The Inquiry Through Design: A model for situating inquiry in design contexts

Inquiry through design is a model for engaging students in scientific inquiry through the use of design projects. While the design project is central to the curriculum, inquiry through design provides supporting activities and materials that structure and guide the learning experience. This approach takes advantage of the benefits of design projects while providing support for processes that are difficult for students.

The promise of design context lies in its potential to support student engagement in the three challenging aspects of inquiry: asking questions, planning investigations, and reasoning from data. For example, design projects may help students define researchable questions. The design project challenges students to determine what constitutes an effective design, a driving question that focuses student investigation throughout the project. In one of the modules, this driving question essentially takes the form: What makes a good fishing pole? Two sets of questions arise from this challenge, both of which students must define and pursue in the course of their design. The first set of questions involves researching design criteria: understanding what the design must do and what these functions mean in terms of the properties that the design must have. Students investigate the relationship between properties and develop an understanding for what the properties are. As students refine their design criteria, they address a second set of questions that concerns the particular materials that might be used in the design. Students must research these materials in terms of the properties laid out in the design criteria.

Since design projects are open-ended and afford many different solutions to a single challenge, each student group is actually engaging in a unique, but related, investigation. This creates an environment in which student-generated questions have value, as each student group has the opportunity to generate knowledge that benefits everyone in the class. For example, one group of students may explore the effect of different kinds of tape on their fishing pole design, while another group investigates the role of directional reinforcement. Both group's findings will be of use to the class.

Design projects also provide opportunities for students to plan investigations that help them discriminate among the effects of different design ideas. Because designed objects can be tested, they naturally lead to planning investigations that compare the performance of different designs. For instance, suppose a student predicts that reinforcing a fishing pole design with tape will improve strength. The student can test that prediction by building a design that includes the tape and comparing its performance to a design without tape. Alternatively, the student could build several designs that vary the kind of tape used or the amount of tape applied in order to generate comparative data that could be used to reason about the effect of different kinds of tape.

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