Inquiry

Inquiry learning consists of building a summary of what is known about a topic. It can range from quite directive to constructivist. It can take the form of a research paper, a white paper, or a multimedia product that creates an answer to a question. The product can be created by an individual or a group of researchers and can be an overview of expert findings or it can also end up as a conspiracy theory.

In K-12 education, English teachers, social studies teachers, and librarians have teamed for decades in the preparing young people for college level research work. The traditional product was a research paper focused around a question and is a summary of documented expert sources. More recently, the product expands to a wide variety of summaries in multimedia formats. The major emphasis of a piece of research is to demonstrate mastery of major ideas about the topic or question at hand. There are many models of inquiry learning out there, and one recent example is by the Fosil group in the U.K. that has adapted Barbara Stripling's inquiry model. You can find it at: https://fosil.org.uk/fosil-cycle/

A picture of it is below:


What such models lack is inquiry and investigations done by groups or teams rather than individuals. As digital learning leaders and instructors partner together, both individual and group progress needs to be considered as individual expertise might turn into cooperative learning or at the highest level: collaborative intelligence.

Inquiry projects can also range from directive to constructivist. The instructor can be very prescriptive by declaring the exact question to address by the investigators, or the opposite approach is to allow the learner to create the question to research and also choose the form of the product. A third alternative is to have the partnering adults present an umbrella question and ask learners to choose a topic as a subset of the question. This allows all the products to be combined after the individual research into a much broader and deeper investigation. An example might be World War II with research being done on battles, involvement of women in the war effort, political leaders, the bomb, etc. Such a wide investigation would produce a collective view of a very complex event going on in opposite sides of the world.

We recommend that a collaborative working environment be built for inquiry projects. Depending on the computer system in place such as GoogleClassroom or Canvas, we recommend that you construct for each learning experience a Google site where the adults and the learners have editing power. The site is like a home and the pages of the site are the rooms where collaborative work is going on. We name this environment a Knowledge Building Center or KBC. Below are two different examples that can be used as templates to create your own sites.

Here is another tutorial titled The Umbrella question Tutorial at: https://sites.google.com/view/kbcumbrellaquestion/kbc-home-page

Examples and tutorials might help:

An Irish version of Inquiry at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u84ZsS6niPc

An inquiry project with children at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAYh4nWUkU0

Four steps in writing a white paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBmJbMaIqlU

Research paper guide for college students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JcgRyJUfZM