Problem-centred inquiry in collaborative science learning

Abstract

This study examined students' collaborative learning activity and assessed whether fostering problem-centred explanation would increase their performance on conceptual change measures. The domain of investigation is biological evolution. Participants were 60 high-school students randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: (a) Problem-centred explanation, (b) Argumentation, and (c) Knowledge-Activation. Different experimental prompts were provided to foster various kinds of collaborative constructive activity in order to assess the differential effects on conceptual change. The findings showed that problem-centred explanation group outperformed the knowledge-activation group and scored higher than the argumentation group on a number of measures. Students' constructive activity, which involves viewing knowledge as problematic and constructing explanations to deal with such difficulties, may play an important role in collaborative learning.