These technical reports introduce and explain structures and processes used for the Inquiry Synthesis Project.

Technical Report 1: Generating the Synthesis Sample of Studies [176K pdf]
This technical report describes Phase I of the project, the process of identifying and retrieving reports that began with the development of the search criteria at the outset of the project (September 2001) and came to a close on December 31, 2002. This technical report describes the initial search criteria, the potential sources of research reports and procedures followed to access them, and collection procedures. The last section provides a summary of the numbers of reports collected and the total number, sources and characteristics of those included in the final report dataset.

Technical Report 2: Conceptualizing Inquiry Science Instruction [148K pdf]
This technical report introduces and explains a structure for describing inquiry science instruction. Such a structure was essential for this project, which addresses the research question, What is the impact of inquiry science instruction on student outcomes? Because there is great variability in definitions of “inquiry science” commonly used by practitioners, academics, and the public, it was imperative to develop a systematic way to code for the treatment—inquiry science instruction. The first section of this report briefly describes the theoretical and historical underpinnings of inquiry science instruction. The second section presents the rationale and process by which the research team derived a systematic way of capturing the variability of inquiry from past and present heterogeneous definitions in the field. The third section illustrates the operationalization of the rationale into a coding framework. The codebook for this framework is described in Technical Report 5.

Technical Report 3: Operationalizing the Inclusion/Exclusion Process[132K pdf] This technical report describes Phase II, Stage one—inclusion/exclusion coding of the project. It explains the development of the inclusion/exclusion codebook and how it was used to determine which research reports could contribute to answering the research question of the synthesis project and, thus, were eligible to continue on to Stage two of coding. It offers some perspective on the complexity of the inclusion/exclusion task specifically addressing how we defined an empirical study, an instructional intervention, and ascertained the study’s research question and student outcome dependent variables.

Technical Report 4: Report-Study Reconciliation Process [125K pdf]
This technical report describes the issue of unit of analysis for this project. As is common with synthesis projects, we found that the number of documents we had collected did not represent the equivalent number of studies. Since the unit of analysis for the synthesis is the study, we had to ensure that no single study was over- or underrepresented in our final analyses because of its particular documentation configuration, thus it was critical to resolve all of our documents into unique studies. This technical report details the process we used to reconcile this unit of analysis issue common to synthesis research.

Technical Report 5: Operationalizing the Inquiry Science Instruction Coding Process [132K pdf] 
This technical report is on Phase II, Stage two coding—inquiry-science-instruction coding—and explains the codebook used to determine the presence, extent, and nature of the inquiry in the instructional treatment in each research study. This technical report describes how we moved from the Inquiry Framework described in Technical Report 2 into operationalized variables for coding. Studies that were determined to contain some inquiry in the science instruction were eligible to continue on to Stage three of coding.

Technical Report 6: Operationalizing the Coding of Research Rigor, Context, and Study Findings[187K pdf] 
This technical report describes Phase II, Stage three coding—research rigor, context, and study findings. It explains how we coded for the research design, contextual information about the instructional treatments, methodological rigor and study findings. This technical report explains the variables contained in the methodological rigor matrix used in analysis.

Technical Report 7: Bibliography of Studies Included in Final Inquiry Synthesis Project Analyses[155K pdf]
This is the final technical report in the series, and provides the list of studies analyzed in the inquiry synthesis project.