The Effect of Scaffolding on the Immediate Transfer of Students’ Data Interpretation Skills Within Science Topics

Abstract

Cultivating science inquiry skills is increasingly seen as important to students’ science literacy and effective scaffolding can support productive and successful inquiry practices. In this paper, we examine the evaluations of data interpretation practices of students who conducted inquiry within Inq-ITS, an intelligent tutoring system for science. We trace students’ progress on data interpretation tasks to a new science topic after having received scaffolds that assist with the procedural aspects of data interpretation. Results show that, overall, after receiving data interpretation scaffolds within the system, students were more skilled at interpreting data in the new topic. However, there were still certain aspects of data interpretation with which students experienced difficulty after receiving the scaffolding.