To help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge, the document outlines seven action steps: 1. Teach students how to effectively support hypotheses through frameworks, common errors in thinking, and quantitative data analysis. 2. Engage students in experimental inquiry tasks requiring prediction testing through data collection and analysis. 3. Use problem-solving tasks in unusual contexts requiring hypothesis generation and examination of existing strategies. 4. Require decision-making among appealing alternatives and generation of evaluation criteria. 5. Design historical, definitional, or projective investigation tasks with initial predictions and information seeking. 6. Have students design their own tasks to further examine topics of interest. 7. Consider using

1. Chapter 4: What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?
In the classroom Students have some basic information.
Collect data and organize data around the task.
Groups will report on its findings.
Research and Theory Refers to as accommodation or restructuring..
Require students to question their knowledge.
Problem-based learning (PBL).
PBL: the learning that results from the process of working
towards the understanding or resolution of a problem.
The starting point for learning should be a problem, a
query, or a puzzle that the learner wishes to solve.
PBL demonstrated a rather weak effect on students’
ability to produce examples (lower-level, factual type of
understanding).
Teacher serving as a guide.
Simply activating prior knowledge had little effect on
knowledge change.
Generating and testing hypotheses involve providing
support for a conclusion (testing hypotheses).
Action Steps
Action step 1. Teach students about effective support. Framework for supporting a claim: Grounds (to be valid
claims must be supported); Backing (established the
validity of grounds and discusses the ground in depth) &
Qualifiers (State the degree of certainty for the claim
and/or exceptions to the claim)
Students should be exposed to various types of errors in
thinking that can occur when constructing support (faulty
logic, attack, weak reference, misinformation)
Students can be presented with errors that are common
to support that utilizes quantitative data:
-Regression towards the mean: a more moderate score is
closer to the mean.
-Errors of conjunction: is more probably than an event
occurs in isolation rather than simultaneously.
-Keeping aware of base rates: Be aware of the patterns
-Understanding the limits or extrapolation: making
predictions without going beyond what was observed.
-Adjusting estimates of risk to account for the cumulative
nature of probabilistic events: It’s more likely than an
event occurs with the pass of time.
Action step 2. Engage students in experimental inquiry Making a prediction based on observations, designing an
task that require them to generate and test hypotheses. experiment to test that prediction, and then examining
the results in light of the original prediction.
Set up a situation based on a physical or psychological
phenomenon.
Teacher invites hypotheses (what predictions will be
made?)
Students collect data that allow them to test their
hypotheses.
They collect this information and analyze it to determine
which hypothesis it supports.
Action step 3. Engage students in problem-solving tasks Use knowledge in a highly unusual context.

2. that require them to generate and test hypotheses. Challenge to determine what must be done differently
given the unusual context or the constraint; this makes
them to reexamine its strategies and techniques.
Students predict how the new context or the constraint
will affect the situation.
Describe their conclusions using well-structured support.
Action step 4. Engage students in decision-making tasks Require students to select among equally appealing
that require them to generate and test hypotheses. alternatives.
To identify or have students identify the alternatives to be
considered (alternatives may be provided for students)
An option would be to have students generate the criteria:
X: YES
O: NO
?: I DON’T KNOW
Action step 5. Engage students in investigation task that Three types of investigations:
require them to generate and test hypotheses. -Historical: What really happened? Why did X happen?
-Definitional: What are the important features of X? What
are the defining characteristics of X?
-Projective: What would happen if…?
Designing an investigation task:
-State the investigation task in the form of a question.
-Make initial predictions.
-Seek out information about what is already known or
believed to be true about the topic.
-Students focus on identifying areas in which the experts’
opinions differ.
Action step 6. Have students design their own tasks. Introduce this questions to stimulate interest in students
-Is there a particular experiment, problem, decision,
concept or hypothetical event you would like to conduct
or examine using the information we have been studying?
Action step 7. Consider the extent to which cooperative Require gathering information can be done in small
learning structure will be used. cooperative groups
Split the task into parts that are done cooperatively and
parts that are done individually.
Summary What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new
knowledge?
Hypotheses - generation Hypotheses - testing task
To examine their thinking regarding
knowledge being learned.
Types: Experimental inquiry, problem solving, decision making, and investigation.