Some Challenges with Inquiry

The MWM Program addresses concerns of teaching with inquiry through a particular approach called the inquiry through design, in which authentic inquiry experiences are situated within an engineering design context.

Activities that provide opportunities for student inquiry, though promising, also place a greater burden on students with additional responsibility of directing their own learning. Supporting student inquiry faces several obstacles, for students differ dramatically in their individual success with learning through inquiry. Students who come to the task with more sophisticated prior knowledge and with more effective hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data organization skills learn more from their experimentation. Moreover, many students have trouble successfully engaging in various aspects of inquiry, including developing researchable questions, planning investigations, and reasoning about data.

Not all student questions are amenable to classroom investigation. Questions may be overly simplistic, where answers come in the form of a one or two word answer or can be looked up in a book. On the other extreme, questions may be too complex and impossible to investigate given the time and resource constraints of the classroom. Students may need to learn to define productive, researchable questions.

Student heuristics for planning experiments to test hypotheses may not be effective; for example, students often exhibit a tendency to search for confirming cases but not for disconfirming evidence. Students may need help planning experiments to generate suitable evidence to inform their reasoning.

Students have trouble relating scientific data to scientific argument. Student inquiry that produces data may need additional support if students are to successfully build sound scientific explanations that rest on credible evidence.

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