The Interplay of Scientific Inquiry and Metacognition: More than a Marriage of Convenience

The scientific enterprise is a form of collaborative learning that enables society to develop knowledge about the world-knowledge that is useful for predicting, controlling, and explaining what happens as events occur. Creating scientific communities in classrooms, by engaging young learners in theory-based empirical research, is a highly challenging yet important educational goal (Anderson, 2002; Blumenfeld, Soloway, Marx, Krajcik, Guzdial, National Research Council, 1996, 2007; Schraw, Crippen, & Hartley, 2006). To achieve this goal, and enable students to learn about the nature and practices of scientific inquiry, the development of metacognitive knowledge and capabilities is crucial.