From Inquiry to Knowledge: Examining the Impact of Directed Inquiry Activities on Students’ Scientific Understanding and the Elimination of Misconceptions About Selected Human Organ Systems

Abstract In biology education, it is important to provide students with space to explore the world of nature to understand individual biological phenomena and processes. Students should then acquire the correct scientific concepts that they can apply not only at school but also in everyday life. However, it turns out that this is not easy to achieve, because many teachers still prefer the transmission approach. Therefore, using a quasiexperimental design, we compared the impact of directed inquiry activities and the transmissive approach of teaching on the acquisition of correct scientific concepts and the elimination of misconceptions among primary school students related to human organ systems. The results of the research showed that students achieved a significantly higher frequency of correct scientific concepts after the implementation of directed inquiry activities than students in the transmissive approach group. In addition, the implementation of the directed inquiry activities eliminated students’ misconceptions, which contrasts with the transmissive teaching approach, where the frequency of misconceptions even increased. These findings suggest that embedding directed inquiry activities into biology lessons can help students to make sense of concepts and reduce the emergence of various misconceptions that make it difficult or impossible for students to understand future concepts related to the human body.