Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

This paper compares two protocols for web-based instruction using simulations in an introductory physics class. The Inquiry protocol allowed students to control input parameters while the Worked Example protocol did not. Students in the Worked Example group performed significantly higher on a common assessment. The ramifications of this study are…