Numeracy, Scientific Reasoning and Inquiry (including Postsecondary Education)

Team Members: Mark Aulls (Leader), Helena Dedic, Sylvia D'Apollonia, Helen Osana, Steven Rosenfield, and Bruce Shore.

The emphasis on our work at the current time is on inquiry at elementary, secondary, and university levels. Through both FQRSC and SSHRC grants we are pursuing the issue of what happens as inquiry in classrooms and how we can assess, through a variety of tools, the nature of what happens in a manner that can be used for professional development, as well as to describe individual student development. We are also continuing our collaboration with work on inter-professional education and practice in medical education.

This year, we collected both quantitative and qualitative data through fifteen meetings in three different schools, four hundred photos, and a videotape of inquiry knowledge fair that resulted in one thousand four hundred minutes of dialogue to be analyzed. Funded by FQRSC, our focus has been on the needs of teachers in assessing inquiry instruction, determining their conceptions of inquiry, and doing classroom observations in one site to better understand these needs and to jointly develop appropriate tools for inquiry that can be used by individual teachers and grade level teams of teachers. Next year, collaborating staff will be using a newly created assessment tool to assign priorities to the aspects of inquiry learning and instruction they deem most important, as individuals. Then in teams the procedure will be repeated for what they wish to emphasis as curriculum objectives to be assessed during the school year. Both teachers and students will assess what happens as inquiry in the classroom.

We are creating tools for assessing presage factors related to the objectives of the SSHRC project with the expectation that data collection will continue in multiple university sites. We focused on the assessment of outcomes of inquiry in different disciplines in a manner that assists understanding the developmental needs of pre-service teachers and their integration of beliefs, content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. Dr. Juss Kaur has joined our SSHRC team, and transformed a number of assessment tools into electronic format.

Our Students’ Special Recognition

1. Charles Hou, recipient of 2009 FQRSC International Internship Bursary, is in China now pursuing a cross cultural study intended to understand Chinese students’ expectations about teaching and learning.
2. Liv Hua has been awarded an FQRSC Doctoral Fellowship for her Ph.D studies.
3. Ahmed Ibrahim is now visiting at Harvard with Eric Mazur’s research team investigating Peer Instruction as an interactive pedagogical method.
4. Krista Ritchie has completed her Ph.D thesis entitled The process of problem finding in inquiry education: A focus on students’ experience. She has also been awarded a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship and been appointed as a Consulting Scientist at the I. W. Killam Hospital in Halifax.

Our Guests

1. Professor Marina Milner Bolotin from the Physics department, Ryerson University delivered a presentation entitled: Beating the Odds of a University Science Teaching Game: A Constructivist Perspective, and discussed ways of actively engaging university students in inquiry in large lecture hall situations.
2. Professor Rachel Spronken-Smith from the Higher Education Development Centre, University of Otago, New Zealand visited our research lab to discuss her research on inquiry-based learning in higher education. More info is available at: http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/projects/inquiry-based-learning.

Our Dissemination: This past year our team made 17 conference presentations (including three at the QPAT teachers’ convention), and published seven articles, two chapters, and two books.

Report: Dedic, H., Rosenfield, S., Rosenfield, E., & Jungert, T. (2010, March).Attracting and retaining science students. (Final Report). Montreal, QC: Programme d’aide à la recherche sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage (PAREA). See report.