PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Experimentation is one of the most important scientific working methods in biology. However, on the one hand, students can perceive experimentation as very complex, especially when students were offered a high degree of autonomy. On the other hand, fully structured recipestyle inquiry processes seem to be inappropriate to promote the development of students' scientific reasoning skills. Consequently, to support experimentation optimally and foster an autonomous working practice a combination of instructional support and open inquiry is needed. Prompts provide a high degree of freedom and give instructional guidance by offering hints. Accordingly, prompts allow students to work on a task autonomously and with an appropriate degree of support. The research question in this study focusses on, whether the provision of autonomy in combination with support by prompts during experimentation influences motivation and knowledge gain. In the quasi-experimental study (N=151) students in grades 5 and 6 were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions: recipe-style experimentation and experimentation supported by prompt-cards. The results showed that the students of the ‘prompt-group” reported significant lower values in basic need satisfaction (subscale ‘competence’ and ‘autonomy’) and in motivation (subscales ‘perceived choice’, ‘perceived competence’ and ‘interest/enjoyment’). Likewise, the students did not benefit from prompts in the knowledge gain. Summarizing, for young students, experimenting with strong guidance seems to be more beneficial than using prompts. The fulfilment of the need for competence as well as the perceived competence was lower in the ‘prompt-group’ than in the ‘full-structured group’. Thus, these students did not seem to be able to cope with the demands of a more open learning environment. Presumably, it is necessary to improve the students' competence, e.g. by gradually increasing the degree of autonomy in experimenting, in order to enable students to perceive themselves as competent.