Problems and opportunities in students scientific inquiry with Monoplant

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis has been to explore how students interact and learn with a new scientific inquiry system, Monoplant. We developed the system, which is an Internet-connected plant visualizing different aspects of plant biology through a website. The study investigates how this system provides an educational context and how it supports the students' inquiry process. We performed a design experiment where a biology class performed science experiments using Monoplant. Our data consists of one hour of video material from a session where four groups of students worked with five questions related to the experiments. We adopted a sociocultural perspective for the analysis and studied how the institutional aspects of the school affect the learning process. The findings indicate that inquiry learning can lead to scientific misconceptions, multiple representations should be used in scientific inquiry, and that students have difficulties combining the requirements of the school setting with the scientific inquiry process.