The effects of cognitive development and age on elementary students' science achievement for structured inductive and semi‐deductive inquiry strategies

Abstract This study explored Morine and Morine's ( Discovery: A challenge to teachers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1973) assumptions regarding age and cognitive development of learners successfully utilizing two types of inquiry, specifically structured inductive and semi‐deductive. Two groups of elementary school students from grades one, three and five were individually assessed on six conservation tasks and a multiplicative classification task. The two groups were instructed on two different science topics utilizing different inquiry strategies. Achievement data from topic specific tests were analyzed by an ANOVA technique. The results indicated that age made a significant difference on achievement for both inquiry strategies. The significant contributions were due to the differences between grade one and grades three and five. The differences between grade three and grade five were not significant. The effect of cognitive development was more noticeable in the less structured semi‐deductive strategy in which four conservation tasks and the multiplicative classification tasks were significant.