Mysteries is a learning tool that “provides evidence of pupils’ cognitive processes through the observation and analysis of pupils’ manipulation of data slips to solve the mystery” (Leat and Nicholas, 2000, pp. 103). Mysteries falls into the collaborative, ill-defined category of problems. With its design and open question, mysteries aims to promote higher-order thinking skills, reflec- tion, and metacognition; and consequently serves as an assessment tool for these skills.
Paper Mysteries are usually solved by groups of two to four students. The information of the mystery is often presented in 15-30 slips of paper (Figure 5.2) with one open question (e.g. “Should Annie leave Windy Creek or should she stay? And why?”), which may be supplemented by closed questions (e.g. “Has the population of Windy Creek increased or decreased since 1939?”). Stu- dents are encouraged to use as much of the data as possible in formulating their answer. The data in these slips can relate to a wide range of matters such as geographic, physical, and human aspects of the subject, and normally includes the following:
• A narrative thread, which is usually about people doing things or things happening to people to capture students’ attention.
Figure 5.2: Sample slips of the Windy Creek mystery. The mystery contains 20 slips, and the question is “Should Annie leave Windy Creek or should she stay? And why?”
• Abstract information that is more challenging for the students to incorporate in their expla- nation.
• Irrelevant information (referred to asred herrings). Students do not always identify the red herrings as such, and they are included with the intention of increasing the openness and ambiguity of the task.
Leat and Nicholas (2000) reported that researchers investigating the process of solving mys- teries and the quality of written work about the mystery, found a relationship between the way in which the students manipulated the mystery slips and the quality of their written work. This lead to the conclusion that the very process of moving and grouping the data slips reflected the cognitive processes of the students. It was also found that mysteries worked best when the task did not have a singleright answerand when the teacher played a role in supporting groups and individuals who struggled to make progress. With many groups (but not all), the task of solving the mystery was divided into three stages clearly marked by sudden changes in the way data was organized. This, in some cases, was accompanied by a change of thinking before data items were moved. Although a particular group can miss a stage, compress stages or work on two stages simultaneously, the stages that students normally progress through are as follows:
The display (reading) stage: At this stage students familiarize themselves with the data. This is done in a number of ways such as distributing the slips among the students and reading them aloud in turns before laying them on the table, or just spreading them out on the table. The main goal of this stage is to comprehend the data items. The thinking skills used in this stage relate to those in theinformation gatheringelement in Figure 5.1.
The setting (grouping) stage: In this stage, the students usually organize the data into groups with common characteristics. The variety of strategies adopted in making the associations may reflect the cognitive abilities of the students. In general, Leat and Nicholas (2000) found that the number of data items which the groups fail to attach a meaning to was inversely related to overall ability level of the group; all groups, regardless of their achievement level, created a reject pile; and that lower achieving groups tended to jump into conclusions at this stage and usually formed large reject piles. In this stage, students are encouraged to find interpretations of data items that go beyond their literal meaning. The accumulation of meaning attached to each item is reflected in the physical manipulation of data items to form groups. The skills used in this stage relate to those in thebuilding understandingelement in Figure 5.1.
The sequencing and webbing stage: Not all groups demonstrate this stage. However, the ma- jority of the groups start to identify relations between sets of data items and between single items. In some cases these relations are laid out in simple linear sequences comprising a casual expla- nation. More able groups constructed relations that are non-linear, webbed patterns representing multiple inter-relationships. In this stage, and in looking for relations between the data slips, stu- dents use inferences that interpolate and extrapolate beyond the given data. The skills used in this stage relate to those in theproductive thinkingelement in Figure 5.1.
Some groups of higher achieving students progress to two additional stages that are more diffi- cult to clearly distinguish from the webbing stage, these are the reworking and the abstract stages. In the reworking stage some groups start to rework their layout and reconsider slips from the reject piles. In the abstract stage the physical manipulation ceases, but as a result of having internalized the information content of the data items, discussion continues to explore new relationships and hypotheses.
Leat and Nicholas (2000) also used a stimulated recall session, conducted after the task, in which a video recording for the session is played back to students and they are asked to comment on what they were doing and thinking as they worked. This serves to both assess, and raise students’ awareness of, metacognitive skills. This stage corresponds to the reflective thinking skills in Figure 5.1.
In summary, “With mysteries, the physical act of moving a data item to join another to form part of a set, a casual chain or a link between factors has to be explained to the group and often justified. Reasoning has to be externalized, creating the conditions for shared reasoning” (Leat and
Nicholas, 2000, pp. 117). This means that, the process of solving mysteries encourages students to use, and make visible, higher-order thinking skills; making it possible for teachers to observe the development of understanding by the students during the process.
Based on observations of students’ difficulties at certain stages of solving mysteries, a number of specific cases have been identified, and interpretations and possible interventions proposed (see Leat and Nicholas (2000) for a detailed description of these). For example, when it is observed during the setting (grouping) stage that students are unable to group data items, one possible explanation is that students have inability to identify more important characteristics to inform classification and an inability to utilize prior knowledge. Possible interventions include helping students identify common characteristics between slips by giving them examples, and refreshing students’ memory of past learning. Another example is when students end the sequencing stage with unsorted groups of slips, this can be interpreted as an inability of the students to identify sequences of events or causal relationships, and a possible action to take is to ask students about what happened before or after a certain event in the mystery.