Designing inquiry physics laboratories with metacognitive scaffolds to enhance engagement in scientific practices

The study aims to design an inquiry-based authentic laboratory learning environment that supports students' metacognitive activities in an SRL-supportive context to examine the progress of their engagement in scientific practices and the role of metacognitive activities in these practices. The study was conducted as design-based research and included four female undergraduate physics teaching students. This study analyzed whether students' engagement in metacognitive activities followed the metacognitive scaffolds by using Lag-sequential analysis on the coded sections of the videos. The metacognitive activities that students were involved in each scientific practice were analyzed by using code co-occurrence model (code intersection) with the coded sections of the videos. Students' participation in scientific practices was coded and graded on videos and documents, and the changes were summarized with the help of a rubric developed considering the NRC (2012) framework. Scaffoldings given for a particular metacognitive phase were followed by corresponding metacognitive activities. Students' engagement in the same phases of metacognitive activities was also sequential. Students were engaged in planning activities in all scientific practices except for analyzing and interpreting data, monitoring activities in all scientific practices, orienting activities in asking questions, executing activities in planning and carrying out investigation, elaborating activities in constructing explanations, and evaluating activities in engaging arguments from evidence. At the end of the learning progression, students scored three points for engaging arguments from evidence and four points for all other scientific practices.