Resumen de 7th grade VASI study: the case of Beijing
Cheng Liu, Enshan Liu, Shuchen Guo
One of the key components of scientific literacy is having deep understanding about Scientific Inquiry (SI). So it is important for curriculum designer and researcher to know students’ understanding about SI. And Lederman et al (2014) published the VASI questionnaire, which can evaluate students’ idea about SI in a valid and reliable way. This study is to investigate 7th grade students’ notions about SI, who came from mainland China. The sample are all selected from public schools in Beijing, the capital, where there is plenty of educational resources and access to international education program that might focus on SI teaching and learning. Two raters code all sample’s data together. One of them had one-year experience of coding the data from VASI and trained another researcher for coding first. Both joined in the code training meeting with the VASI designers’ team online to be consistent with other international groups. The inter-rater reliabilities of eight aspect of SI are at least higher than 0. 80. The results show students did well on the aspect of “procedures are guided by the question asked” and “conclusions consistent with data collected”, and did not well on the rest of aspects. Especially over 40% of students had naïve understanding or no idea on three aspects of SI, including “data does not equal evidence”, “multiple methods”, and “same procedures may not get the same results”. And less than 10% of students held informed idea on these three aspects of SI. This finding is consistent with no emphasis on these SI aspects in national curriculum standards, even in implicit way. But learning in SI way does be emphasized in the standards. It might indicate that doing SI is not sufficient for developing understandings about SI. Also these might be related with the eastern philosophies of education, such as Confucianism which have been extensively discussed in the literature.
