Scientific reasoning across grades 7-11 in the K-12 curriculum

• Main Author: Camungol, Isalyn F.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: High school students > Philippines; Reasoning; Physics > Study and teaching
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5824
• Institution: De La Salle University

The new K-12 curriculum aims to improve the reasoning skills of the learners as they moved from one level to another. In line with this, the researcher made a cross-sectional study on the scientific reasoning skills across Grades 7-11 in terms of level of reasoning and progression. The researcher chose two sections per grade level, the Star Section and the non-star section. 420 junior high school students and 75 senior high school (47 from STEM and 28 from TVL strand) students participated in the study. The researcher found that most of the students are in concrete and transitional level of reasoning. There is a slight increase in formal level, decrease in concrete and transitional level in the Star sections and STEM students. However, the three levels of reasoning almost remained constant in the non-star section and TVL students. There is a significant difference found in scientific reasoning between the star sections and non-star. In terms of progression there is no significant difference found across grades 8-11, while there is a significant difference found between grade 7 compared to other grades. Using the concentration analysis on the LCTSR (Bao & Redish, 2000) the population has significant difficulty in the conservation of displaced volume, isolation and control of variables, proportional reasoning and hypothetical-deductive reasoning which are also verified by interviews.