Developing a Researchable Question: Open Inquiry in a School Garden

Learning how to ask questions about the natural world is a central enterprise of science. Yet typical instruction seldom provides students with the opportunity to develop and investigate their own scientific questions. School garden ecosystems offer a rich setting for students to investigate their own questions. In this study, middle school students participate in a 15 week after school science program situated in their school’s garden. After engaging in teacher led empirical garden investigations, students are asked to develop scientific questions of their own to investigate. In this design experiment, we examine how students’ scientific questions emerge and the roles that phenomena, tools and consultations play in the development and refinement of students’ researchable questions. Findings suggest that instructional scaffolds played different roles for different students as they generated and refined their research questions.