Can Inquiry Lead to Greater Achievement and Engagement?
Implementing an inquiry-based approach to instruction is something that usually takes large amounts of preparation on the teacher’s part. Being able to invest the time to properly plan and thoroughly implement inquiry in a science classroom is something that some teachers struggle with. The uncertainty is whether or not the extra time spent will indeed lead to greater student achievement. When teachers decide to use inquiry in their lessons though, students become more involved in their learning. As Llewellyn (2007) stated, “the teacher envisions the student as an active participant in the learning process, attempting to search for meaning and interpret the natural world” (p. 86). …show more content…
This was an extensive study of more than 1,000 8th graders who were separated into two different instructional groups. The teachers involved in the study were given extensive training consisting of 20 hours of professional development on inquiry design-based learning. Students involved were given a proficiency exam prior to the lessons and again a month later after the completion. The results of the study showed that more open-design based inquiry “has superior performance in terms of knowledge gain achievements, engagement, and retention” (Mehalik et al., 2008, p. 80). The design inquiry group achieved double the pre-post test gains that that traditional group, 22.5 percent compared to 11. 3 percent. Additionally, 29 percent of students who were signified as “middle achievers” in the pretest jumped up to the “high achievers” level in the post test. This was much greater than the traditional group, which only had 10 percent of students go up to the next …show more content…
However, the one aspect of the survey that may have affected the results is the fact that there were different teachers teaching the two different groups and they were not given prior training. In order to increase the validity of this research study, ideally the same teacher would have taught bought groups of students, just at different times. In contrast, the teachers for the Mehalik et al. (2008) study were all trained together so that they could teach using the same methods. This study was also a lot larger and had solid quantitative data to analyze.
Conclusions
Kawalkar and Vijapurkar (2015) demonstrated how a well-designed qualitative research study can be used to support the idea that teaching with inquiry leads to greater engagement. Mehalik et al. (2008) took this claim to the next level and showed how quantitative results can additionally be used to validate how inquiry leads to greater
Implementing an inquiry-based approach to instruction is something that usually takes large amounts of preparation on the teacher’s part. Being able to invest the time to properly plan and thoroughly implement inquiry in a science classroom is something that some teachers struggle with. The uncertainty is whether or not the extra time spent will indeed lead to greater student achievement. When teachers decide to use inquiry in their lessons though, students become more involved in their learning. As Llewellyn (2007) stated, “the teacher envisions the student as an active participant in the learning process, attempting to search for meaning and interpret the natural world” (p. 86). …show more content…
This was an extensive study of more than 1,000 8th graders who were separated into two different instructional groups. The teachers involved in the study were given extensive training consisting of 20 hours of professional development on inquiry design-based learning. Students involved were given a proficiency exam prior to the lessons and again a month later after the completion. The results of the study showed that more open-design based inquiry “has superior performance in terms of knowledge gain achievements, engagement, and retention” (Mehalik et al., 2008, p. 80). The design inquiry group achieved double the pre-post test gains that that traditional group, 22.5 percent compared to 11. 3 percent. Additionally, 29 percent of students who were signified as “middle achievers” in the pretest jumped up to the “high achievers” level in the post test. This was much greater than the traditional group, which only had 10 percent of students go up to the next …show more content…
However, the one aspect of the survey that may have affected the results is the fact that there were different teachers teaching the two different groups and they were not given prior training. In order to increase the validity of this research study, ideally the same teacher would have taught bought groups of students, just at different times. In contrast, the teachers for the Mehalik et al. (2008) study were all trained together so that they could teach using the same methods. This study was also a lot larger and had solid quantitative data to analyze.
Conclusions
Kawalkar and Vijapurkar (2015) demonstrated how a well-designed qualitative research study can be used to support the idea that teaching with inquiry leads to greater engagement. Mehalik et al. (2008) took this claim to the next level and showed how quantitative results can additionally be used to validate how inquiry leads to greater