Inquiry-based learning (Enquiry-based learning in British English) or inquiry-based science describes a range of philosophical, curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching.
Inquiry-based learning is an instructional method developed during the discovery learning movement of the 1960s. It was developed in response to a perceived failure of more traditional forms of instruction, where students were required simply to memorize fact laden instructional materials (Bruner, 1961). Inquiry learning is a form of active learning, where progress is assessed by how well students develop experimental and analytical skills rather than how much knowledge they possess.
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Now,an important aspect of inquiry-based science is the use of open learning. Open learning is when there is no prescribed target or result which students have to achieve. In many conventional traditional science experiments, students are told what the outcome of an experiment will be, or is expected to be, and the student is simply expected to 'confirm' this.
In open teaching, on the other hand, the student is either left to discover for themselves what the result of the experiment is, or the teacher guides them to the desired learning goal but without making it explicit what this is. Open teaching is an important but difficult skill for teachers to acquire.
Open learning has many benefits. It means students do not simply perform experiments in a routine like fashion, but actually think about the results they collect and what they mean. With traditional non-open lessons there is a tendency for students to say that the experiment 'went wrong' when they collect results contrary to what they are told to expect. In open lessons there are no wrong results, and students have to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the results they collect themselves and decide their value. Because the path taken to a desired learning target is uncertain, open lessons are more dynamic and less predictable than traditional lessons.
Open learning has been developed by a number of science educators including the American John Dewey and the German Martin Wagenschein. Wagenschein's ideas particularly complement both open learning and inquiry teaching. He emphasized that students should not be taught bald facts, but should be made to understand and explain what they are learning. His most famous example of this was when he asked physics students to tell him what the speed of a falling object was. Nearly all students would produce an equation. But no students could explain what this equation meant. Wagenschien used this example to show the importance of understanding over knowledge.
Inquiry-based learning has been of great influence in science education, where it is known as Inquiry-based science, especially since the publication of the U.S. National Science Educational Standards in 1996. Since this publication some educators have advocated a return to more traditional methods of teaching and assessment. Others feel inquiry is important in teaching students to research and learning (e.g., see Constructivism (learning theory)).
Scientists use their background knowledge of principles, concepts and theories, along with the science process skills to construct new explanations to allow them to understand the natural world. This is known as "science inquiry".
The National Science Education Standards call for students to do inquiry, and to know about inquiry. When students do inquiry, they use the same ideas as scientists do when they are conducting research. Students become 'mini-scientists.'
When students are learning about inquiry, they should become familiar with the processes used by scientists, and the new knowledge that results. Inquiry is a natural introduction to the branch of epistemology known as the Nature of Science, which deals with the characteristics of scientific knowledge.
The National Science Education Standards were often misunderstood with regard to inquiry-based learning. As a result, the National Research Council put out a second volume, entitled 'Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards' in 2000.
Heather Banchi and Randy Bell (2008) suggest that there are four levels of inquiry-based learning in science education: confirmation inquiry, structured inquiry, guided inquiry and open inquiry. With confirmation inquiry, students are provided with the question and procedure (method), and the results are known in advance. Confirmation inquiry is useful when a teacher’s goal is to reinforce a previously introduced idea; to introduce students to the experience of conducting investigations; or to have students practice a specific inquiry skill, such as collecting and recording data.
In structured inquiry, the question and procedure are still provided by the teacher; however, students generate an explanation supported by the evidence they have collected. In guided inquiry, the teacher provides students with only the research question, and students design the procedure (method) to test their question and the resulting explanations. Because this kind of inquiry is more involved than structured inquiry, it is most successful when students have had numerous opportunities to learn and practice different ways to plan experiments and record data.
At the fourth and highest level of inquiry, open inquiry, students have the purest opportunities to act like scientists, deriving questions, designing and carrying out investigations, and communicating their results. This level requires the most scientific reasoning and greatest cognitive demand from students.
The philosophy of inquiry based learning finds its antecedents in the work of Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Freire among others.
The above comments represent a classroom that is fully committed to inquiry, to the greatest extent possible. However, it is not necessary to take an all-or-nothing approach to inquiry-based teaching methods.
In the 1960s, Schwab called for inquiry to be divided into four distinct levels. This was later formalized by Marshal Herron in 1971, who developed the Herron Scale to evaluate the amount of inquiry within a particular lab exercise. Since then, there have been a number of revisions proposed, but the consensus in the science education community is that there is a spectrum of inquiry-based teaching methods available.
| “ | After a half century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, there appears no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when student acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge | ” |
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— Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching by Kirschner, Sweller, Clark [1]
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Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006)[1] review the literature and have found that although constructivists often cite each others' work, empirical evidence is not often cited. Nonetheless the constructivist movement gained great momentum in the 1990s, because many educators began to write about this philosophy of learning.
Inquiry-based science has been increasingly promoted as a mainstream teaching approach, especially since the publication of the 1996 Standards in Science Education document. However, there are many critics of inquiry-based science.
Science testing has become increasingly important with the No Child Left Behind program, and the rewriting of the National Assessment of Educational Progress to emphasize facts. This has led to a decrease in emphasis on inquiry as a method of teaching science and a fall back to traditional direct instruction methods, which are still employed at the university level.
Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn cite several studies supporting the success of the constructivist problem-based and inquiry learning methods. For example, they describe a project called GenScope, an inquiry-based science software application. Students using the GenScope software showed significant gains over the control groups, with the largest gains shown in students from basic courses.[2]
Hmelo-Silver et al. also cite a large study by Geier on the effectiveness of inquiry-based science for middle school students, as demonstrated by their performance on high-stakes standardized tests. The improvement was 14% for the first cohort of students and 13% for the second cohort. This study also found that inquiry-based teaching methods greatly reduced the achievement gap for African-American students.[2]
Based on their 2005 research, the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded that while inquiry-based learning is fine to some degree, it has been carried to excess.[3]
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