International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning

Ravit Golan Duncan, Clark Chinn, Ravit Golan Duncan, Clark Chinn, Clark A. Chinn, Ravit Golan Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317413165
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning is an overview of scholarship related to learning through and engagement in inquiry. Education takes on complex dimensions when learners solve problems, draw conclusions, and create meaning not through memorization or recall but instead through active cognitive, affective, and experiential processes. Drawing from educational psychology and the learning sciences while encompassing key subdisciplines, this rigorous, globally attentive collection offers new insights into what makes learning through inquiry both possible in context and beneficial to outcomes. Supported by foundational theories, key definitions, and empirical evidence, the book's special focus on effective environments and motivational goals, equity and epistemic agency among learners, and support of teachers sets powerful, multifaceted new research directions in this rich area of study.

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Inquiry and Learning

Clark A. Chinn and Ravit Golan Duncan

This volume—The International Handbook of Learning and Inquiry—provides an overview of scholarship related to learning through inquiry. The chapters focus broadly on how to promote learning through engaging learners in inquiry. Collectively they discuss what it means to engage in inquiry, what learners gain through engaging in inquiry, how to structure inquiry environments to promote greater learning as well as equity in learning, and how to support teachers and other educators (including designers of learning environments) as they engage students in learning through inquiry. The handbook is intended to be a resource both for scholars new to the field and for scholars who specialize in issues related to inquiry and learning. While summarizing and reviewing existing scholarship, the chapters also advance new ways of thinking about effective inquiry environments that foster student learning.

In this introductory chapter, we will begin with a discussion of several foundational issues related to inquiry. These include defining inquiry and learning through inquiry, identifying the goals of inquiry-based learning environments, and issues of domain and topic specificity. Then we turn to an overview of the chapters in the handbook.

Foundational Issues

What Is Inquiry?

What does it mean to engage in inquiry as a means of learning in and out of schools? We asked authors of each chapter to explain what they mean by inquiry but did not charge them with adopting a particular definition. The resulting variation reflects the variety that exists in the field. Nonetheless, we think that their approaches to understanding what inquiry is overlap substantively, along the lines of our analysis below.

What, then, is inquiry? In common terms, we could say that inquiry occurs when people “find things out.” In turn, finding things out is a complex notion with at least six components. First, finding things out means that one is in fact gaining new ideas or new knowledge. There is no inquiry when one already knows the answer to a question. For instance, if a person can answer a question by recalling an answer that is already stored in memory, nothing new has been learned—nothing new has been found out. Many laboratory exercises in science classes fall into this category: The teacher explicitly teaches a scientific principle to the students, and the students carry out a laboratory experiment as an illustration of this principle. There is no inquiry in such activities, as students already know what the experiment is to show.

Second, finding things out means that one is not simply told an answer; the inquirers must engage in active work to think through and work conclusions out. When a teacher poses a question and then tells the answer, there is no inquiry for the students, because the students have engaged in no effort to figure out the answer. If a teacher develops a rich set of mathematical materials from which students could potentially engage in finding out new mathematical principles, but then the teacher does all the work of inquiry, modeling each thinking process for the students, then the students have not engaged in any inquiry. If the teacher already knew the principles in advance, the teacher has not engaged in inquiry, either, but has only pretended to do so. Thus, inquiry needs to involve active work to think through and work out some conclusions anew.

Third, finding things out involves the use of some sort of evidence to reach some kind of conclusion. In this analysis, we construe evidence very broadly, in the broad philosophical sense of including all the considerations that are used to support or refute a claim (Kelly, 2014). Thus, evidence can be empirical evidence, testimony from an expert or a friend, prior memories and experiences, and so on. Conclusions similarly refer to a broad range of epistemic products developed on the basis of this evidence, from simple propositions to historical narratives to scientific models. In science, evidence may include empirical studies, results of simulations, and established principles of other theories; the conclusions can be laws, models, explanations, theories, and so on. In mathematics, the evidence may include basic axioms or givens in a problem, and the conclusion could be the final proved claim (in a proof). In literary inquiry, the evidence may be the corpus of texts under consideration, and the conclusions may be claims about the characters, about the work of fiction, about a genre of writing, and so on. Finding things out means using a set of considerations (the evidence) to reason through to a conclusion.

Fourth, finding things out requires that inquirers have epistemic agency. Epistemic agency means that inquirers have the authority to express their own ideas, share these ideas with the communities engaged in inquiry, advance their own proposed ways of knowing about the matters at hand, and to reach their own conclusions. All the inquirers in a community are “allowed to propose and shape the community’s knowledge production and practices” (Stroupe, Caballero, & White, 2018, p. 1180). Learning activities can masquerade as inquiry when they provide the resources that could be used for inquiry, but teachers end up doing all the intellectual work (Miller, Manz, Russ, Stroupe, & Berland, 2018). For instance, imagine a history unit intended to engage students in reaching historical conclusions using multiple documentary sources. If the teacher walks the students through each document, steering them to the teacher’s (or the curriculum’s) predetermined conclusion about each document and how they should be interpreted, there is no real inquiry going on, because the students have little or no epistemic agency to propose their own interpretations, suggest ways of approaching the thinking about the documents, or reach their own conclusions. In a similar way, there is little epistemic agency in a cookbook lab in which every step is clearly spelled out in the instructions, and the questions asked point strongly to the normative conclusions.

Fifth, finding things out entails that there is some degree of complexity in the reasoning involved. Finding things out involves enough reasoning so as not to be trivial. There is no hard-and-fast boundary as to what should be regarded as simple inferences that do not rise to the level of inquiry. But we can classify some instances as clearly on one side of the line or the other. Showing students a graph indicating an increase in immigration over time and then asking students how immigration changes over time do not rise to the level of inquiry. The inference is too simple. Inquiry generally involves considering, evaluating, and weighing multiple pieces of information (often from different information sources) as students attempt to reach conclusions from the complex of information. An inquiry task might give students a set of a dozen written and/or video documents providing conflicting information about the economic effects of immigration and then ask students to determine the relationship between immigration and economic conditions. This is a complex task that involves complex forms of analysis, evaluation, interpretation, and integration of information across multiple sources of information as well as the use of prior knowledge.

Finally, full-fledged inquiry requires engagement within communities. In any real inquiry, the ideas developed by an individual or a team must be subjected to the appraisal of others in their community (Longino, 2002). Finding things out requires that the community of knowers validate the new ideas developed by any individuals or groups within the community. A single individual or group that propounds a new idea has merely proposed an idea for consideration. To say that something has been found out requires further that the community has evaluated the claim and endorses it (Chinn, Buckland, & Samarapungavan, 2011; Code, 1991). In addition, the community is the home of the practices that guide the inquiry. The principles of reasoning themselves need to be endorsed by the community, and thus the community establishes norms and practices that are accepted as legitimate, reasonable ways of knowing. Thus, inquiry in learning environments needs to involve communities of students working socially to establish through their collective epistemic agency both the conclusions that they accept and the reasoning practices that are used to reach the conclusions.

The chapters in this handbook discuss a variety of learning environments that engage students in inquiry. All of them generally engage students in activities that, in varying degrees, meet the above six characteristics of inquiry, in terms of finding things out. Collectively, they scrutinize the conditions under which engaging students in inquiry can foster learning.

Goals of Inquiry-Based Learning

The goals of inquiry-based learning vary but generally encompass some combination of motivational and learning goals. Motivational goals include increasing students’ engagement, enhancing interest in topics and subjects, promoting intrinsic caring about learning, and advancing goals for learning rather than just getting good grades or other such ends. Learning tasks can be made as consequential as possible, which means that tasks engage students in matters that they care about (e.g., analyzing and proposing solutions to various social injustices in one’s community); in this way, students will perceive the direct relevance of what they are learning to addressing problems that matter to them.

Other goals involve gaining knowledge, understanding, and skills. A distinction discussed by Andriessen (2006) with respect to argumentation pertains more generally to learning through inquiry. Andriessen (2006) distinguished between arguing to learn and learning to argue. Arguing to learn means that students engage in argumentation to learn about the content of a topic; for instance, students engaged in argumentation about how to address poverty are learning about the topic of poverty and how policies might affect poverty levels. Learning to argue means that students engage in argumentation to learn how to argue more effectively. With this goal, the primary intent is not for students to learn about poverty but instead to learn about how to argue more effectively—by using evidence, counterarguments, rebuttals, and so on. Of course, argumentation-based learning may focus on one goal or the other or focus on both goals simultaneously.

The analogous distinction can be made for inquiry learning more generally. One goal of inquiry-based learning could be that students learn more about the content (we could call this “inquiring to learn”); a second goal is that students learn how to engage in inquiry (“learning to inquire”). Many contemporary curriculum standards envision that both goals can be achieved simultaneously (e.g., NGSS Lead States, 2013). Many chapters in this handbook describe learning environments that seek to foster both. For example, the environment that we ourselves have developed for science learning aims for students to learn science content about topics such as genetics while also learning to engage in inquiry with models (Duncan et al., this volume).

Inquiring to learn. When inquiring to learn is the focus, the specific goals of the learning environment will vary widely—from learning models of photosynthesis to understanding historical events. In schools, the content learning goals will usually be determined by curriculum standards, although many scholars also advocate affording students more autonomy to choose topics that are consequential to them (Hall & Jurow, 2015). Content goals may involve topic-specific concepts and principles as well as more generalizable concepts and principles. In science, an example of the former is the concepts and principles of evolution; an example at a more general level is the concepts and principles that govern complex systems, which are applicable to many topics in science. In history, an example at the topic level is learning about the Industrial Revolution; a more general topic would be learning about historical causation more generally (Van Boxtel et al., this volume).

Learning to inquire. Learning to inquire involves learning a range of reasoning practices to construct and critique conclusions (Ford, 2008). Two distinct subgoals of learning to inquire can be broadly distinguished. The first is that students learn some of the disciplinary practices of a field. For example, through engaging in inquiry, history students can experience and learn some of the practices that historians use to develop their historical narratives; in the same way, science students can experience and learn some of the practices that scientists use to generate scientific knowledge and consensus. This approach treats learners themselves as young or budding scientists, historians, mathematicians, and so on. In an analysis of science education, Feinstein and Waddington (2020) refer to this approach as an internalist approach—students are learning to be scientists as if they are internal to science, as scientists are. We extend this notion more broadly to all disciplines.

The second subgoal is learning to inquire not as a specialist in an area but as a layperson. In science education, Feinstein and Waddington (2020) refer to this as a contextual approach to science—students are learning not to be scientists but to be “competent outsiders” (Feinstein, 2011) who are external to science but nonetheless can interact with scientists and scientific information in ways that enable them to address issues of importance to them in personal and social contexts relevant to them. The same contextual approach can be applied to any field.

In reality, working as a scientist, as a historian, or as any other expert requires vast content knowledge and methodological knowledge of the domain. For inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• 1 Inquiry and Learning
• Section 1 The Design of Inquiry Learning Environments
• Section 2 Components of Inquiry Environments
• Section 3 Inquiry and Learning across Disciplines and Contexts
• Index