International Collaborative Investigation of High School Students’ Understandings of Scientific Inquiry – A Follow Up Study

Abstract

Although understandings of scientific inquiry (SI) (as opposed to conducting inquiry) is included in science education reform documents around the world, little is known about what students have learned about inquiry during their school years. The purpose of this large scale (i.e., 23 countries spanning six continents and including 2,899 students) international project was to get data on what high school students have learned, this is a follow up study on grade seven students’ understandings about SI (Lederman, J et. al., 2017). The participating countries are: Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United States, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey. This study will examine high school students to see if their knowledge about scientific inquiry has changed during high school. It is important to note that collecting data from each of the 130+ countries globally was not humanly possible. And, it was not possible to collect data from every region of each country. A concerted effort was made, however, to provide a relatively representative picture of each country and the world.