Focus on Technology (Spring 2003)

The computer and the Internet have created new opportunities for enhancing student learning. In this article, I examine the use of the Internet as a tool for fostering inquiry-based learning, giving some general principles, guidelines, and examples.

What Is Inquiry-Based Learning?

First consider the concept of inquiry as formulated by John Dewey, an American philosopher of education who lived from 1859 to 1952. Dewey posits that learning takes place through active involvement in an experience that requires thinking, not through passive acquisition of pre-processed information. Inquiry-based teaching involves placing the learner in situations with a problem or problems that arouse his/her interest and engage his/her activity. To arouse thought, the problem must be sufficiently new to prevent routine from dealing effectively with it, but not so new as to give the learner no leverage for building on prior experiences or knowledge.

According to Dewey, any experience which involves contact with a new situation or problem proceeds initially through the process of trial and error. Trial and error consists initially of more-or-less inchoate interaction of the person’s energy with specific materials. By seeing how the materials respond to this interaction, the person begins to gain an understanding of the materials, and can begin to plan more sophisticated and fruitful interactions. Real learning cannot happen without trial and error, but schools tend to neglect this phase of inquiry. Without trial and error, the student never learns deeply about the material or situation at hand, and is dependent upon the teacher to provide specific information or procedures. With trial and error, the student gradually becomes an expert in the situation or topic. Also, schools tend not to reward, and even actively discourage, failure, although failure is essential to learning. In fact, students need to be actively encouraged to experience failure because failure indicates that you are doing something that you don’t know how to do, and suggests that you need to learn. Without failure, there is no way for the teacher or the student to know what is still to be learned. Certainly successful inquiry is dependant upon having the room to try and fail in order to learn.

Once the student begins to understand the situation or material (through trial and error), he or she can begin to develop a plan to deal with the problem posed by the situation. A plan is the foundation of all good learning, as higher ordered learning involves the development of a plan, followed by implementation of the plan and its evaluation utilizing research and testing. Many school activities are not structured in a way that students can form their own plan. Rather, the structure is such that the teacher does the planning and the students participate. While ideally learning should flow from problems that arise from the student’s own experiences, schools have “curricula” or agendas for student learning that often push out student generated problem solving. Methods need to be found to enable student interests and school subject matter to interact in dynamic and contextual ways. This is the most difficult aspect of teaching in a school situation. (Those who teach outside of school or on the job have no difficulty with letting real problems form the core of learning experiences, because they are not tied to a previously developed curriculum the way that schools are. Dewey believed that school teachers could learn a lot from the kind of teaching that goes on in the family, apprenticeship, community, and workplace.)

The Characteristics of Good Inquiry Based Activities

Most of the problems offered in school are not students’ problems, but are problems that somebody else thinks students should solve. For example, worksheets full of addition, subtraction and multiplication problems are the ultimate example of a school problem which nobody would ever really consider in real life. Teachers who want their students to learn how to learn (as opposed to just memorizing a previously-determined solution) need to spend time finding ways to make their own curriculum or the standards that they teach come alive for the students. Dewey identified a number of factors that can help to make a teacher-created lesson a good inquiry-based activity:

  • Some element of the situation must be familiar to the student so he/she will know how to begin to experience trial and error.
  • The learning task itself must be intrinsically interesting, rather than requiring external rewards to motivate students. It should naturally suggest itself within some real life situation or personal experience.
  • The problem posed in the learning task should lead to observation, experimentation, and thinking. It should be the type of situation that would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school.

Dewey suggests that in preparation of learning activities, teachers can discriminate by asking themselves the following questions: Is there anything here but a problem? Is it an unconnected matter, a problem only for the purposes of conveying instruction in the school setting? Does the student care about the problem, or is it the teacher’s or textbook’s problem, made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win the teacher’s approval, unless he deals with it?

The following are a few examples of problems that could be used to foster student inquiry. For each, I’ve included an Internet resource that might be used as a starting point for students who are beginning to solve the problem.

  • Math: How would our lives be affected if we didn’t have the mathematical concept of “zero”? (see http://mathforum.org/dr.math/problems/tristan02.17.99.html)
  • Science for primary grades: Would you like to be cold blooded? Why or why not? (see http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/communication/rothery/Rothery.html)
  • Science for middle school children: Predict the effects of global warming on your future. (see http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/impacts/ )

Inquiry-based learning is a valuable tool. As opposed to learning through rote or learning by discipline, with inquiry-based learning, young people can gain skills for solving future (not-yet-defined) problems, they can learn to function in the diversity of today’s world, and practice dealing with “messy” reality and complex situations. In addition, inquiry-based learning helps students learn to deal with moral and ethical issues. To the extent that we can figure out ways to get students to solve problems that they think that they should solve, that they are really interested in and invest in, the more likely learning will bring results.

The Internet as a Tool for Student Inquiry

The Internet significantly enhances the ability of teachers to foster inquiry-based learning. The Internet supports student inquiry in a variety of ways:

  • The Internet includes a robust collection of materials and resources related to almost every imaginable subject.
  • The Internet can support an astonishing array of activities (computerized and not).
  • The Internet facilitates coordinated communication between students and other people all over the world.
  • Internet -based lessons or units can allow teachers to individualize learning so that students do work at their own pace, outside of the regular school day, or at a different location.
    Nevertheless, there are a number of dangers associated with use of the Internet:
  • It contains inappropriate content (for example, pornography, advertising, inflammatory web sites).
  • Students will come across a mix of opinion, truth, and bald-faced lies.
  • The vast amount of resources available makes the search process difficult.
  • The Internet can foster mindless surfing.
  • Accessibility can lead to endless perfectionism (“just let me look a little while longer for the perfect picture to illustrate my report”).
    There are, however, a number of strategies that teachers can employ in order to overcome the potential dangers and maximize the value of the internet as a resource for student inquiry:
  • Teachers must review and select appropriate content in advance of sending students to each resource.
  • Students need to be taught how to distinguish valuable material from propaganda.
  • Effective searching skills need to be taught.
  • Students should be guided to pursue specific tasks rather than merely surfing.
  • Focus should be on content and not making things “pretty” or “cool”.
  • Teachers should provide evaluative rubrics to encourage a standard of quality in student work.

 

These requirements place the teacher in a different role than that of the frontal classroom teacher. On the Internet, there is no barrier between the world and the classroom, so the teacher must become the intermediary. First and foremost, he/she must become a researcher, reviewing and selecting appropriate content. There is no substitute for this. If a teacher gives the students a link, then he/she must know if it’s a site that they can go to. Furthermore, in order to properly guide the students, the teacher must develop effective search skills and the ability to discriminate between valuable material and propaganda. These are skills that can be learned through appropriate professional development. In essence, the teacher who utilizes the internet for inquiry-based learning becomes an ongoing learner and a facilitator of learning, as opposed to a subject matter specialist who transmits knowledge.

Structures for facilitating inquiry-based learning

A variety of structures have been developed to facilitate use of the Internet in inquiry-based learning activities. Perhaps the most popular form is the WebQuest. A WebQuest is an inquiry oriented activity in which some or all of the information of learning comes from resources from the Internet. All WebQuests have the following elements:

  • An introduction that creates a context for the learning and relates the task to some other topics or future events.
  • A task which is an open-ended question with multiple possible responses.
  • A process and the description of the process.
  • Lists of resources, both web-based and other (paper, people, tools).
  • Assessment that is embedded in the task through use of a rubric or other explicit evaluation criteria.
  • A conclusion providing opportunity for closure and connection to the bigger picture or other issues.

The following are some sample WebQuests:

  • Fact or Fiction: Truth, Opinion, and the Web: http://education.nmsu.edu/webquest/truth/truth.html
  • The Holocaust: Fact or Fiction: http://www.hercomputers.com/holocaustweb/
  • Rome: The Past is Present http://kathyschrock.net/webquests/FOULKE/rmindex.htm
  • Find a Need and Fill It http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/lausd/offices/di/Burleson/Lessons/need/index.htm
  • The Real Scoop on Tobacco: http://www.itdc.k12.ca.us/curriculum/tobacco.html
    More WebQuests can be found on the WebQuest site maintained by Bernie Dodge at the San Diego State University in California. See http://webquest.sdsu.edu/.

A more flexible structure for organizing student inquiry is a curriculum web. A curriculum web is simply a web site designed to support the teaching and learning that goes on in a unit. Curriculum webs serve many teaching goals, including the facilitation of student-based inquiry. They can be organized as multiple inquiries, part of a unit, an entire unit, several units or even a whole course. A school can develop curriculum webs where every grade level has a curriculum web created over time. One advantage of the curriculum web is that they can be reused, updated, and improved from year to year.

Curriculum webs provide teachers with the opportunity to develop their own inquiry-based units, and/or to utilize the research already completed and tested by colleagues in the field. As such, they are valuable and accessible tools for student inquiry.

For the past seven years, I have been teaching teachers to create curriculum webs. Some good examples of webs created by teachers for their own classrooms include:

  • The origins of the ingredients of pizza for third grade science students http://cuip.uchicago.edu/wit/99/teams/pizza/
  • “Who Am I?,” self-identity and discovery for sophomore high school language arts http://curriculumwebs.com/Whoami/”
  • “A Virtual Tour of the Cuisines of Europe,” comparing food words for first-year language students http://cuip.uchicago.edu/wit/2000/teams/cybertour/tasteofeurope.html
  • “Portraiture,” history and the creation of self-portraits, for elementary school art http://cuip.uchicago.edu/wit/99/teams/portraits/frontpage.htm
  • “African Folktales in the Classroom” for elementary school language arts http://cuip.uchicago.edu/wit/99/teams/tales/folktales.html
  • “Wacky Whales,” about the collection of data for research, for elementary school science http://cuip.uchicago.edu/wit/2000/teams/whales/frameset2.htm

Additional curriculum webs can be found at http://webinstituteforteachers.org/projects.

Conclusion

Inquiry-based learning is a powerful method for engaging students in an authentic learning process. It is not a new educational concept. In fact, inquiry plays an important role in Jewish history and traditional Jewish learning. The advent of the Internet, however, has enhanced the potential for teachers to incorporate student inquiry in their curricula. If utilized effectively, this potential can be used to improve our students’ abilities to think about, and effectively respond to, the uncertainties of life in the 21st century.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Craig A. and Marty Billingsley. 2003. Curriculum Webs: A Practical Guide to Weaving the Web into Teaching and Learning. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Dewey, John. 1910. How We Think and Selected Essays, 1910-1911, volume 6 of the Collected Works of John Dewey (Middle Works), edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dodge, Bernie. 1997. “Some Thoughts About WebQuests.” Available: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_webquests.html. Last accessed 12/9/02.

Molebash, Philip E. 2002. “Promoting Student Inquiry: WebQuests to Web Inquiry Projects (WIPs).” Paper presentated at annual meeting of the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE), March 2002, Nashville. Available: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/wip/WIP_Intro.htm. Last accessed 12/9/02.

Yoder, Maureen Brown. 1999 (April). “The Student WebQuest.” Learning and Leading with Technology 26 (7).