Levels%20of%20Inquiry - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Levels%20of%20Inquiry

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Levels of Inquiry Helping teachers help students find their way through the maze of inquiry practices using differentiated instruction. Authentic Problem Solving ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Levels%20of%20Inquiry


1
Levels of Inquiry
  • Helping teachers help
  • students find their
  • way through the maze of
  • inquiry practices using
  • differentiated instruction.

2
Authentic Problem Solving
  • Problem-based learning
  • Failure analysis
  • Scientific experimentation
  • Technological design
  • Etc.

3
Each practice assumes
  • That students know something about inquiry.
  • More sophisticated problem solving requires more
    sophisticated inquiry skills.
  • Lower ability levels of inquiry must be learned
    and practiced prior to employing higher levels.
  • Teachers must use instructional strategies
    appropriate to meeting the readiness levels of
    all students (differentiated instruction).

4
Sophisticated Inquiry Skills
  • Solving complex, real-world problems.
  • Establishing empirical laws
  • Synthesizing theoretical explanations
  • Analyzing and evaluating scientific arguments
  • Constructing logical proofs
  • Generating principles through induction
  • Generating predictions through deduction

5
Teaching Inquiry Practices
  • While inquiry is instinctive among children,
    their natural propensity is rather limited.
  • Authentic inquiry practices addressing real-world
    problems are many and complex.
  • How do we teach students to conduct inquiry at
    higher levels?
  • Assist with students metacognitive understanding
    of the inquiry process
  • Model and fade though a set of progressively more
    sophisticated inquiry practices

6
Metacognitive Understanding
  • Provide students with mental models.
  • Mental models
  • are cognitive frameworks (e.g., road maps)
  • are alternative representations of complex
    patterns (e.g., rules of language)
  • provide for an understanding of the hierarchy and
    approaches of inquiry processes.
  • Hierarchy of levels can be used to deploy inquiry
    effectively.

7
Modeling Inquiry Practices
  • Start simple and move to the more complex.
  • There are many levels of inquiry
  • Discovery learning
  • Interactive demonstrations
  • Inquiry lessons
  • Inquiry labs
  • Guided
  • Bounded
  • Free
  • Hypothesis development (pure and applied)

8
Discovery Learning
  • The most basic form of inquiry-based learning.
  • It is based on the Aha! approach.
  • A very guided approach to observation, pattern
    recognition, or conclusion.
  • Used with lower elementary school students.

9
Interactive Demonstrations
  • Teacher models investigatory processes
  • Teacher uses a think-aloud protocol to conduct
    demonstration (e.g., floating and sinking,
    defining and measuring buoyancy finding its
    relationship with density, pinhole images, etc.).
  • Teacher probes for understanding, prediction, and
    explanation.

10
Inquiry Lessons
  • Teacher leads students through a simple
    experiment (e.g., Which variables affect
    buoyancy? How can we test this?)
  • Define problem
  • Define system
  • Identify and control variables
  • Teacher regularly speaks about nature of
    scientific inquiry.

11
Inquiry Laboratories
  • As opposed to cookbook labs (see handout for five
    major distinctions)
  • Levels of inquiry labs
  • Guided - with lots of questions
  • Bounded - with teacher provided question only
  • Free - student guided from problem identification
    through experimental process.

12
Distinguishing Lab Types
13
Hypothesis development
  • Detailed explanation based upon substantial
    information
  • Source of buoyancy
  • Inverse-square law of light
  • How conservation accounts for kinematic laws
  • Why laws for parallel and series resistance hold
  • How Newtons second law accounts for Bernoullis
    law of fluid flow

14
Levels differ by amount of
  • Teacher/material guidance.
  • Decreases with higher levels of inquiry
  • Student independence.
  • Increases with higher levels of inquiry
  • Skills deployed.
  • Intellectual processes higher with level
  • Technology more sophisticated with level

15
Sophistication / Locus of Control
16
Inquiry Intellectual Processes
17
Resources
  • Colburn, A. (2000). Science Scope, "An Inquiry
    Primer," March 2000
  • Herron, M.D. (1971). The nature of scientific
    enquiry. School Review, 79(2), 171- 212. (levels
    of inquiry)
  • Wenning, C. (2005). Levels of inquiry
    Hierarchies of pedagogical practices and inquiry
    processes. Journal of Physics Teacher Education
    Online, 2(3), pp. 3-11.
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