Abstract
‘Teaching and assessing students’ research. A study on supporting learning to make a research design in upper secondary geography education.’
Recently the formal curriculum in upper secondary education in the Netherlands (pre-university level) has been renewed. In most subjects inquiry skills now have a central place in the examination requirements. Supporting
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the process of mastery of skills for designing research (which constitute the preparatory stage of research) can be legitimized from different objectives. Learning to design research can be seen as an end in itself, as a means to stimulate students to engage in a process of active content related knowledge building, and as a means to develop insight into what can or cannot be investigated.
Simultaneously with the implementation of inquiry skills in upper secondary education, schools have been stimulated to implement a pedagogical reform, which can be characterized as a shift from teaching students to guiding students’ learning processes. This shift is not made easily. Many teachers feel uncertain about guiding students’ learning processes. This problem seems to occur especially with regard to learning to do research. Therefore, the research problem of this study is directed at the effects of different components of teacher guidance on the mastery of inquiry skills. The study focuses on skills for designing research and on one knowledge domain in upper secondary education: geography. Although little theory is available about the guidance of students learning to do research, there are reasons to assume that the effectiveness of guidance depends on the relation between two components of teacher guidance: a) the guidance offered to structure the process of learning to do research, and; b) the guidance offered to enhance the quality of the collaboration process between students.
An empirical study has been carried out in order to examine the effect of teacher guidance with respect to these components on the mastery of skills for designing research. For this empirical study, 150 fifteen to seventeen-year-old students in secondary education of ten geography teachers have been examined during one and a half years. Within this period each student worked together with two or three fellow students on two successive inquiry projects. Each inquiry project took up to ten hours spread over eight weeks, in which six hours were available for instruction and guidance from the teacher. Before and after each of the two projects, students made a so-called ‘inquiry test’. During each inquiry project, students also answered a written questionnaire with items about the guidance they received from the teacher, the collaboration process and some individual background characteristics.
From the results it can be concluded that the teacher guidance as implemented did not contribute directly to the process of mastery of skills for designing research. This could be due to the fact that teachers do not have much experience with guiding students to learn to design research, as well as the possibility that teachers received too little support from the researcher in order to be able to guide students’ learning process. However, teacher guidance of the collaboration process did seem to have a positive effect on the quality of student interaction (the quality of the collaboration process and meta-cognitive learning activities). This kind of student interaction is supposed to be beneficial for learning how to design geography research. Therefore, it is possible that supporting the collaboration process might have a positive long-term effect on process of mastery of skills for designing research.
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