Paper Title
Investigating elementary students’ abilities of scientific inquiry in differentiated inquiry teaching setting

Abstract
The purpose of this study is to develop and implement differentiated inquiry teaching to improve elementary school students’ abilities of scientific inquiry. Differentiated inquiry teaching is different from general inquiry teaching. Teachers consider students’ learning needs to provide different guides while they do inquiry. In this study, a model of differentiated inquiry teaching was developed. The participants were sixteen students (age 10-12). They were divided into three categories (high-level, medium-level and low-level) based on their abilities of scientific inquiry. The data were gathered by inquiry ability questionnaire and classroom observation chart. The quantitative data were analyzed by t-test and the qualitative data were analyzed by classification and comparison. The results show that students’ abilities of scientific inquiry were improved after implementing differentiated inquiry teaching. High-level and medium-level students had capacity for doing inquiry, including observing and identifying, planning and executing, analyzing and finding, as well as discussing and communicating. However, low-level students only have basic scientific inquiry skills. They can make an observation and carry out a plan. They are not very good at explaining the data and communicating the results. Keywords - Abilities of Scientific Inquiry, Differentiated Inquiry Teaching, Elementary School, Science Education