How strategies serve as guidelines for teaching science? Explain some thoughts of scientists on inquiry.

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Research on effective learning reveals that an awful lot of what goes on in the classroom simply doesn’t matter. There are many pointless activities that take up valuable time in the name of engagement, merely demonstrating progress as opposed to actually making progress. Often, these approaches not only have limited impact on student learning but can have a hugely detrimental impact on teacher workload and well being.

There is significant evidence to suggest that teachers should prune back what they do and focus on a more streamlined approach in the classroom. So it’s less about spending hours cutting things up and putting them in envelopes, and more about creating conditions in which students can gain long-lasting knowledge that can be applied in a range of situations. The following six principles are a distillation of key research on what really matters in the classroom. Revisit previous learning.

A core element of effective learning is that a class is exposed to new information a number of times. For education researcher Graham Nuthall, students should encounter a new concept on at least three separate occasions in order to learn it properly.

The most effective teachers in the studies of classroom instruction understood the importance of practice, and they began their lessons with a five- to eight-minute review of previously covered material. Some teachers reviewed vocabulary, formulae, events, or previously learned concepts. These teachers provided additional practice on facts and skills that were needed for recall to become automatic. Check for understanding.

This is a deft skill that needs both a strong knowledge of your students and an understanding of common misconceptions. Various techniques can achieve this, but probably the most useful tool in the box will be judicious questioning that is both open and closed in nature and, crucially, informs what you will do next. Firstly, it should take no longer than two minutes, and ideally less than one minute, for all students to respond to the questions; the idea is that the hinge-point question is a quick check on understanding, rather than a new piece of work in itself. Second, it must be possible for the teacher to view and interpret the responses from the class in 30 seconds.

Marking student work is another good way of checking understanding – but doesn’t need to be an onerous task. Some marking should simply function as a quick signpost to the teacher of how they could adapt their teaching in response to what students have or have not learned.

Give feedback on students, not work
Once a teacher gets into the habit of regularly checking for understanding, they are in a position to provide meaningful feedback. But marking and feedback are not the same thing. A key aspect of a successful classroom is that feedback is given to improve the student rather than the work, as Wiliam points out:

Too many teachers focus on the purpose of feedback as changing or improving the work, whereas the major purpose of feedback should be to improve the student. If the feedback isn’t helping the student to do a better task and a better job the next time they are doing a similar task, then it is probably going to be ineffective.

Affording students the opportunity to consider their own progress against their peers through the evaluation of exemplar work is another way to conceptualize improvement: it’s very hard to be excellent if you don’t know what excellent looks like. For students, feedback should be more of a mirror than a painted picture.

Create a positive classroom climate
Designing and communicating clear, concrete routines to the class long in advance of any misbehavior will minimize misbehavior, because students will be aware of the classroom cultural norms. Driven home often enough, it can create tramlines for behavior to default to. Instead of leaving behavioral choices to chance, the best strategy is for teachers to draw up exactly what is expected of their students from the beginning of the relationship.

Forging strong relationships where students have respect for not just the sanctity of the classroom but the privilege of learning is possibly the most important thing a teacher can do for better teaching.

Offer plenty of guidance
The limitations of working memory can be particularly problematic for novice learners.
In one study, the more successful teachers of mathematics spent more time presenting new material and guiding practice. The more successful teachers used this extra time to provide additional explanations, give many examples, check for student understanding, and provide sufficient instruction so that the students could learn to work independently without difficulty. In contrast, the least successful teachers gave much shorter presentations and explanations, and then they passed out worksheets and told the students to work on the problems. Under these conditions the students made too many errors and had to be retaught the lesson.

What every teacher should know about ... memory
 Getting students to a place where they can work independently is a hugely desired outcome, but perhaps not the best vehicle to get there. Providing worked examples and scaffolding in the short-term is a vital part of enabling students to succeed in the long-term.

Reduce cognitive load
Cognitive load theory has been described by Wiliam as“the single most important thing for teachers to know”.Reducing the level of information to an optimal amount, which avoids overloading or boring students, is crucial to effective learning. Once learners have built up schemas of knowledge that allow them to work on problems without exceeding their cognitive bandwidth, then they can work independently.

Part b: Imagine science classrooms in which:

• The teacher pushes a steel needle through a balloon and the balloon does not burst. The teacher asks the students to find out why the balloon didn't burst.
• Students are dropping objects into jars containing liquids with different densities and recording the time it takes each object to reach the bottom of the jar. They are trying to find out about viscosity.
• Students are using probes connected to a microcomputer to measure the heart rates of students before and after doing five minutes of exercise. They are investigating the effect of exercise on pulse rate.
• Students are reading newspaper articles on the topic "toxic waste dumps" in order to form opinions about a proposed dump being established in their community.

In each case students are actively involved in measuring, recording data, and proposing alternative ideas in order to solve problems, find meaning, and acquire information. In these situations students were involved in the process of inquiry. The greatest challenge to those who advocate inquiry teaching is the threat to the traditional and dominant role of the teacher in secondary education. I am going to discuss inquiry teaching first because of its relationship to the essence of science, but also because of the philosophical implications siding with an inquiry approach implies. By taking a stand in favor of inquiry teaching, the teacher is saying, "I believe students are capable of learning how to learn; they have within their repotoire the abilities as well as the motivation to question, to find out about and seek knowledge; they are persons, and therefore learners in their own right, not incomplete adults." The philosophy of inquiry implies that the teacher views the learner as a thinking, acting, responsible person.

Characteristics of Inquiry
Inquiry is a term used in science teaching that refers to a way of questioning, seeking knowledge or information, or finding out about phenomena. Many science educators have advocated that science teaching should emphasize inquiry. Wayne Welch, a science educator at the University of Minnesota argues the techniques needed for effective science teaching are the same as those used for effective scientific investigation. Thus the methods used by scientists should be an integral part of the methods used in science classrooms. We might think of the method of scientific investigation as the inquiry process. Welch identifies five characteristics of the inquiry process as follows:

• Observation: Science begins with the observation of matter or phenomena. It is is the starting place for inquiry. However, as Welch points out, asking the right questions that will guide the observer is a crucial aspect of the process of observation.
• Measurement: Quantitative description of objects and phenomena is an accepted practice of science, and desirable because of the value in science on precision and accurate description.
• Experimentation: Experiments are designed to test questions and ideas, and as such are the cornerstone of science. Experiments involve questions, observations and measurements.
• Communication: Communicating results to the scientific community and the public is an obligation of the scientist, and is an essential part of the inquiry process. The values of independent thinking and truthfulness in reporting the results of observations and measurements are essential in this regard. As pointed out earlier in the section on the nature of science, the "republic of science" is dependent on the communication of all its members. Generally is this done by articles published in journals, and discussions at professional meetings and seminars.
• Mental Processes: Welch describes several thinking processes that are integral to scientific inquiry: inductive reasoning, formulating hypotheses and theories, deductive reasoning, as well as analogy, extrapolation, synthesis and evaluation. The mental processes of scientific inquiry may also include other processes such as the use of imagination and intuition.

Inquiry teaching is a method of instruction, yet not the only method that secondary science teachers employ. However, because of the philosophical orientation of this book towards an inquiry approach to teaching, I will explore it first, but also highlight three other methods (direct/interactive teaching, cooperative learning, and conceptual change teaching) that contemporary science teachers use in their classrooms.

Inquiry in the Science Classroom.
Secondary science classrooms should involve students in a wide range of inquiry activities. The description of "scientific inquiry" is a general description of the inquiry model of teaching. The inquiry model of teaching presented in this book includes guided and unguided inductive inquiry, deductive inquiry and problem solving. Students engaged in a variety of inquiry activities will be able to apply the general model of inquiry to a wide range of problems. Thus the biology teacher who takes the students outside and asks them to determine where the greatest number of wild flowers grow in a field is engaging the students in guided inquiry. The students would be encouraged to make observations, and measurements of the flowers and the field, perhaps create a map of the field, and then draw conclusions based on these observations. In an earth science class, a teacher has been using inductive inquiry to help students learn about how rocks are formed, and now wants the students to devise their own projects and phenomena to study about rocks. Inductive inquiry is a teacher centered form of instruction.

On the other hand, unguided inductive inquiry is student centered inquiry, in that the student will select the phenomena and the method of investigation, not the teacher. However, this does not mean that the teacher is not involved. The teacher may gather the class together for a brainstorming session to discuss potential phenomena to explore and study, based on the class's work to date. Small teams of students are then organized. The teams discuss the list of topics and phenomena generated in the brainstorming session, and then proceed to devise a project of their own.

In both forms of inductive inquiry, students are engaged in learning about concepts and phenomena by using observations, measurements and data to develop conclusions. We might say the student is moving from specific cases to the general concept. In deductive inquiry the student starts with the big idea, conclusion, or general concept and moves to specific cases

Environments That Foster Inquiry
The classroom environment has psychological, sociological, philosophical and physical dimensions affected by the curriculum, students, teachers, school, community and the nation. Yet in much of the research investigating classroom environments, the teacher's role is often seen as a powerful determinant of the classroom climate. In his book Teaching Science As Inquiry, Steven Rakow points out that behaviors and attitudes of the teacher play an essential role in inquiry teaching, and he identifies the following as characteristic of successful inquiry teachers:

1. They model scientific attitudes.
2. They are creative.
3. They are flexible.
4. They use effective questioning strategies.
5. They are concerned both with thinking skills and with science content.

Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards.
The National Science Education Standards place science inquiry at the top of the list of standards. In this view, science inquiry goes beyond the teaching of science process skills (e.g. observing, classifying, inferring, etc.) and requires students to integrate process and science content to develop an understanding of science.
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