As this subunit is aimed at the higher levels of secondary education, the main IBSE approaches are guided discovery, guided inquiry, and bounded inquiry. Skills developed by students include:

  • Performing experiments
  • Analysing results
  • Communicating results with the use of graphs
  • Comparing experimental results to theoretical models
  • Deciding if results support or falsify previous hypotheses

The difficulty for the teacher in this case arises if experimental errors are large and students reach incorrect conclusions. An important part of maintaining the IBSE nature of the investigations is to examine these results in the context of the wider opinion, i.e. how one set of results compare to those of other students. The aim should be to establish that a single experiment is insufficient to draw conclusions, that the results from multiple experiments should be analysed as a whole, and to promote discussion on why certain methodologies employed by the students were less error-prone than others.