Students should be encouraged to access school library services and other sources of information in the Community and beyond to verify their hypotheses. The focus in deductive inquiry is on moving students from a generalized principle to specific instances that may be subsumed logically within the generalization. The process of testing the generalized assumptions, applying them and exploring the relationships between specific elements is stressed. The teacher co-ordinates the information and presents important principles, themes or hypotheses. Students are actively engaged in testing generalizations, gathering information and applying it to specific examples.
Deductive inquiry is based upon the logical assimilation and processing of information.
This becomes a framework upon which students can build their understandings and connect with their prior learnings. See Figure 4.3 for an example of an advance organizer for a series of Grade 10 Geometry lessons. Each isolated element is discussed and its unique characteristics are highlighted to make the concept or generalization meaningful for students. Students are provided with a variety of examples of the specific elements of the generalization. They are asked to seek out similarities and differences in an attempt to understand relationships among the specific elements and between the elements and the generalization.