Most science content standards are written to be neutral about pedagogy. The standards simply state the what, not the how for learning. The National Science Education Standards do go further with standards for science teaching and science assessment, but unfortunately these too often seem to be the least looked at portion of the standards. Many state standards don’t address the how of learning at all, only the what. The unfortunate result are standards that promote and encourage direct teaching of science material by the teacher instead of making sure student’s have a rich experience in science. The Revised Colorado Academic Standards attempted to bring the how of science teaching back into the state standards by embedding science process and 21st century skills into the standards, but even more importantly writing student outcomes that require active learning on the part of the student by having statements written at higher levels of blooms taxonomy.
This is where Guided Inquiry comes into play. To get a wide range of students to think at higher levels of blooms taxonomy classrooms will have to employ more of the strategies described in the National Science Education Standards such as guiding and facilitating learning and planning an inquiry based science class. Unfortunately too many people associate inquiry based learning and constructivist learning models as meaning that students have to figure everything out for themselves. While this does represent the extreme of inquiry and constructivist learning, like most other things in life, inquiry and constructivist based learning really represents a continuum from all direct instruction toward having students figure everything out for themselves.
Guided inquiry represents a wide range of this continuum. According to Kuhlthau, Manites, and Caspari in their book Guided Inquiry guided inquiry is built around six principles: Students learn by being actively engaged and reflecting upon their experiences; Children learn by building on what they already know; Children develop higher-order thinking through guidance at critical points in the learning process; Children have different ways and modes of learning; Children learn through social interaction with others, and; Children learn through instruction and experience in accord with their cognitive development. Unfortunately merely having content standards and the direct instruction model that they support doesn’t recognize many of these principles.
The good news at the new Colorado Academic Standards in Science supports these principles of student learning. For example the Colorado Academic Standards in Science represent a learning a progression, thus acknowledging that students need to build on what they already know. This is not to say that all teachers can assume that all their students come in having the proper background, but it does move toward a model where each teacher at each level isn’t expected to start over with the basics and teach it all. This learning progression also recognizes higher levels of cognitive development in the later grades.
As expressed earlier in this blog, the standards were designed to support the active engagement of students with wording such as “Students will develop, justify, and communicate an evidenced based scientific explanation of…” This wording, that students will develop, justify, and communicate, assumes active engagement of the students. But even beyond this the standards support reflection by the students through inquiry questions, for example “What are the most common forms of energy in our physical world?” Questions like this prompt and support student reflection of what they have learned.
The standards also support student collaboration. One of the things about learning we know from multiple sources including constructivist thought and studies of how the brain learns is that deep learning happens in a social setting. The more students talk, process, and problem solve with their peers the richer the learning is. The Revised Colorado standards support these kinds collaboration, for example “Share experimental data, and respectfully discuss conflicting results” or “Work in groups using the writing process to effectively communicate an understanding of the particle model of matter”.
While it is out of the scope of standards to specify when and where guidance should be provided to students to build higher order thinking, the Revised Colorado Standards support higher order thinking skills having students analyze, develop, and evaluate not just identify and know.
Of course there is a lot more to guided inquiry than I can write about in a blog, but there are many excellent resources, books and professional development opportunities, on guided inquiry for teachers who want to know more.
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It's really too bad that over 100 years since the concept of guided inquiry began (under another name, of course), it's still being discussed and debated. It's been used repeatedly across the decades and succeeded. It just didn't spread. The alternatives of open inquiry and directed inquiry don't work as well.
ReplyDeleteOpen inquiry would assume that given a few principles, students could recreate the special theory of relativity. Not likely.
Directed inquiry limits students too much.
Give students the opportunity to collect their own data, to analyze it, to compare it and their conclusions to others, to discuss the similarities and differences, and they learn.
It was also over 100 years ago that this approach was proven to work but also shown that very small class size was a necessity for success. One prominent educator suggested no more than 12 students in a guided inquiry lab. One teacher has to be able to move from student to student and ask guiding questions as needed.
In order to be able to ask the right questions as well as answer questions that arise from the students, that teacher must be very learned in the subject matter as well as understand much of the history and philosophy of science.
This combination of small class size and highly-trained teacher is rare. Too many teachers barely know more than their students are to learn. Class sizes are way beyond the ideal maximum of 12.
Yes, guided inquiry is the ideal. It's a great goal. However, implementing it and scaling it will require some real breakthroughs, especially with today's budgets.
True innovative breakthroughs in science education must fulfill three criteria, the last one being more for success in enlisting the cooperation of teachers.
1. Save money. Most technology costs schools money, and they have little enough of that.
2. Improve learning. Few technologies have a proven record of improving learning. Most cases of technology improving learning really are examples of side effects of introducing something new. The teachers get excited and create new, better lesson plans or just transmit their excitement to their pupils.
3. Make teachers' lives easier. Large class size along with media-induced lower attention spans make teaching successfully harder than ever. Technologies should engage students and stimulate their curiosities.
One NYC school with a 60% poverty rate has used prerecorded real experiments to boost the pass rate among their lowest performing quartile from 22% to 33%. Their overall pass rate leapt by 16 percentage points. Guided inquiry becomes a snap with this sort of technology. Great teachers get great results without any such boost. Good teachers with great tools can also get great results.
i already know that tinder must be dry, light, and fluffy. catches to a matches flame. matches must be dry, toothpick size to finger size in diameter. wood can be wet if you are adding it to a large, blazing fire. but what would be "dry, finger size to wrist size"? this is to help light a fire if you are in the wild, and you are stranded or something like that. also, this is for a science trip to estes park, colorado for science camp
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