Why use inquiry learning?

Temple of inquiry

I've elaborated on Kuhlthau's types of learning through the Australian Curriculum lens to outline the objectives and outcomes addressed through an inquiry approach. This is presented as the temple of inquiry - a framework for planning, assessing and scaffolding student learning through inquiry.

Foundations

The foundations are the fundamental skills that students need to engage with information.

Pillars

The pillars build on these literacies and can help teachers define the focus for each phase of the inquiry.

Lintels

The upper most section is the lintel. A lintel differs from a sill as it bears a load. The lintels in this diagram represent the optimistic goals of inquiry. They offer more than engagement; they're the true purpose of learning.

Evidence for inquiry learning

Inquiry learning is a popular point of discussion in education circles. It's often mistakenly dichotomised with explicit teaching and described as "discovery learning". This false equivalence is unhelpful in helping teachers to plan a range of meaningful and effective learning activities for their students.

Throughout this toolkit I've attempted a more informed discussion of the research to highlight the nuances of an inquiry approach. As an introduction, you'll find below a:

• Rationale for inquiry

and two popular critiques of inquiry learning:

• Hattie (2008)

• Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006).

Rationale for inquiry

The NSW Department of Education's purpose is to prepare young people to be engaged citizens in a complex and dynamic society. The reasons behind this are elaborated in Education for a Changing World and speak to the unprecedented impact that emerging technologies will have on society. New educational environments require different ways of designing learning experiences for students as well as new ways of teaching and assessment (Scott and Friesen, 2013).

Evidence from the learning sciences suggest that traditional approaches to education that emphasise the ability to recall disconnected facts and follow prescribed sets of rules and operations should be replaced by learning that enables:

• critical thinking

• flexible problem solving

• the transfer of skills knowledge in new situations" (Darling-Hammond, 2008).

Rather than learning about a field of knowledge, or learning elements and pieces of a field (i.e. procedures and rules), Perkins (2009) argues that students should be given opportunities to "play the whole game" where they can experience junior versions of how knowledge is created and communicated within specific disciplines.

Inquiry learning is used in this toolkit as an umbrella term that includes approaches such as project-based learning, design thinking and challenge-based learning. In each approach, students are active learners; they're given choice, voice and responsibility when setting goals and approaches to learning.

This toolkit provides you with the knowledge and practices to plan inquiry learning that supports the findings from empirical and theoretical learning science research to:

• allow students to "play the whole game" of a discipline - developing a functional understanding of how knowledge is constructed and used across disciplines.

• develop general capabilities - clusters of skills and knowledge that are increasingly important for a complex and dynamic world.

• engage students in learning that is social, relevant and challenging - important aspects of improving student wellbeing (NSW Department of Education).

Hattie's meta-analysis

Inquiry learning was given an effect size of 0.36 (Hattie, 2008) (or thereabouts, depending on the revision). This falls below his simplified hinge point of 0.4 - the normal amount of growth for a student.

Considerations

• Professor Hattie has said that most teachers introduce inquiry learning too early - that is, without students developing prior "surface level knowledge" as a basis to develop deep knowledge (Corwin).

• One of the drawbacks to Hattie’s analysis is that the research he is drawing from is twenty-five to thirty years old. Further, it is not clear if the way this approach was taken up in the classroom was more akin to minimally guided discovery learning, which has limited impact on student achievement (Friesen and Scott, 2013).

• The goals of inquiry are broader than simply the development of content knowledge; inquiry learning aims to take learning a step further by enabling students to transfer their learning to new situations and problems (Baron and Darling-Hammond, 2008). That effect size describes only a narrow band of success is another limitation of this analysis - there are many outcomes of schooling such as attitudes, social outcomes, citizenship, and a love of learning. Hattie's book, Visible learning, focuses on student achievement and that is a limitation of this review (Snook, et al., 2009). Hattie identifies another limitation of his results as they are "more related to surface and deep knowing and less to conceptual understanding" (Hattie, 2008).

Kirschner, Sweller and Clark

In this 2006 article, direct instruction is contrasted with minimally guided approaches. The authors argue that direct instruction is more effective than "learning by discovery" when dealing with novel information.

Considerations

• Kirschner, Sweller and Clark group together a range of pedagogical approaches as "minimally guided instruction" including inquiry learning and problem-based learning. These pedagogies are not discovery processes and provide considerable guidance to students (Mayer, 2004; Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn, 2006).

• The evidence base used in their critique suggests that inquiry approaches can foster deep and meaningful learning as well as significant achievement on standardised tests (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn, 2006).