The Science Fair as a Means for Developing Children’s Graphing Skills in Elementary School

Abstract. This article reports on an ongoing research program aiming at the pedagogical exploitation of the science fair as a mechanism for developing investigative skills in elementary school and promoting student inquiry through a sequence of formal and non-formal activities. Specifically, this paper refers to the development of data graphing skills by children aged 10-12 years old. The students, who participated in the teaching intervention, were engaged in a process of undertaking and reporting on authentic investigations in order to contribute to a school science fair. The curriculum used in the present study, was drawn from the program “The Science Fair as a means of developing investigative skills”. Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained from students ' responses to paper and pencil open-ended tests, their notebooks and their posters, which were used as sources of evidence in the present study. Analysis of the results demonstrate children’s ability levels on data graphing, difficulties that hamper students ' attempts to develop and interpret graphical representations of data, differences between students ' graphing achievements between pre-test, mid-test and post-test, and correlations between constructing graphs and interpreting information from graphical representations. This work clearly demonstrates that the construction of graphs needs to be taught systematically in elementary school in combination with other science investigation skills such as interpreting data