Particulate matter(s!) – Evaluation of a learning environment regarding scientific investigations by data exploration

How students plan and conduct experimental inquiry has been a major focus in science education research. However, experimental inquiry is not representative for all scientific investigations. So, a focus on experimental inquiry can cause the impression that there is a "single scientific method". We are currently developing learning environments that focus on another type of inquiry using environmental data from an online data repository. We call this scientific investigation by data exploration. Due to the increased variability in environmental data, ideas of inferential statistics are of extreme importance because causal relationships cannot be directly derived. Hence, the focus of our learning environment is to support students' skills which are relevant for performing scientific investigations by data exploration. The main goal during the intervention for the students is to identify factors influencing the particulate matter concentration in an Austrian city. In this article, we report the evaluation of our intervention with a cohort of 27 secondary school students. The evaluation shows that students regard particulate matter as a highly interesting. Furthermore, students self-report a high intrinsic motivation during the intervention and feel more informed about the environmental issue of particulate matter after the intervention. However, a few starting points for further improvement of the learning environment were identified and are discussed in this article.