Inductive Learning

Inductive learning is designed to helps students develop better inference and evidence gathering skills to deepen their understanding of the content.  Students gather and examine information to later be grouped and labeled to seek patterns. This strategy is not just about patterning, but tasks the student to then construct working hypotheses and collect evidence to support, verify, and refine each hypothesis while gaining content knowledge and working vocabulary. 

In this strategy, students use examples first to come to an understanding of the content rather than students being given the information that represent the big picture and then doing examples of the content.

Implementation of Inductive Learning in the Classroom

Inference:  

Students examine information closely, looking for relationships, generating initial hypotheses, drawing connections that are not blatantly obvious.  Students work together to decide how to assign groups and labels to the the subject/content.  Also, the students give explanations for their decisions.

Evidence: 

Students support their hypotheses using high-quality evidence.  Students must actively search information that supports their thinking, as well as collecting and considering evidence that counters their view points.  This engaging practice leads to stronger, more refined ideas.

Academic Vocabulary: 

Students now use the inferences made and evidence collected to organize their learning to represent a larger understanding of the content and now appropriately apply the vocabulary.