Inquiry-Based Teaching in Life Sciences

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4.1

Impressions about Writing to Learn Activities

Please share your first impressions about writing to learn activities. What are the advantages for students? If you already use writing to learn activities in your science classroom, please explain how you use them with an example.

Nowadays, our students are losing the habit of writing, especially of explaining what they have acquired, and this is really a deficiency that I am seeing with great regret. I do not use much to have my pupils write and so far I have limited myself to explaining what are the steps to follow in order to write a scientific report correctly, but I have used so little this form of evaluation, which I will certainly increase in the future.
4.2

How do Writing to Learn Activities contribute to students’ results?

In your opinion how do writing to learn activities contribute to students’ results?

Writing helps students to improve their language, but also to reflect on the results of a scientific exploration, putting ideas in order, starting from the observation of what happens to arrive at the analysis of the results.
4.3

Evaluating Writing to Learn Examples

Please select one of the writing to learn examples (poems or letters) given in this section and explain how you could evaluate it.

I have read all the documents available and I believe that the letters give more elements to evaluate, especially with regard to the acquisition of scientific expertise. Through them it is possible, not only to evaluate the correct use of scientific language, but also if the phases of a scientific exploration have been well understood, if the student has the ability to deduce theories through observations.