Abstract
A central concern in science education is promoting inquiry activities, and a significant amount of research in science education has addressed what inhibits this goal. However, this research has tended to be focused on implementation issues. Levels of implementation are correlated with extrinsic barriers such as time, resources and teacher knowledge, but the internal structure of inquiry remains unexamined. However, are there also some ways in which inquiry based instruction is intrinsically difficult? That is, given perfect conditions for implementation, is devising inquiry activities a non-trivial matter, and are there patterns to the difficulties in doing so? The aim of this paper is to provide both a theoretical and empirical basis for the intrinsic problems associated with the construction of inquiry activities. We present a theoretical framework that connects contemporary studies of science to the classroom context. We then examine a case study of teacher education students designing inquiry-based instruction to demonstrate empirical evidence of intrinsic problems. Our ultimate goal is to improve our ability as teacher educators to guide science teachers in fulfilling this central task of their work.
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Notes
We should note that heterogeneous classrooms, as traditionally structured, are not a solution here. Such classrooms have students of diverse abilities, but not science classroom experience.
There was one additional code – meta – indicating a conflict about their own process that will not be discussed here.
Counts of each code are not reported since such counts would be meaningless. As noted in the discussion of our methodology, each trigger utterance was coded, even though multiple trigger utterances were arguably indicators of the same hurdle. This was to insure that every possible hurdle was examined.
We originally referred to all of these categories as barriers. However, we later felt that a key distinction between extrinsic problems and intrinsic problems is that extrinsic problems are barriers to be removed, while intrinsic impediments are hurdles to overcome.
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The authors would like to thank Norman Lederman, Stephan Bartos and Jeanine Meyer for reviewing drafts of the paper.
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Meyer, D.Z., Antink Meyer, A., Nabb, K.A. et al. A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration of Intrinsic Problems in Designing Inquiry Activities. Res Sci Educ 43, 57–76 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-011-9243-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-011-9243-4