Introduction Effectiveness of Inquiry-Based Learning A generation effect was only found among students with high self-generation success after a 1-week delay. However, after a period of 1 week had elapsed, both treatment conditions turned out to be equally effective. Direct instruction was clearly superior to self-generation in facilitating students’ acquisition of CVS immediately after the inquiry task. We used both an immediate and a delayed test to examine which treatment better developed a deeper understanding of CVS and an ability to apply this knowledge to novel problems (transfer). An inquiry activity that included the self-generation of scientific reasoning skills was compared to an inquiry task that had students simply read information about the experimental design. For this purpose, an experiment involving 133 6th and 7th graders was conducted. The focus of this research is to analyze the distinctive role of self-generation of scientific reasoning skills within the concept of inquiry-based learning and to identify the influence of prior knowledge and self-generation success on short-term and long-term retention. That is why this experiment was conducted. However, there is still no research on the self-generation of scientific reasoning skills (procedural knowledge) and no knowledge of interaction between the (long-term) retention of these skills with prior knowledge, feedback and self-generation success. Previous research on self-generation of content knowledge in inquiry-based learning has demonstrated that (1) a high cognitive load impairs retention of the generated information, (2) feedback is a fundamental requirement for self-generation of complex content knowledge, (3) self-generation success is key to long-term retention, and (4) generating and rereading place different demands on learners. From the perspective of cognitive load theory, generating answers and solutions during inquiry-based learning is inefficient as it imposes an intrinsic and extraneous load on learners. This approach allows students to not only acquire content knowledge, but also an understanding of investigative procedures/inquiry skills – in particular the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). It plays a distinctive role within the concept of inquiry-based learning, which is an activity-oriented, student-centered collaborative learning approach in which students become actively involved in knowledge construction by following an idealized hypothetico-deductive method. Self-generation of knowledge can activate deeper cognitive processing and improve long-term retention compared to the passive reception of information. 2Department of Empirical School and Teaching Research, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany.1Department of Biology Education, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany.Irina Kaiser 1*, Jürgen Mayer 1 and Dumitru Malai 2
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