| Abstract: | This study involved 24 third- and fourth-grade students in a suburban school in the Chicago area. These children had been learning science through a reform-based, integrated science and mathematics curriculum for about 2 years. In this study I explore how these children made sense of a scientific procedure that had been introduced to them and they had used before in their own experimental inquiries: performing repeated trials and determining the best representative of the measurements of a continuous dependent variable. Specifically, I explore how children made sense of the variability in the results of repeated trials, how their ideas of repeated trials and best representatives are related to their understandings of the sources of the variability, and how they thought about what would be the best representative of their measurements. The data and analysis reveal the complexity of the understandings involved in this apparently simple procedure, as children attempted to appropriate for themselves the procedure that had been introduced to them. The results support the idea that many of the children had not conceptualized the procedure of repeating trials and finding the best representative of the results in the way adult practitioners do. They also point to the value of introducing children to such experimental procedures. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 853–872, 1997. |
