How students use empirical evidence to draw conclusions

The ability to use data to draw conclusions from experimental evidence is an important part of students’ science education and this is especially so, in the United Kingdom, with the advent of the National Curriculum for England in recent years. Evidence from a number of studies has shown that students’ understanding of how to choose data to gather, how to analyze data and how to evaluate the conclusions drawn from data is limited and that it is also context specific. In the present study, an attempt is being made to learn something about the ways in which students choose to gather data to establish conclusions. This is a cross age study, in which groups of students are asked to gather a strictly limited amount of data to establish a conclusion in an investigative task. Their discussion about the choice of measurements to be made is video taped and the video tape analyzed to determine the strategies that students use in gathering data to support conclusions and to determine the criteria that they use in establishing that the conclusions drawn are reliable. The students are then given a number of concept cartoons and asked to discuss these in their groups; the discussions are once again video taped. These cartoons are used to help to clarify students understanding of data collection and data analysis still further. The tasks are presently being trialled.