Inquiry Based Learning
Inquiry Based Learning
• teacher point-of-view
• inquiry-based teaching focuses on moving students beyond general curiosity into the
realms of critical thinking and understanding. You must encourage students to ask
questions and support them through the investigation process, understanding when
to begin and how to structure an inquiry activity.
• Using methods such as guided research, document analysis and question-and-
answer sessions, you can run inquiry activities in the form of:
• Case studies
• Group projects
• Research projects
• Field work, especially for science lessons
• Unique exercises tailored to your students
• Whichever kind of activity you use, it should allow students to develop unique
strategies for solving open questions.
Types of Inquiry-Based Learning
Structured, guided, and open inquiry approaches
• Inquiry-based teaching/learning varies in the amount of autonomy given to
students and encompasses a broad spectrum of approaches, ranging from
teacher-directed structured and guided inquiry to student directed open inquiry
Structured inquiry
• In structured inquiry, the students investigate a teacher-presented question
through a prescribed procedure, and receive explicit step-by-step
guidelines at each stage, leading to a predetermined outcome, similar to
following a recipe.
• The results are not foreknown to the teachers and students. In guided
inquiry, the teacher provides the student with inquiry questions and
procedures, and therefore this decreases the level of uncertainty during
the inquiry process.
• The students ultimately lead the inquiry process, are involved in decision
making from the data collection stage, and may come up with unforeseen
yet well conceived conclusions.
Open inquiry
• In open inquiry, the most complex level of inquiry-based learning, teachers define the
knowledge framework in which the inquiry will be conducted, but allows the students to
• Thus, students are engaged in continuous decision-making throughout each stage of the open
inquiry process, starting from the stage of finding the interesting phenomenon to be inquired.
• Open inquiry simulates and reflects the type of research and experimental work that is