Inquiry learning

One of my ‘favorite’ pedagogical approaches, as I may say so, is inquiry learning (or inquiry-based learning), which is about learning through asking questions (question-driven learning). This is a constructivist approach, based on natural learning processes. Inquiry learning holds that students try to find out how something works by asking questions in order to understand the content (as opposed to ‘just’ knowing) and to be able to explain how this works to someone else.

I found two very interesting research articles regarding this approach, each with another perspective on it. One is written by Wu and Hsieh (in 2006) and focuses on the inquiry skills of sixth graders and the other is written by Hogan and Berkowitz (2000), who focus on inquiry guidance by teachers.

Wu and Hsieh (2006) state that students need scaffolds in this process of inquiry learning in order to construct solid explanations. These are to be offered by the teacher, who asks questions to the students in order to help them to understand the content better and by this also helps them to reformulate their explanations.

Hogan and Berkowitz (2000) describe a one-year project in which ecology teachers learn to work according to the inquiry learning approach (i.e. professional development). After this year, most ecology teachers found inquiry learning a good method in ecology teaching. Hogan and Berkowitz mention that it’s important that the students’ explanation needs to be given by the students, which means that teachers should not influence the students’ reasoning too much. This is also referred to by the term ‘scaffolding’: help students more in the beginning and decrease this support during the learning process.

One of the most interesting parts of inquiry learning to me is the role of the teacher. Within this approach, students are to find the explanations themselves, so what does the teacher need to do? They can be guiding them, but to which degree? If they ask too many questions, the students don’t learn anything; but if they ask too little questions, the students might get stuck. Teachers need to find a balance in this, for example by scaffolding. These articles try to find a solution to this dilemma, which makes them really interesting to read.

Link Wu & Hsieh (2006): http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.uu.nl/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=105&sid=62544de4-4c66-4260-a294-9c7fe912c3c7%40sessionmgr111

Link Hogan & Berkowitz (2000): http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.uu.nl/content/t3132l26605g4242/fulltext.pdf