Learning chemical reactions through inquiry-based laboratory tasks about everyday life issues

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine high school students’ performances when solving two inquiry based tasks about chemical reactions, in which they have to plan how to solve issues related to everyday life. The participants are 9th grade students attending Physics and Chemistry lessons, who work in small groups. For the analysis, students’ written responses related to the planning, data collection and final reports for each task are collected. The main results point to students’ difficulties in planning the investigations as well as a small evolution in students’ performances in task 2 respect to task 1.