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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Effects of Science-Inquiry on Urban Students Standardized Test Scores

As I continued my research on the effects of inquiry-based science instruction on standardized tests, I came across a very interesting article called Standardized Test Outcomes for Students Engaged in Inquiry-based Science Curricula in the Context of Urban Reform by Geier, R., Blumenfeld, P. C., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Fishman, B., Soloway, E. and Clay-Chambers, J. The abstract of the article can be found at the following link:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.20248/abstract

Note: (to obtain the full article, register for free at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/user-registration)

To summarize the article/research, researchers conducted a study in Detroit Public Schools with 7th and 8th graders living in urban areas. Using the rest of the District as the control group, researchers compared standardized test scores after the selected 7th and 8th grade students had received inquiry-based science curriculum that was also standard-based. Researchers found that the 7th and 8th grade urban students performed significantly higher on standardized achievement tests than the rest of the District and showed an increase in science content comprehension. Thus, science-inquiry has a positive correlation to higher standardized test scores and science content understanding.


Citation: Geier, R., Blumenfeld, P. C., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Fishman, B., Soloway, E. and Clay-Chambers, J. (2008), Standardized test outcomes for students engaged in inquiry-based science curricula in the context of urban reform. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45: 922–939. doi: 10.1002/tea.20248

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