The Future of Education

The documents of science education reform have stressed the significance of students’ abilities on scientific explanations. Scientific explanation is an effective tool for students to understand scientific conceptions and procedures. The purpose of this article is to investigate students’ conceptual understanding in sound and their scientific explanation abilities after implementing inquiry teaching. Scientific explanation has three components, includes (1) claim: a statement of conclusion that answers the original question; (2) evidence: scientific data that supports the claim; (3) reasoning: a justification that links the claim and evidence. The subjects are 10 fifth grade students from an elementary school in Taiwan. Several inquiry activities about sound which integrate with the strategies of scientific explanation were designed to guide these students to explore. They played various instruments, such as drum, recorder, xylophone and ukulele, and investigated how to make sound. The pre-post tests were adopted to collect data. The sound conception test has 26 items. The scientific explanation test has 4 items and includes two types. The type Ι refers to the relationship between three independent variables and a dependent variable, one independent variable covaries with the dependent variable and the others do not. The type Π refers to the relationships between an independent variables and a dependent variable. It was found that many students did not know what causes the change of volume, pitch and timbre in the pre-test. All students acquired higher scores on the sound conception test after inquiry teaching. They realized how to increase the volume and produce a higher pitch while playing the instruments. Different instruments have different timbre. In addition, most students made an appropriate claim but they cannot provide evidences and reasons in the pre scientific explanation test. Through inquiry teaching, they were able to use the evidence to support their claim, but the evidence sometime is insufficient in the type Ι. All students knew reasoning is important while making scientific explanation. Their scientific explanation comprises the reasoning. In the type Π, the reasoning they gave is sufficient and correct to defend the claim and evidence. However, they adopted inappropriate scientific theory to illustrate the link between claim and evidence in some cases of the type Ι. These results could be a useful resource for science educators and teachers to design and implement inquiry teaching that improves students’ scientific explanation abilities.