Breaking into Inquiry: Scaffolding Supports Beginning Efforts to Implement Inquiry in the Classroom

For science teachers, implementing inquiry for the first time can seem intimidating. Inquiry-based curriculum requires teachers to design experiences that engage students in scientific phenomena through direct observation, data gathering, and analysis of evidence. Replacing familiar routines and conventional methods with inquiry may seem outside of a teacher's budget, unpredictable, less structured, and more difficult to manage. Appropriately scaffolded inquiry, however, can provide a smooth transition. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Teachers who are considering inquiry as an instructional technique for the first time should incrementally apply variations of inquiry, depending on the needs and level of their students. The scaffolding described in Figure 1 (p. 50) allows teachers to adjust from highly structured environments and teacher-directed inquiry to less structured environments with student-directed inquiry. Scaffolding inquiry experiences Teachers should vary the amount of guidance in their inquiry-based teaching, from "guided" to "open," depending on student skills and needs (NRC 2000). These four different levels of variation can be used by applying the framework in Figure 1--the five essential features of classroom inquiry and their variations of "openness" (NRC 2000). Teachers can successfully start using structured, teacher-directed inquiry (right-hand column of Figure 1) and work up to variations of inquiry that are more open and student-directed (left-hand column). In this way, both teachers and students become accustomed to doing inquiry in an incremental approach, from guided to open degrees of inquiry, building up their confidence and skills through a chosen variation of openness. Inquiry level 1 (Figure 1, Column 5) Teacher-directed variants of inquiry are ideal for teachers breaking into inquiry because they can easily be incorporated into existing curriculums and preferred teaching approaches. The level 1 approach breaks into inquiry through use of the first two essential features of inquiry, engaging in scientific questions and giving priority to evidence in responding to questions. At this level, students should focus on a main scientific question to answer based on supplied data. The goal of this approach is for students to understand the importance of evidence, and use the dataset to infer or possibly explain scientific principles that are currently being studied in class. This approach, and all the ones we describe, begins with a question designed to elicit student thinking about the science they are about to experience. Teachers new to inquiry can easily incorporate a data-based worksheet into their teaching routine to help students think like scientists as they analyze real data that is tied to their science content. The internet is a ready source of authentic data that is often generated for scientific use (Bodzin and Cates 2002). Data can come from scientific instrumentation directly connected to the internet (real-time data) or scientists who post it for others to access and use. For example, teachers could have their students look at real-time data for stream flow in their area and ask students if the flow is due to the lack of rain or just seasonal fluctuations (Figure 2, "Water cycle"). Earth science students might plot worldwide earthquake patterns from real-time seismic readings obtained from the internet (Figure 2, "Plate tectonics"). Although students are not collecting the data themselves, they are actually experiencing the scientific evidence required by the second essential feature of inquiry. In a follow-up discussion, the teacher should probe student learning from the data exercise and explicitly connect student responses and descriptions of data to the principle or concept of study. This approach stands in vivid contrast to traditional textbooks, in which the evidence for the scientific explanations discussed typically does not appear. …