Implementing Inquiry-Based Science Education to Foster Emotional Engagement of Special-Needs Students - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 111

Table 2 Aims of the teaching unit and indicators of managing guided inquiry (cp. Abels, 2012 )
Personal skills Methodological skills Social skills

Autonomy Formulating assumptions

Planning and conducting
experiments
Observing
Systematically describing
Documenting the results in
protocols

Interacting
Cooperating
Helping each other
Discussing instead of arguing
Observing rules

“ Self - dependent planning ,
experimenting and recording
indicated that the pupils were
able to manage the phases of
an investigation relevant in
guided inquiry .” (Abels,
2012 , p. 170)
Self-dependence

“ The better the ideas the pupils
had for problem - solving , the
better their realization of
inquiry .” (ibid.)

“ If more issue - related dia-
logues were held in compari-
son to non - issue - related ones ,
the pupils showed that they
could manage the coopera-
tive part of guided inquiry .”
(ibid.)
Subject-related dialogues Ideas for problem-solving

The following table shows the respective learning targets in three competence
areas (Table 2 ). Certain observations in students behavior were indicating when

and if these targets could be attained (added in italic in Table 2 ). A derived category
is emphasized in bold letters.
As the respective curriculum (Senatsverwaltung f¨r Bildung Jugend und Sport
Berlin, 2005 ) suggests, all four competence areas are directly related to engagement
in relevant and meaningful learning. Subject matter skills develop during the
involvement with interesting problem-based challenges. Personal skills develop
in situations of appreciation and in the successful mastery of problem-solving.
While methodological skills develop during the work on meaningful and relevant
tasks, social skills manifest themselves as the increasing ability to manage exercises
in teams.
The competence areas can be transferred to Deci and Ryan

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s( 2000 ) psycholog-
ical needs of autonomy (personal skills), competence (visible in subject matter and
methodological learning), and relatedness (social skills). Diagnostic assessment of
the skills was done by observations and discussions with the classroom teacher
during the whole 9-month period. Video analysis was added for a short period
(90 min) of guided inquiry.
To facilitate the acquisition of these competences and to reach the aims, the
teaching unit was designed as follows.

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5.2 Successive Implementation of Inquiry-Based Learning

The teaching unit was split in three phases. First, it started with some “cookbook”
experiments (inquiry level 0; see Table 1 ) to link the tasks to the methodical