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This paper reports a study of the effects of a collaborative inquiry approach to science on language minority students ' (middle and high school) learning. This approach emphasizes involving the students, most of whom have had very little schooling, in "doing science " in ways that scientists practice. This study addresses the question: To what extent do students appropriate collaborative scientific inquiry? The authors focus the analysis on changes in students ' conceptual knowledge and use of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning in the context of two think-aloud problems. The findings indicate that at the beginning of the school year the students ' reasoning was non-analytic and bound to personal experience. By contrast, at the end of the school year they reasoned in terms of a larger explanatory system; used hypotheses to organize and give directions to thei