Cognitive Activation Strategies: A Promising Approach to Teaching Science to All Students

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Methodological Challenges with latent constructs

Proposal

Introduction
Inquiry-based teaching is a promising approach to developing students' reasoning and thinking skills (Teig et al., 2019). This approach encourages students to ask questions, gather evidence, and draw conclusions. Inquiry-based teaching is based on the scientific method, and it has been shown to be effective in helping students learn. The relationship between teaching methods and student achievement is one of the most important indicators of teaching effectiveness (Teig et al., 2019). In recent years, there has been a growing trend towards inquiry-based teaching.
An increasing number of studies have explored the relationship between inquiry teaching and student science achievement, but they have failed to draw a firm conclusion about the effectiveness of inquiry-based teaching. Some studies have found that inquiry-based instructional practices are associated with positive outcomes (e.g., Schroeder et al., 2016), while more recent studies using ILSA data have shown that these practices are actually negatively associated with science achievement (e.g., Cairns & Areepattamannil, 2017). One explanation for these inconsistent findings could be due to how inquiry-based teaching is measured and how the data is analyzed based on its measurement.
More specifically, many studies that explore the effectiveness of inquiry-based teaching primarily assess the frequency of inquiry activities, emphasizing how often they are implemented (e.g., Urdanivia Alarcon, 2023). Moreover, these studies commonly assume a linear correlation between the occurrence of inquiry activities and students' academic achievement. In contrast, Creemers and Kyriakides (2008) suggest studies on teaching effectiveness should explore the potential of a nonlinear relationship between the occurrence of teaching behaviors or activities and students' academic achievement.
For example, on the one hand, teachers should implement inquiry-based teaching to a significant extent in science class to develop students' scientific literacy (Teig et al., 2018). On the other hand, the effective implementation of this approach demands a substantial amount of class time, as highlighted by Guskey (2000). If teachers spend too much time on inquiry activities, they may not have enough time for other important teaching and learning practices. Hence, there might be an optimal amount of inquiry-based teaching that leads to better student achievement, which indicates a curvilinear relationship.
In 2018, Teig and her colleagues find the curvilinear relationship between inquiry-based teaching and science achievement using TIMSS 2015 Norway data. However, Teig and her colleagues' study (2018) is limited to one educational system, leaving open the question of whether the curvilinear relationship between the variables in investigation would exist in other educational systems and why.
Object and research hypothesis
To fill in this gap, in this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between inquiry-based teaching and student science achievement in science using TIMSS 2019, following Teig et al. (2018). We also aim to determine whether the relationship is linear or curvilinear across different education systems and why this could be the case.
Data
This study utilized data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2019. TIMSS is a widespread assessment that occurs every four years and aims to gather information about the academic performance of students in mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth-grade levels. The study encompassed numerous countries and involved the collection of contextual data through questionnaires administered to students, teachers, and school leaders. For this particular study, the analysis focused on a subset of 37 countries that took part in the eighth-grade assessment in 2019.
Measures
Science achievement
In this study, we used eighth-grade science achievement as the outcome measure. The assessment was in four content domains: earth science, chemistry, physics, and biology. For each student, five plausible values of their science achievement were reported. We used all five plausible values in our models.
Inquiry-based teaching
TIMSS 2019 collected data on how often teachers use different teaching practices in the classroom. Following Teig et al.'s (2018) study, we selected five items out of 15 teaching and learning activities to build a scale of inquiry-based teaching, such as “design or plan experiments or investigations.”
Socioeconomic status (SES)
Three items were selected from the student background questionnaire to create a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) at the student level, such as the number of books at home. We also created a measure of SES at the classroom level using the same three items under the doubly-latent variable framework. Both individual and classroom SES were added into the model as controlling variables.
Method
As we were investigating the effectiveness of inquiry teaching in the classroom, we conducted multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) with both student and classroom levels. The data analysis was conducted in two steps using Mplus with the XWITH command (Muthén & Muthén, 2017).
First, we conducted multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) to establish and test measurement models of inquiry-based teaching across 37 different educational systems. This allowed us to create a model that accurately represented the relationships between different aspects of inquiry-based teaching.
Second, we performed MSEM on the basis of the previously examined factor structures in four models. These models examined the relationships between inquiry-based teaching, SES, and achievement, and whether the relationship between inquiry-based teaching and achievement was linear or curvilinear.
Both models were tested for the pooled datasets and the datasets collected by each educational system. This allowed us to compare the results across different educational systems and to get a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between inquiry-based teaching and achievement.
Results achieved
Initial findings from the pooled dataset of TIMSS 2019 suggest a curvilinear relationship between inquiry-based teaching and science achievement. These findings indicate that achievement increases with a higher frequency of inquiry-based teaching up to the optimal frequency. However, an excessive amount of inquiry activities may have an adverse effect on student performance.
The outcomes of our study will help generate valuable information that will enable us to propose theoretical mechanisms for understanding the connection between inquiry-based teaching and educational achievement. By taking a comprehensive and internationally comparable approach, we gain a deeper understanding of the factors that influence the development and trajectories of educational systems worldwide.

Authors

• Zhijun Chen, University of Bath, Department of Education

• Andres Sandoval-Hernandez, University of Bath