Developing Children’s Questioning Skills for Inquiry in STEM

Abstract

Asking well-formulated, empirically answerable questions can be considered the driving feature of inquiry. In most approaches, teachers provide children with the questions to be answered, rather than inviting them to creatively generate their own questions; self-generated questions, however, can lead to a much more personally meaningful understanding of science. As an example of how questioning as a creative activity can be developed in primary school, we present a study that we carried out in a fourth-grade classroom (children aged nine to ten). We developed a learning unit on the topic of light, featuring different inquiry cycles. Specific strategies (e.g. modelling, using ‘question hands’) were adopted in order to help the children externalise, share and develop their questions, and to promote a creative process of questioning, in terms of fluency, variability and originality of the questions. The analysis of the questions generated by the children during the different inquiry cycles suggests that the approach presented here has fostered not only the children’s general curiosity, but also their ability to formulate empirically answerable questions that can effectively drive inquiry. The social aspects of the learning environment have also impacted the quantity and quality of the generated questions positively.