Yin in a guided inquiry biology classroom - Exploring student challenges and difficulties

Student encountered challenges in performing guided inquiry learning (gil) activities are a minority literature in science education,but may provide valuable inputs to developing science process skills vital to scientific literacy. this study determined the challenges and difficulties by science-oriented students in performing gil activities in biology. cluster sampling determined the participants in the pre-survey (69 grade 8 students) and the actual investigation (30 grade 8 students). a validated survey questionnaire pre-identified the six major difficulties of the students. validated student and expert questionnaires assessed the level of difficulty in each of the task on the six pre-identified challenges. results show that science-oriented students and the experts assessed the following with a fair difficulty level: background knowledge; performance of laboratory procedure; managing extended activities; designing an experiment; and writing a laboratory report. the same group assessed the task - data analysis to be difficult. the upper (high average to superior iq) group and lower (average to above average) groups of science oriented students provided a non-significant difference in their difficulty assessment of all the tasks. however,replicating the study to include low cognition students from non-science oriented schools may provide a wider perspective of these student-encountered difficulties and challenges in gil.