September 1997 Report Provides Insights into Inquiry-Based Teaching
The worlds of inquiry, curiosity, and wonder should be alive in classrooms everywhere. It is a world where children's minds come alive with possibilities and where students learn through experience, investigation, and hands-on activities that engage their minds and foster their interest.
And inquiry-based teaching, notes Kit Peixotto, Manager of NWREL's Science and Mathematics unit, is a perfect complement to a child's natural curiosity about the world and how it works. "Whether it is the elementary student's wonder that is prompted by a story about hibernating animals, the middle school student's predictions about the relationship between circumference and diameter that arise from an exploration of different-sized spheres, or the high school student's questions that are provoked by a local environmental issue, students become actively engaged in the learning process when given the opportunity to hypothesize and investigate," she notes.
A new publication from NWREL's Science and Mathematics unit provides teachers with research-based strategies to create inquiry-based classrooms. Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning is the second publication in the unit's It's Just Good Teaching series.
Inquiry is central to both mathematics and science. For example, inquiry-oriented instruction in science engages students in the investigative nature of the world around them, and inquiry-based strategies involve activities and skills that focus on the active search for knowledge or understanding. And mathematics is much more than arithmetic and algorithms. Instead, it involves data, measurements, and recognition of patterns.
An inquiry-based classroom recognizes the diverse needs of students and employs the research-based strategies that help to keep all students engaged in learning. It is a community of inquiry where students and teachers share responsibility for learning, and where they collaborate on constructing new knowledge. "Students have significant input into just about every aspect of their learning—how their classroom is set up, how time is structured, which resources are used, which topics are explored, how investigations will proceed, and how findings are reported," notes Denise Jarrett, writer and researcher for Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning. "No longer are teachers the sole purveyors of knowledge and students passive receptacles."
Strategies used by exemplary mathematics and science teachers ensure that activities are set up to allow students to be physically and mentally involved in the academic subjects. Activities are based on the use of materials to investigate questions and solve problems. Evidence is mounting that indicates that inquiry-based instruction improves student attitude and achievement, facilitates student understanding, fosters critical thinking skills, and facilitates mathematical discovery.
Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning also provides guidelines for creating an inquiry-based classroom that provide students with the time, space, resources, and safety necessary for learning. An inquiry-based classroom:
- Engages students in designing the learning environment.
- Integrates science laboratories into the regular class day
- Uses inquiry in the mathematics classroom
- Employs management strategies to facilitate inquiry
- Reflects the nature of inquiry by displaying and demanding respect for diverse ideas, abilities, and experiences; modeling and emphasizing the skills, attitudes, and values of scientific inquiry: wonder, curiosity, and respect toward nature; enables students to have a significant voice in decisions about the content and context of their work; and nurtures collaboration among students
The publication also includes chapters on curriculum implications, planning an inquiry lesson, classroom discourse and questioning, and challenges of inquiry-based teaching. Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning: It's Just Good Teaching is available online as a PDF file (37 pp, 582K) at www.nwrel.org/msec/book2pdf.pdf. To view the Portable Document Format files (PDFs) on this site, download a free Acrobat Reader from Adobe, www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html.
You can also purchase it for $7.65 online at www.nwrel.org/comm/catalog/detail.asp?RID=7464 or via our Document Order Form
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