Developing scientific thinking skills through teaching chemical reaction with inquiry based teaching

This article shows the result of implementing a series of inquiry-style activities in a first year chemistry course. The main goal is to asses the extent in which it promotes scientific-thinking skills among students, for which an experimental proposal was designed based on the course's curriculum; the selected topic was the chemical reaction. An inquiry-based class has activities with the objective of putting the students in the spotlight, allowing them to design and conduct a research based on a problem they are facing. As part of this process, students will have to compare the answers they found with those found by their peers in order to determine which the best possible answer is. By performing this sort of activities, the student's individual insight will turn to be truly meaningful. This study is based on the work done by 19 freshmen who were divided into teams who take the general chemistry course at UNAM Chemistry School, Mexico. The elements of the work done by students that are presented in this article are the inquiry questions, predicted outcomes, a contrast between the expected and the results, a designed experimental procedure, conclusions and the answers found for the original question.