Sunday, November 15, 2009

Educational Research in Science

I am designing an educational research project about web-based inquiry. As a master's student in Instructional Technology, I know well that students in the 21st century learn differently than past generations. It is rare to find a classroom in the U.S. today that does not use the world wide web in some way, but are teachers using the web in significant, meaningful ways?
I am interested in finding out how well my high school science students actually learn using the web. In inquiry projects, the students pose meaningful questions and search out the answers. High school science courses, however, are packed with content leaving little time in the year for exploring issues of interest to students. Since inquiry based projects are designed to help students become better thinkers and better question designers, will this translate to better understanding of core curriculum required in a high school science class? It makes sense to know this before redesigning class curricula, so I have developed this research question:

I plan to evaluate the impact of web-based inquiry lessons versus traditional lecture and lab lessons on the achievement of high school students in chemistry.


I am interested in your feedback and opinions on the work, on the topic, and on the research question itself. I'd like to make sure I am covering all the bases and your collaboration adds more brainpower and creativity to the process.

2 comments:

  1. Christine,

    I love your problem statement.

    Are you going to use simulations on the web based lessons, or are you only going to do inquiries?

    Maria

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  2. Hi Christine,
    I like this idea as well. I completely agree that it is difficult to find the time to do it all. I think it will be interesting to see the results as students learn in so many different ways. As we learned from the last class, the web based inquiry is more of a constructionist approach which should have a bigger impact. I can't wait to see what you find out.

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