ABSTRACT
Effective learning and knowledge building is achieved through learners’ active interactions with their social and physical environment. This study was dedicated to exploring these social and physical interactions by looking at how learners interact with their peers and with a simulated world during scientific discovery learning. In most studies, scientific discovery learning is regarded as an individual scientific reasoning process that involves the generation of hypotheses and testing them against the collected evidence. However, the perspective of social interaction has been overlooked to some extent. This study investigated the influences of peer collaboration and questioning-explanation prompt on simulation-based scientific discovery learning. Peer collaboration had a prominent effect on the discovery outcomes, intuitive understandings, and variable control skills. The influence of the questioning-explanation prompt was less clear, and hence needs to be addressed in depth in future studies.
