to Berzina. “This isn't a magnet,” she said. “There's no magnet in it.”

“Sometimes in life, we may be deceived,” he said.

Berzina and other educators stressed the importance of making such lessons relevant.

In one lab, Berzina asks which is the most efficient way to cook a hot dog: by boiling it in water in a pan, heating it in a microwave oven or essentially electrocuting it in a 1960s-era device called the Presto Hot Dogger. (It turns out the Hot Dogger is the most efficient and the microwave oven is No. 2, while the stove-top method uses considerably more energy.)

“Any time we can make things real life, that's going to help the modern student,” Berzina said.

It will be difficult, however, to assess a subjective skill like inquiry on a statewide test, educators said.

“Kids may be able to name the steps of inquiry, but that's totally different than being able to do it,” said Zabel, who also serves on the standards-writing panel.

Both the Westside Community Schools and Grand Island Public Schools have developed their own inquiry-based assessments. In both districts, students devise an experiment, carry it out, write their conclusions and evaluate the process in some way.

In the meantime, Berzina's students say they're learning more by figuring things out themselves.

If he'd simply written formulas on a board, he said, “they might be able to regurgitate it on a test, but it probably wouldn't stick.”

Contact the writer:

444-1223, julie.anderson@owh.com

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