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Inquiry-based and Co-constructive Education
 

Resources for further exploration, compiled June 2010 by teal, kgould, and jpfeiffer for the Inquiry-Based Education K-12 Summer Institute 2010. Additions to this resource list are welcome on the on-line forum area below.

Materials available on the Serendip website:

• Open Ended Inquiry in Science Education
• Education Between Two Cultures
  
• What is Inquiry Pedagogy?
  
• Exploring Science as Open-Ended Transactional Inquiry
  
• Science, Culture, Education, and the Brain

Materials available elsewhere on the Web:

Knowledge Co-Construction During Collaborative Learning

Interesting because “The preliminary findings show that although students all had different initial models in the pre-test, all the pairs shared the same mental model in the post-test. In other words, students converged on their model of the circulatory system after collaboration, although they sometimes converged on an incorrect model.”  What does this mean for education? Is it better that students collaborate and come to a unanimous decision (whether it be an answer to a problem or a designing a task to complete) or that this answer is “correct?”

Co-Construction of Knowledge, Identity, and Difference

Intriguing! A culture/language-based view on co-construction of knowledge in the classroom.

Collaboration and Co-Construction of Knowledge During Language Awareness Activities

Can’t obtain the full study, but the abstract looks very interesting. Again, a language-based study. Interesting because students collaboratively brought their own experiences to a language that was new to all of them, in order to learn it together. Should we be taking a more linguistic-based approach? It seems that the learning of a new language is an ideal setting in which to try out co-construction of knowledge and the formation of a task by all involved.

Co-Construction of Knowledge During Problem Solving

An open-ended task!

Workshop: lnquiry-based Learning

This site is interesting because many of the main questions that one may have about inquiry-based learning are listed as bullet-points at the beginning of the site. Several questions are answered such as what inquiry-based learning is, how it differs from a traditional approach to learning, how to incorporate such learning into the classroom, and other pieces of information about the history of such learning. The site is very interactive, containing pictures, diagrams, and videos demonstrating inquiry-based learning. In addition, there are several tabs on the top of the home page for the site in chronological order of introducing inquiry-based learning to demonstrating to educators how to implement such techniques into their classrooms. Overall, a very information and interactive site that helps to explain what inquiry-based learning is as well as explaining and depicting how it is used with students!

Inquiry Page- Definition of Inquiry

This site is an extension of the University of Illinois. It  first explains the definition of inquiry as based upon Dewey’s interpretation of the four interests of children. Similar to the website described above, this site also supplies tabs that continue in order- first introducing inquiry-based learning and continuing to examples and how to effectively incorporate it into the classroom. There is a tab explaining the inquiry process which outlines the process of inquiry step-by-step which appears tremendously effective for educators. Another link that this site includes are the environment indicators that inquiry-based learning is apparent in the classroom. Finally, the site provides additional links about inquiry-based education and well as provides several sets of highly informative slides that one can either download to their computer or view online as a web version. Overall, the site appeared incredibly informative and presented information through several different ways!

Introduction to Inquiry Learning

This site ( like most of the others) contained a description of what inquiry based education is and what the advantages of this type of learning are. This site also provided information about how to pose an ‘effective’ question to students. Within the main page of the website are links to several pages, one which includes information on how to make an open-ended project and another which includes information on collaborative learning.