Keywords

Introduction

Thirty students attend a history lesson. Instead of the traditional seating arrangement, instead of passively listening to the teacher while taking notes, the students sit in a computer room, busily searching the web, reading, interpreting, and integrating sources of information. In a civics class, as part of their work on a performance assessment inquiry task, students collect data on manufacturers of playground equipment and on their cost in order to propose an informed plan for a neighborhood playground, where there used to be a neglected plot. In a science lesson, elementary school children are busy dipping objects made of various materials in a water tub, to inquire what floats and what sinks. In a math class, students measure an area in the courtyard to calculate the number of tiles needed to pave it. Finally, in a geography lesson, the students survey neighborhood residents to find out why they chose to live there.

All these are examples for inquiry-based learning (IBL). In recent years, the terms inquiry-based teaching and learning are frequently heard in educational discourse in many countries. Policy documents recommend IBL, educational leaders talk about it, researchers support it, and many teachers adopt it wholeheartedly. Other teachers, however, are averse to it and sigh from the bottom of their heart when required to apply it, mainly because of the workload involved. Students are also unhappy: I frequently hear from my university students that they recall IBL as an empowering experience from their school days, while others talk about a frustrating and annoying experience. IBL has met with great successes together with significant failures.

System-wide implementation of IBL is particularly challenging. The transition from traditional teaching and learning to inquiry-based teaching and learning represents a full-blown pedagogical revolution. It involves a fundamental revision in the perception and goals of learning, in teachers’ and students’ roles, in the design of lessons and of the learning environment, in the curricula, in the use of technologies, in evaluation methods, and more. Thus, together with the prestige and positive attitudes that accompany IBL, there is also the danger typical to every attempt at broad implementation of a complex pedagogical reform: superficial and mechanical implementation of IBL that would undermine its true spirit.

I am one of the avid supporters of IBL, in its finest. However, when I look at current educational systems in a disenchanted glance, I often see the disappointing outcomes of its system-wide implementation. A father whose son studies in an elementary school that emphasizes scientific excellence told me, with great frustration, about his son’s inquiry-based science assignment. The class was studying the conditions for growing plants on other planets. After the boy and his team members considered several issues but failed to develop them into a research question, they decided to examine how plants can grow in waterless conditions. They decided to conduct an experiment and water plants with coke, bleach, and coffee. The teacher was happy that the children finally had come up with a plan for their experiment and was full of their praises. When the father asked about the rationale for choosing these particular fluids or where would water be found outside Earth to make coke or coffee, the child did not answer. He considered these questions irrelevant, since the teacher was pleased with the research plan. The father thought the teacher was mainly interested in having the children prepare their presentation for a parent-student meeting. She devoted considerable teaching time to preparing the students’ presentations and refining their aesthetic appearance, at the expense of deep learning. The father emphasized that the level of the inquiry-based learning processes and the fact that there were no criteria for evaluating them, pointed to superficial learning.

Looking at particular cases, one can certainly find fascinating examples for inquiry- and project-based learning, but these are often the exceptions rather than the rule. In a broader view, it seems that when the concept of IBL is examined in cases of large-scale, system-wide implementation, something in this important concept often gets lost. This is not the first time in history that implementing an inquiry approach runs into difficulties. The history of education offers several precedents (e.g., the progressive movement of the 20th century; see Zohar, 2013, Ch. 9). The problem is that if the implementation of IBL would fail again, the critics would not conclude that this is a great idea whose realization has failed. Instead, failed implementation might make the educational pendulum shift again to the opposite end—away from progressive pedagogies and back toward more traditional ones. Because IBL is tightly related to the development of students’ thinking, the unique challenges involved in expanding its scope make it relevant for the main theme of this book. The discussion of IBL in this chapter is relevant to various types of education professionals, including teachers, pedagogical coordinators, subject coordinators (department chairs), principals, superintendents, and policymakers.

Inquiry-Based Teaching and Learning: A Review

Dewey (1938) was the first to introduce the concept of inquiry to the educational field. He explained that inquiry is a process where the undefined and unknown become, in a deliberate and controlled process, a uniform and clear whole. Inquiry in education is currently considered a meta-concept for a set of educational approaches that share a common denominator, including IBL, project-based learning (PBL), and problem-solving. These approaches place the student at the center and encourage meaningful learning characterized by active knowledge construction through seeking solutions to problems or questions (Loyens & Rickers, 2011). Inquiry-based teaching offers an intellectual challenge. It develops curiosity and involves active, experiential, thought-oriented, and deep learning related to issues the students are interested in.

IBL has numerous definitions. For example, “In inquiry-based learning, students are encouraged to pose questions, to formulate assumptions and hypotheses, to gather and analyze data and to construct evidence-based arguments” (Maaß & Artigue, 2013). Linn et al. (2004) view IBL as engaging students in the intentional process of diagnosing and formulating problems, criticizing experiments, distinguishing among alternative solutions (hypothesizing), planning investigations, searching for information and processing it, constructing models, debating with peers, communicating to diverse audiences, and forming coherent arguments (Linn et al., 2004). One of the most commonly cited definitions was formulated by the US National Research Council (1996, 23):

Inquiry is a multifaceted activity that involves making observations; posing questions; examining books and other sources of information to see what is already known; planning investigations; reviewing what is already known in light of experimental evidence; using tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations, and predictions; and communicating the results. Inquiry requires identification of assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of alternative explanations.

These definitions point out the tight relationship between IBL and higher-order thinking (HOT). To pursue a meaningful process of IBL, it is necessary to apply a variety of cognitive strategies, including posing questions, hypothesizing, planning, analyzing information or data sources, interpreting and integrating information, making comparisons, isolating variables, evaluating, and forming arguments. Forming evidence-based arguments is particularly critical to inquiry processes. In fact, every inquiry process includes a stage of drawing conclusions (whether based on an empirical experiment or on text analysis), and every process of drawing conclusions involves the forming of one or more reasoned arguments. The strong relationship between drawing conclusions and argumentation is one of the reasons for the central role of argumentation in policy documents and research addressing IBL (National Research Council, 2000, 2012b). As argued in detail below, one of the explanations for IBL often being so superficial is that students (and often also their teachers) are unable to use the thinking strategies involved in inquiry processes. Only when students master these strategies can they perform quality inquiry.

As suggested above, the concept of IBL is not new. It may be traced back to the writings of leading twentieth-century thinkers, such as Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner (Maaß & Artigue, 2013). In the course of the century, extensive attempts have been made to implement IBL in schools, and the proverbial pendulum swung back and forth between them and more traditional approaches. Over the past few years, IBL learning has been widely adopted in education systems worldwide (for a review of select examples, see Crawford, 2014; Maaß and Artigue, 2013). This wide distribution has several reasons, including the search for student-centered learning approaches, the belief that IBL helps develop 21st century skills, the search for constructivist instructional practices and for relevant learning environments, the search for ways to develop epistemic understanding of the way knowledge is constructed in various disciplines, and research findings showing that IBL helps develop deep, transferable knowledge (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Bransford et al., 2000; Loyens & Rikers, 2011; Maaß & Artigue, 2013; National Research Council, 2012a; Zohar, 2013). Since, at its best, IBL can serve all these ends, it is currently popular.

In Israel, IBL has played a key role in recent pedagogical reforms—the Pedagogic Horizon Reform and the Meaningful Learning Reform (Israel Ministry of Education, 2009, 2015). As shown in Chap. 7, many high schools currently adopt IBL as part of a reform in the matriculation exams. Many elementary and junior high schools also engage intensively with IBL. Accordingly, in tens of thousands of classes, students experience varying doses of inquiry-based learning, with varying degrees of success.

The Debate About Teaching IBL

Despite the multiple reasons supporting IBL, its implementation is complex, involving hot debates (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008). To understand this issue, I will describe the controversies around it and explain the conditions for the success or failure of some of the relevant instructional methods.

Multiple studies that have tried to assess the effectiveness of IBL report mixed results: some of them indicate a positive influence on conceptual knowledge, thinking skills, and learning motivation, whereas others show no such effects (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Coburn, 2003; Crawford, 2014; Loyens & Rikers, 2011). For example, Minner et al. (2010) reviewed 138 studies about IBL and reported an obvious tendency supporting its effectiveness. They found that teaching strategies that engage students in scientific inquiry involving active thinking, particularly drawing conclusions from data, have a positive impact on the understanding of scientific concepts compared to teaching strategies that rely mainly on passive learning. Conversely, McConney et al. (McConney et al., 2014) refuted the assumption that IBL facilitates knowledge construction. They used data from the 2006 PISA tests to examine patterns of reports by students from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand on their degree of engagement in IBL. Then they compared them to the achievements of the same students in scientific literacy and their attitudes toward science. The findings from all three countries were consistent: students who reported a low level of IBL showed higher-than-average levels of scientific literacy and lower-than-average levels of interest in science studies.

The contradictions between the findings of the various studies assessing the contribution of IBL may be explained in several ways. First, IBL is multifaceted, and the different studies addressing it actually examined significantly different teaching and learning methods. Second, most of the research in this area was based on standardized tests. These often examine basic knowledge and skills, rather than the profound knowledge and complex skills IBL is supposed to develop. Therefore, when the effects of IBL are compared to those of traditional learning, there is a lack of appropriate instruments for assessing the advantages of IBL. Third, large-scale controlled experiments comparing inquiry-based and traditional learning involve methodological difficulties. And finally, implementation processes of IBL suffer from inherent difficulties, so that some of the studies have addressed educational processes that have actually implemented a pale, diluted version of IBL. The final reason leads us to the main subject of this chapter, and I will elaborate on it in the following section. Please note that the scope of the current chapter does not enable a systematic review of the many studies evaluating IBL, and it will therefore concentrate on some select studies whose findings contribute to clarifying the main idea of this chapter.

IBL: Strengths and Weaknesses

One of the sharpest criticisms against IBL has been offered by Kirschner et al. (2006), who argued that guided teaching is preferable to the open-ended teaching that usually characterizes inquiry-based learning. They support their argument with studies on the structure of human thought, difference between experts and laypersons, and the theory of cognitive overload. According to Kirschner et al., approaches to IBL that are characterized by minimal or no guidance are highly attractive intuitively, and therefore very popular, but also ignore theories about the structure of human cognition, as well as the findings of empirical studies in this area. As opposed to this intuitive appeal, these researchers argue that theories and studies over the past 50 years consistently show that minimal guidance approaches to teaching, such as IBL, are less effective than teaching approaches with a strong emphasis on guiding the students in their learning processes. Their clear-cut conclusion from a review of multiple studies is that after half a century in which education systems have experimented with minimal guidance instruction, it appears there is no research body that supports IBL. To the extent that research evidence has been founded on controlled experiments, it supports instruction with direct and intensive guidance almost without exception. At the same time, this research evidence objects to teaching based on constructivist principles with minimal guidance, particularly among students with little or only some initial knowledge of the content under consideration.

This sharp criticism of applying IBL in the classroom was countered by a forceful response article by Hmelo-Silver et al. (2007). They argued that Kirschner et al. wrongly identified inquiry-based learning and teaching with minimal guidance and that in fact the opposite was true. At its best, IBL makes extensive use of diverse guidance strategies, mainly based on mediation. They also offered extensive research evidence for the effectiveness of IBL. Since the issue of guidance in IBL is fundamental to the main argument brought later in this chapter, I will elaborate on the two sides to this controversy.

Hmelo-Silver et al. affirm that every learning involves some kind of knowledge construction. The fundamental question in the current debate is which teaching methods can support knowledge construction. They argue that Kirschner et al. oppose minimal guidance instruction approaches such as IBL claiming they are ineffective and inefficient while preferring approaches that provide direct guided teaching. According to Hmelo-Silver et al., Kirschner et al.’s definition for minimal guidance pertains to learning where the learners must discover essential information by themselves and use it to construct knowledge without any guidance. They argue that the definition of Kirschner et al. for instruction with direct guidance pertains to teaching that provides complete explanations for the concepts and processes students are supposed to learn.

Hmelo-Silver et al. argue that Kirschner et al.’s definitions suffer from two severe failures. The first failure is pedagogical. Under “minimal guidance learning,” Kirschner et al. have grouped together several different pedagogical approaches, without making the obvious distinctions between them: constructivism, discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, and IBL. This lack of distinction is misguided, as it ignores the fact that at least some of these pedagogical approaches, particularly problem- and inquiry-based learning, are not characterized by minimal guidance. On the contrary, at their best, these approaches support students’ learning processes by providing extensive mediation and guidance. In their article, Hmelo-Silver et al. discuss a variety of guidance and mediation approaches that support IBL and quote multiple studies suggesting that applying them to teach IBL does result in significant improvement in learning outcomes. In fact, the improvement is achieved even when student outcomes were measured in standardized tests, which usually measure relatively simple learning goals. The improvements were even more salient when student outcomes were measured using assessment that is more appropriate for measuring the complex learning goals consistent with IBL, such as thinking skills, problem-solving skills, the ability to provide complex explanations, teamwork, and interpersonal communication skills.

According to Hmelo-Silver et al., there are a variety of successful approaches for guiding IBL: first, combining spells of direct teaching in an inquiry-based lesson, such as a short lecture that presents vital information for students’ inquiry process; second, mediation by restructuring the assignment and providing clues, but without explicitly revealing the final answer; and third, directing the students to address relevant key concepts in the content area under consideration. Such guidance prevents students from wasting time and energy on aimless rambling, directing their attention to important learning goals. Mediation could be assisted by digital tools, but even when using them, teachers must play a key role. Teachers can guide their students to think deeply and model deep thinking processes. Explicit teaching of thinking strategies is essential to these moves. Such explicit teaching deals, in fact, with metacognitive knowledge and particularly with meta-strategic knowledge pertaining to the thinking strategies used in the course of IBL. Note that the comprehensive meta-analysis conducted by Hattie (2012) supports Hmelo-Silver et al. because according to Hattie’s data, guided inquiry produces better results than open-ended inquiry.

This debate on the degree of openness as opposed to guidance in IBL processes is central to the argument made in this book. Common problems in large-scale implementation of IBL result from a lack of clarity regarding the required degree of guidance. Another relevant issue has to do with the depth of implementation and the quality of learning and teaching that are part of this implementation. It is easy for the teacher to tell her students to perform an inquiry task on a certain subject, with little or no guidance, expecting them to manage on their own. Often, however, this expectation is not met, and the students perform superficial and low-quality inquiry, as in the example at the opening of this chapter.

Profound and high-quality inquiry requires support with precise and professional guidance and mediation. Such guidance is challenging for teachers. They must possess deep knowledge of inquiry processes, devote time to preparing appropriate materials and to repeatedly read students’ essays, talk to them, provide feedback, and evaluate the quality not only of the product but also of students’ learning process. Although such guidance is supposed to guarantee the quality of students’ inquiry processes, it is difficult to meet its requirements when it comes to large-scale implementation (see also below and in Chap. 7).

These considerations directly affect the issue of scaling up: it is very easy to implement superficial IBL in many classes, with little teachers’ mediation—when students are given inquiry assignments and expected to figure them out on their own (or with their parents’ help, etc.). However, implementing inquiry processes that include appropriate teacher guidance and mediation requires extensive and methodical preparations in terms of developing learning materials, professional development, and appropriate evaluation methods (see also Chaps. 4 and 7). When attempting to do this on a large scale, it is essential to invest considerably in detailed pedagogical and strategic planning, as well as in the actual implementation. Such an investment is essential for attaining meaningful inquiry learning processes that will lead to constructing deep knowledge, rather than to superficial learning.

Difficulties in System-Wide Implementation of IBL

The main theme of this book is highly relevant to IBL. Although the literature offers literally thousands of examples for successful, small-scale inquiry projects, attempts to implement IBL on a large-scale run into difficulties worldwide. One source of difficulties is the competition for resources in terms of time for learning. As suggested in Chap. 2, IBL requires time, but schools suffer from a chronic shortage of learning hours, and they constantly struggle to “cover the curriculum.” Sometimes, inquiry-based teaching does not even make it across the classroom door. Apparently, however, even when inquiry does enter the classroom and students are engaged in IBL, large-scale implementation often means that the learning that actually occurs is far from that envisioned by reformists.

It appears that inquiry approach to instruction is successful with teachers who are early adopters. These teachers are highly motivated to quickly adopt innovative instructional approaches and tend to participate in profound professional development (PD) processes. Research shows, however, that the effects of this success usually fade away when moving to wider implementation (Barron et al., 2008). Accordingly, studies on small-scale programs of IBL, with enthusiastic teachers and substantial investment in PD, demonstrate positive results. These disappear, however, when the studies examine the results of the same programs under conditions of system-wide implementation. The main reason lies in the complexity of open-ended IBL, including the complexity inherent to guidance mentioned earlier. This complexity requires a set of conditions, including the development of appropriate knowledge for teachers. It also requires extra budget to support additional time to enable teachers to construct new lesson plans, to guide students individually or in small groups, and to devote more time for assessment. When the scope of implementation is widened, it usually becomes apparent that at least one of these conditions is not met. The result is inappropriate implementation, with the students receiving only a pale shadow of the original concept of IBL.

Due to the difficulties in implementation, teachers often adopt the façade of IBL, such as writing a research paper, but give up on the deep elements of the process. Too often, the thinking strategies involved in IBL are forgotten. In the current digital age, this state of affairs is often evident when students search the Internet for materials and then cut and paste pieces of information without having understood them in depth. If students decorate their work using animation and graphic features found on the web and submit some kind of “cool” creative product, their work might make a good impression. This is an illusion, however, because their learning has absolutely nothing to do with the profound thinking processes that are at the heart of IBL.

This state of affairs was indeed observed in an evaluation study of large-scale implementation of IBL (Gordon et al., 2003). The 1990s saw a system-wide process of implementing IBL in Israeli elementary schools. The study examined the effects of this process several years later. Its findings indicate that following the implementation, learning and teaching by inquiry were indeed very common. Out of the schools randomly sampled for the study, 75% were found to be engaged in IBL, and in most, this engagement comprised a significant part of the curriculum. Teachers reported that they considered inquiry to be an important element in their work, because it enabled them to fulfill multiple educational objectives that were important to them. In other words, in terms of their scope and the importance attributed to them, it appears that the system-wide implementation processes were successful. Nevertheless, serious problems were found with the substantive pedagogy of the process—that is, with the core of the relevant teaching and learning processes. The study found that the IBL often became a routine and uniform process with a standard pattern, at the end of which a uniformly shaped product was expected. The emphasis in teaching was on the end product, i.e., the written paper, rather than on the process leading to it. The emphasis on the end product also led to the intensive use of tools that highlights its external appearance, such as power point presentations, graphic programs, or photos downloaded from the Internet. In many cases, the investment in external appearance came at the expense of deep learning. The report stated that very little use was made of data and evidence that should lie at the very core of the argumentation constituting the conclusions of any inquiry process. Gordon et al. (2003) concluded that one of the main reasons for these findings is that teachers do not have sound understanding of inquiry processes and therefore cling to routine blueprints of writing and shallow aesthetic aspects that help them manage IBL in the classroom.

Mechanical and Superficial IBL and Inadequate Thinking Abilities

As mentioned, at least when implemented on a broad scale, IBL is too often mechanical and superficial. A significant contributing factor is students’ and teachers’ level of knowledge of the thinking strategies required for conducting sound inquiry. In this context, two catchphrases have been coined in the literature: “learning by doing, not learning by thinking” (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008), which applies to all disciplines, and “hands on but not minds on” (Crawford, 2014), coined in relation to science education, to convey criticism against routine lab studies. At least part of the implementation problem of IBL is, therefore, the lack of systematic development of thinking skills that should have been the very cornerstones of inquiry.

To illustrate this point, let us examine the conclusion stage. In all disciplines, the conclusion of inquiry processes must include a reasoned argument, because the conclusion is in fact an argument that needs to be supported by reasons based on evidence or explanations. The quality of a conclusion increases when the argument is supported by evidence that are more numerous, relevant, and logically related to the conclusion. The conclusion becomes even stronger if it also refers to potential counterarguments and refutations.

If student have not mastered these aspects of argumentative thinking (as the literature consistently shows), how can they write conclusions at a high level? Moreover, if the teachers themselves do not master argumentative thinking, how can they guide their students in writing their conclusion, and how can they provide them with thoughtful feedback on its quality?

Obviously, similar questions might be asked about additional thinking strategies related to other inquiry stages, such as formulating research questions, planning investigations, thinking critically about information sources, integrating information sources, and analyzing data. This demonstrates the relationship between inquiry-based teaching and thinking strategies, without discounting the affective experiential value of IBL. Experiences of curiosity and discovery that often accompany IBL, especially in young children, are invaluable. The development of thinking skills can and should improve and refine discovery learning rather than suppress children’s curiosity and enthusiasm while they are engaging with IBL.

Observing IBL from the perspective of its underlying thinking strategies shows why large-scale implementation often results in superficiality. Clearly, students who do not master the necessary thinking strategies and are not used to applying them in their routine learning would not suddenly begin to use them, out of the blue, when they move to IBL. Similarly, teachers who do not use these strategies in their own thinking, nor master the pedagogical principles for using them in class, would not suddenly start to apply them during instruction. Thus, part of the problem with the wide-scale implementation of inquiry in schools is the lack of system-wide engagement with thinking skills.

As we have seen in previous chapters, wide-scale implementation of thinking skills requires in-depth work on teachers’ PD, as well as on developing students’ thinking strategies. Hence, the expectation of achieving profound inquiry processes without investing in constructing students’ and teachers’ thinking skills, as well as relevant teaching strategies, is hopelessly naïve.

A recent review of 25 international studies on teachers’ PD in preparation for inquiry-based teaching (Zohar & Resnick, 2021) found that all studies but one referred in their theoretical section to the importance of the thinking skills students need in order to engage in IBL. It could therefore be expected that the PD programs would devote considerable efforts to developing teachers’ ability to cultivate their students’ reasoning. Only three studies, however, reported activities designed to work with teachers on developing relevant thinking strategies. If the goal is to develop teachers’ ability to support their students in thinking-rich inquiry processes rather than conduct superficial, “mechanical” inquiry, then PD settings need to foster inquiry-related instruction of HOT proactively and methodically.

Educators’ Beliefs About the Implementation of IBL

Prevalent educators’ beliefs on IBL also prevent broad and profound implementation. In what follows, I will examine these beliefs and assess their implications.

IBL as a Fixed Linear Process

The first belief considers IBL as a linear process that follows fixed stages. These may vary somewhat across disciplines but generally have a standard sequence:

  1. 1.

    Selecting a topic.

  2. 2.

    Formulating a research question.

  3. 3.

    Searching and collecting background information for constructing a theoretical review of the literature.

  4. 4.

    Deciding on the appropriate methodologies for answering the research question.

  5. 5.

    Collecting, processing, analyzing, and presenting the data. In the humanities, this usually involves working with texts: analysis, interpretation, comparative evaluation of primary sources, comparison, and synthesis. In the natural and social sciences, this involves collecting and analyzing empirical quantitative and qualitative data (through observations, experiments, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, etc.).

  6. 6.

    Summary, conclusions, and discussion—at this point, it is essential to verify that: (a) the conclusions are related to the research question and provide an answer to that question; and, (b) the discussion integrates the findings with various aspects of the literature review.

  7. 7.

    Bibliography.

The view of inquiry as consisting of fixed, linear stages has grown out of the conventional descriptions, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the processes scientists allegedly follow in their work. Accordingly, many textbooks on IBL described the stages of inquiry in terms of a rigid sequence and taught them accordingly. In the meantime, however, studies of how authentic scientific research is actually conducted found that in the real world researchers operate differently (Knorr-Cetina, 1983). It turned out that the work of researchers does not follow the orderly sequence of these stages. Although it usually consists of all these stages, it often skips back and forth and reiterates certain stages. For example, a researcher may formulate a research question and search for relevant background materials. After reading these materials, however, she might realize that previous studies had already answered her research question and that it is therefore not interesting enough for further study. The literature search can therefore lead her back to the stage of asking a research question and to the need to reformulate it. The new question can lead to a renewed and more focused literature search, and so on. Likewise, unexpected findings can take a researcher back to the literature and then result in a new or more refined research question. These examples indicate that scientists’ work is more similar to free floating across the various stages of inquiry than to an orderly and linear transition from one stage to the next. The educational implication of this means that even in the classroom, teachers and students may float freely across the stages of inquiry, without having to cling to them rigidly.

IBL and the Writing of Inquiry Essays

Another common conception identifies IBL with its end product: a written essay. Moreover, the common conception implies that the essay must consist of all the inquiry stages noted earlier. Writing such an essay requires significant investment of time and energy. Many teachers I have met over the years told me that facilitating IBL in their classroom was an amazing experience, and many even said it was their best experience in many years of teaching. At the same breath, they swore they would never do it again. Many teachers reported a uniform reason for that reluctance: the amount of work it required, particularly in guiding students through the process of writing an inquiry paper.

Parents are often also reluctant to repeat the ordeal. They argue that when their children are required to write an inquiry paper, the task is actually theirs. The school does not provide appropriate support and infrastructure, and the parents find themselves involved, willingly or less so, often writing the essay themselves. This obviously results in gaps between students whose parents can help them write the essay and students whose parents cannot.

Importantly, however, facilitating a complete inquiry process whose product is a written essay is only one possible model for IBL that can be applied in the classroom. Other models include:

  • Integrating selected inquiry stages in individual or group work or in class discussions. In this model, the teacher presents—in the form of texts and films or even by transmission of information—various stages of the inquiry process regarding a certain subject. Then she opens only one or two stages for students’ active thinking. For example, the teacher may present a topic and ask students to think about productive inquiry questions. Another possibility is to present a subject, a productive inquiry question, and the relevant theoretical background and ask the students to plan an investigation that would answer the question. Alternatively, the teacher may present research findings and ask the students to analyze the data and draw their own conclusions.

  • Using original (or adapted) research articles. In this learning model, students follow other people’s inquiry (usually that of expert researchers). First, they try to understand the process and the rationale that guided the researchers. Next, the teacher instructs her students to analyze the article and think about it critically. For example, could they improve the research question? Is the research design appropriate? Are the conclusions valid? What future research could be conducted following the findings? Importantly, in this model, students are active thinkers, but they analyze and criticize an inquiry process conducted by others instead of pursuing it themselves.

These two models are less demanding than conducting a whole inquiry process that ends with an essay. Teaching according to these models is less demanding for the teachers, because they may integrate them into a lesson plan that relies mainly on more traditional and familiar instructional methods. Therefore, teachers do not have to abandon methods they are comfortable with, leaping into unfamiliar terrains. This hybrid approach can enable teachers to engage with inquiry in ways that require less time and energy and are less threatening for them. In sum, IBL does not always have to be intense and demanding, but can instead involve a variety of instructional methods and levels of intensity.

Inquiry Levels: It’s Not All or Nothing

Unlike the common view relying on a polarized distinction between traditional and inquiry-based teaching, we can talk about various levels of inquiry. One manifestation of the varying levels is a sequence of various inquiry stages the teacher presents to her students as a given, as opposed to those she leaves to open-ended, independent thinking. For example, in the spirit of the previous discussion of superficial inquiry (“hands on but not minds on”), the teacher can introduce an activity that may seem as if it involves inquiry, such as a lab experiment in science or a research article in history, and deal with them in a way that leaves nothing for students’ independent thinking. In the case of the lab experiment, the students may be given a “ready-made” problem, clear instructions for conducting the experiment, and systematic instructions on how to process the data and what conclusions to draw. The students are asked to write a lab report based on this information. In the case of the history article, the teacher lectures on the main points in the text. In terms of the level of independent thinking required of students, both these cases may be classified to a very low level. In what follows, I shall call this Inquiry Level 0.

Researchers have proposed four additional inquiry levels, based on the degree to which students are required to think independently, as opposed to being passive learners. Accordingly, Table 5.1 presents five different levels of inquiry (e.g., Tamir, 2006).

Table 5.1 Inquiry levels
Full size table

Note that there are other possible combinations for inquiry levels, beyond those presented in the table. For example, Inquiry Level 1 can be reached when the teacher invites students to think independently in a different stage of the inquiry process (rather than the conclusions stage as in Table 5.1), such as formulating a question or planning the investigation.

The various inquiry levels have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of high inquiry levels include the following:

  • Students may select a topic and research question that interest them, thereby increasing their motivation for learning.

  • The inquiry process is authentic, facilitating an experience of discovery learning driven by curiosity.

  • Students gain the opportunity of experiencing a complete inquiry process, from start to finish, and get to understand how inquiry works.

  • The process facilitates active and profound knowledge construction of the content under study.

  • Going through all the stages of the inquiry process involves the development of a variety of thinking strategies.

At the same time, high inquiry levels also involve significant disadvantages:

  • It takes long to complete the process, potentially at the expense of the scope of the contents learned.

  • Managing the process can be difficult and even threatening for teachers. First, when teachers engage in traditional teaching, they have a sense of confidence and authority generated by their mastery of the knowledge they own. Inquiry-based teaching shatters that confidence and authority. Second, open inquiry makes it likely that the teacher will be challenged by unfamiliar topics that students had chosen to investigate. Third, many teachers lack first-hand knowledge on IBL because they have never experienced it as learners. Fourth, teachers often lack the pedagogical skills required to facilitate IBL. Fifth, as mentioned, IBL often requires teachers to devote extra time and energy in a system that does not reward them for the extra effort.

  • Lower levels of inquiry allow teachers to control the knowledge students engage with. Conversely, the more freedom students have to inquire into a topic that interests them and to ask original questions, the more their learning moves away from the formal curriculum, making it harder for teachers to use IBL as a means for teaching the assigned curriculum.

The level of thinking involved in the inquiry process is also influenced by the teacher’s mediation. For example, there is a great difference between a student who completes all inquiry stages (Inquiry Level 4) with close guidance by the teacher and one who completes them without any guidance. This issue too, however, is not clear-cut. As we have seen earlier, guidance has been a central issue in the debate between Kirschner et al. (2006) and Hmelo-Silver et al. (2007). Whereas Kirschner et al. argued that IBL is characterized by minimal guidance, Hmelo-Silver et al. objected, arguing that, at its best, inquiry is characterized by intensive guidance by the teacher. However, guidance does not mean that students are spoon-fed by the teacher. Rather, guidance provides students with scaffolding that enables them to perform tasks they are unable to perform on their own but leaves them considerable space for independent thinking. Such guidance is a complex skill demanding knowledge and experience and, accordingly, requires long-term teachers’ PD. The extent and nature of the guidance influence the actual level of students’ thinking in each inquiry level.

Conclusions

This chapter emphasized the scope and complexity of teaching inquiry. Implementing open-ended inquiry is a real revolution in terms of conventional teaching methods and school routines. It requires a knowledge infrastructure that many teachers don’t have. It also requires school-based support, which is often lacking when inquiry-based teaching is attempted on a large scale. Under these conditions, experience shows that even if IBL is implemented in a large number of schools, there is a real problem with the depth of implementation, often resulting in mechanical and superficial learning processes.

It is easier to implement system-wide IBL with minimal guidance: Students are given an inquiry assignment and expected to figure it out on their own (or with their parents’ help). Guidance, on the other hand, requires much more from the teachers and, in turn, also extensive preparation of suitable materials and PD. Nevertheless, proper teacher guidance and mediation are the key for non-superficial inquiry. The multiple facets of IBL presented earlier provide specific examples for the general argument of this book regarding the difficulty of in-depth implementation of complex pedagogical change on a system-wide scale. They also point to potential ways for addressing the challenges involved: inquiry may be pursued modularly and to different degrees by (a) focusing on one or several parts of the whole process even in lessons that largely maintain more traditional instructional structures, (b) applying varied ways of inquiry-based teaching beyond working toward the demanding product in the form of a written essay, (c) applying the possibility of working on different levels of inquiry, and (d) combining various degrees of guidance and scaffolding. All these offer a variety of ways to engage with IBL.

Nevertheless, at its best, open-ended and complete cycle of IBL—from the stage of defining the problem to finding and presenting the solution—holds significant advantages. This process enables students to learn about topics that interest them and are relevant to their lives, to do so authentically, and to experience a joy of learning that enhances their motivation. Thus, there is reason to support the idea that all students will have opportunities to experience open-ended and complete cycles of IBL at least sometimes during their school years. Such learning has intrinsic value and should therefore be supported at least to some extent, even regardless of the degree to which it fosters the construction of knowledge and skills.

At this point, it is important to mention again the issues of relevance and students’ interest discussed in Chap. 2. It is commonly argued that one of the most important advantages of IBL is that students investigate questions they themselves had formulated. Consequently, they feel that learning is interesting and relevant for their lives.

I support relevant learning that engages students and connects learning to their inner world. Yet, I disagree with the assumption that only topics the student themselves generate based on their own interests, can be relevant. Even when the formal curriculum, or the teacher dictate the topic, learning can be significant when teachers use instructional methods that make the topic relevant to students’ lives. For example, if the literature teacher manages to initiate an inquiry assignment on a collection of poems that raises existential issues important to the lives of adolescents or if the history teacher initiates inquiry about leadership and manages to connect it to current political dilemmas, learning can be interesting and relevant.

Moreover, the expectation that interest and relevance are determined only according to what initially interests students severely narrows the school’s role in expanding students’ horizons and providing them with a broad and universal education. If the student has never heard of the Middle Ages, about Shakespeare, or nuclear physics, he is by definition unable to propose them as a topic for investigation. Does that mean that the school should give up on teaching these areas as legitimate subjects for learning in general and for significant IBL in particular? I contend that schools must not narrow the scope of teaching because of exaggerated expectation for relevance. At the same time, the education system should find ways to introduce students to subjects currently distant from their world, making them relevant and interesting. This can be done in many ways, one of which is IBL.

Another point has to do with learning content knowledge, an issue elaborated on in Chap. 2. Some of the negative criticism of IBL has been influenced by failed attempts to implement such learning in previous reforms worldwide. Claims have been made that IBL has negatively affected the quality of students’ knowledge, leading to ignorance. For example, the protest against the progressive movement that spread in the USA under the influence of John Dewey’s ideas in the first half of the 20th century focused on the fact that the knowledge level of students who had experienced IBL was lower than that of students who had studied by traditional methods (for elaboration, please see Chap. 2 and Zohar, 2013). In the present chapter, I explained the reasons for the inherent difficulties in attempting to evaluate the contribution of IBL for students’ learning. I also explained, however, that the more the inquiry process is open and the more it is dictated by students, the more difficult it is to attain learning of a structured body of knowledge that is included in the curriculum. Conversely, the more guided and closed-ended the inquiry process, the better it is able to encompass a larger number of concepts taken from the curriculum (even if at the cost of a lower degree of relevance and authenticity).

Does the present discussion suggest that IBL, and particularly open-ended IBL, should be recommended as a major approach to school teaching and learning? The answer is complex and depends on multiple factors. The present discussion assumes that IBL holds many advantages but that its mechanical and superficial implementation must be avoided at all costs.

Inquiry-based instruction is multifaceted. It can include many different situations, ranging between open- and closed-ended inquiries and between intensively and minimally guided inquiries. The idea that IBL can take place in a modular way opens up the possibility that rather than “all or nothing,” IBL may be adopted on a partial basis. Under such circumstances, the availability of necessary resources may dictate the extent and depth of implementation. This idea has far-reaching implications for system-wide implementation of IBL. It is relevant for decisions at all the organizational levels of the school system—from a single school to school districts to the entire educational system. Choosing the best way to pursue IBL in a given level is complex and depends on the multiple factors reviewed earlier. Reflective change leaders may therefore consider the pros and cons of the multiple options for IBL, in order to create the best combinations for the unique needs and objectives of their particular educational setting.

Accordingly, designing IBL is a complex decision-making process involving both considerations of structural and of substantive pedagogy. Structural considerations include the extent of political support for the change process, its duration, budget, technological support, available organizational infrastructure for teachers’ PD and for classroom support, incentives offered to teachers, and more. Other important considerations, however, are strictly on the level of substantive pedagogy, such as the following:

  1. (a)

    Meticulous choice of teaching objectives, including the decision of whether IBL would be part of learning a specific content or whether its main goal is to provide an empowering learning experience.

  2. (b)

    Choosing the most appropriate approach for the specific IBL process, given the unique educational context where it is being implemented. This choice is based on various student-related variables, such as the number of students involved, their level, their prior knowledge and experience with IBL, their age, etc.

  3. (c)

    The choice also needs to be based on various teacher-related circumstances, such as the possibilities for PD processes, teachers’ knowledge about inquiry processes, and their relevant pedagogical knowledge. The latter consists of knowledge of appropriate teaching strategies—including how to provide students with accurate guidance, feedback and scaffolds.

These considerations can be decisive in choosing whether to support a complete inquiry process, including the writing of a final essay, or to prefer a modular approach focused on smaller, selective parts of the process. Making an informed choice based on these considerations within a given educational context requires a high level of pedagogical knowledge.

The discussion of large-scale implementation of IBL illustrates and explicates one of the main ideas of this book, according to which large-scale implementation of a pedagogical innovation combines aspects of general strategic planning with aspects that require deep understanding of substantive pedagogy. The influence of political and budgetary support on pedagogical considerations in the planning of IBL is an interesting example for the combination of these aspects. When IBL receives broad and long-term support at high political levels and when this support is manifested in large budgets that can enable systematic PD and appropriate conditions for teachers, open-ended IBL has a chance to succeed. Under these conditions, even learning that is revolutionary in terms of the extent to which it transforms instruction can succeed.

Conversely, without political support and the resources that enable deep implementation, any attempt for a revolution in learning and instruction is liable to end in superficial and mechanical inquiry. Under these circumstances, instead of giving up on IBL altogether, it is preferable to opt for more modest implementation, in small and gradual steps. This implies evolutionary implementation: modular work with a strong element of teachers’ guidance focused on only some parts of the complete inquiry process. Such conditions may facilitate IBL that is not superficial and is tightly related to the objectives of both the IBL and the content of the school curriculum. The challenge inherent to taking this path is in how to implement IBL in small, moderate, and guided steps without killing the joy of learning and discovery. At the same time, it is important to make sure that the school curriculum also reserves significant space to more authentic inquiry. The process of deciding on the timing, setting, and “dosage” of authentic IBL also requires comprehensive pedagogical understanding.

The following chapters re-illustrate these general ideas by examining two cases of concrete system-wide implementation of IBL and HOT. Chapter 6 demonstrates the challenges involved in implementing HOT and IBL in civics. Chapter 7 examines IBL through the implementation of what is known as the “meaningful learning” reform.