Jakita O. Thomas Book order

Focusing on the development of critical skills in middle-school students, this work explores how project-based inquiry can enhance the interpretation and application of expert cases in science. It argues that effectively engaging with these cases allows students to deeply understand their content and lessons, facilitating future transfer of skills to other contexts. The study examines the scaffolding methods used to support students in this cognitive apprenticeship, whether they are working alone, in groups, or as a class.

The ability to interpret and apply cases is a skill that is a key to successful transferable learning. In this work, we make the following claim: If learners in project-based inquiry classes are able to understand, engage in, and carry out the processes involved in interpreting and applying cases effectively to their projects, they will not only learn those cases contents and lessons deeply and be able to apply those lessons later, but they may also be able to transfer interpretation and application skills to some other learning situations where application of cases is appropriate. This work seeks to understand and describe the path along which middle-school students in a project-based inquiry learning environment acquire and develop the skills needed to apply expert cases to solve science problems. We do this in the context of a system of scaffolds designed such that students will be scaffolded as cognitive apprenticeship suggests whether working individually, in groups, or as a class.