Views About Scientific Inquiry: A Study of Students’ Understanding of Scientific Inquiry in Grade 7 and 12 in Sweden

This paper analyses data from the Swedish sample of the internationalVASI (Views about scientific inquiry) study (Lederman et al. [2019]. Aninternational collaborative investigation of beginning seventh gradestudents’ understandings of scientific inquiry: Establishing a baseline.Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Published online. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21512). Understandings about scientific inquiry involveknowledge about the processes of inquiry, and are not the same asbeing able to do inquiry although these are related domains. This paperfocuses on what students know about scientific inquiry and whatimpact school science may have on this knowledge. Data werecollected using the VASI instrument developed previously and wasadministered to 126 students at the beginning of year seven and 145students at the end of year 12 in a cross-sectional design. Resultsindicate that the majority of students do not have an informedunderstanding of key aspects of scientific inquiry in either grade.Although students in year 12 are more informed, the average is still lessthan 50% as measured by the VASI and with a large spread.