Increasing degrees of freedom and writing articles in the laboratory. A didactic sequence to improve practical works

Abstract

The article describes a didactic sequence composed by three laboratory inquiry activities. Each activity increases gradually the participation of the students in experiment design and data collection, and includes an exercise of redaction of a scientific article from the inquiry work. The use of a didactic scaffold has allowed to relate the different grammatical connectors to different kinds of reasoning and different sections of the standard structure for scientific articles. The experience promotes a better understanding of the inquiry activities and the nature of science, and the development of scientific skills as designing experiments, making the difference between results and conclusions, as well as scientific writing. The experience and the results of a survey performed among the students are evaluated and discussed in the frame of the Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) standards.