An Inquiry Primer

Journal Article | February 2000

The science education community has embraced no idea more widely than “inquiry,” or “inquiry-based instruction.” In fact, developing an inquiry-based science program is the central tenet of the National Science…

An Inquiry Safari

Journal Article | November 2004

The Virtual Gorilla Modeling Project (VGOR)—a professional development project—is a collaboration of middle and high school in-service teachers, Zoo Atlanta primatologists, science and computer educators, and students.…

Inquiry on Board

Journal Article | September 2006

Helping students to identify variable can be the key to other aspects of an investigation, such as the use of tables or graphs. In this article, we describe a tool we have successfully used to highlight the role of…

Exercise in Inquiry

Journal Article | February 2003

Students expressed strong positive feelings about inquiry-based teaching methods the authors developed and implemented in an undergraduate exercise physiology laboratory course. Inquiry-based learning resulted in a…

Is the Inquiry Real?

Journal Article | June 2009

When describing activities in today’s K–12 science classrooms, the word inquiry often causes some confusion. As a result, many of us find ourselves asking the same questions: How do we know when inquiry is authentic?…

Enzyme Inquiry

Journal Article | August 2008

In this article, the authors describe a two-phase inquiry lesson in which students explore the catalytic activity of amylase on starch (Rungruangsa and Panijpan 1979). In the first phase, students’ prior knowledge about…

Got Inquiry?

Journal Article | February 2011

Milk Fireworks, Cat's Meow, Breaking the Tension--whatever you call it, this lesson will provide strategies for taking a simple, hands-on activity and transforming it into inquiry. The lesson is ideally suited for…

Inspired Inquiry

Journal Article | December 2000

In using the inquiry-based learning concept, this project uses candy and containers of water to spark students' interest in investigating.

The Inquiry Flame

Journal Article | October 2010

In the lesson presented in this article, students learn to organize their thinking and design their own inquiry experiments through careful observation of an object, situation, or event. They then conduct these…

The Inquiry Matrix

Journal Article | October 2010

One way to advance inquiry in the classroom is to establish a systematic strategy for reflecting on our practice and our students’ readiness to engage in increasingly complex scientific reasoning. The Matrix for…

The Micro Assignment Guided Inquiry and Collaboration (MAGIC) method: A qualitative discussion of the benefits of active learning through scaffolded assignments in upper-level physics and mathematics

Journal Article | May 2024

In this article, we discuss Micro Assignment Guided Inquiry and Collaboration (MAGIC), an active learning method that draws on the merits of inquiry-based learning in STEM courses. We describe the use of Micro…

Defining Inquiry: Exploring the many types of inquiry in the science classroom

Journal Article | January 2002

Different types of lessons and different types of inquiry are used for specific needs in the science classroom. Understanding the different aspects of inquiry can help educators vary the types of teaching and learning…

Open-Ended Inquiry

Journal Article | August 2012

In this article the authors describe how to help chemistry students develop a method to answer their own research question, called open inquiry, using the reaction of hydrochloric acid and aluminum foil as an example.

A New Model for Inquiry

Journal Article | June 2004

There has been renewed discussion of the scientific method, with many voices arguing that it presents a very limited or even wholly incorrect image of the way science is really done. At the same time, the idea of a…