Use Inquiry, it's an Effective Approach to Teaching Science

For my blogs I have focused on ways to be an effective elementary science teacher. Through research I have done the term "inquiry" has been brought up several times. In our science methods class we have discussed what science inquiry is, what it looks like, and examples of science inquiry. The science inquiry approach essentially allows students to become the experts on a topic that the teacher presents to them. They are able to ask questions, form a hypothesis as to what they believe the outcome will be, test their predictions, conduct research, and communicate with their peers. There were several articles that I have read with regards to science inquiry. Most of the articles I have read stated that inquiry allows the students to become the "teachers", they are doing the learning along with the teacher. The article that I found to be most beneficial stated that often times teacher want to give students the answers, as opposed to letting them think through what it is that they are really doing and learning. Inquiry allows students to take control of their learning instead of having the teacher stand in front of the classroom and tell it how it is. Think about it, how effective is it to have a teacher dish out a bunch of facts to you? Will you retain any of that information?

There are several benefits to an inquiry based approach to science:

• students learn to problem solve
• students design/set up their own investigation
• students learn how to analyze and make sense of the data they collected
• students learn how to seek out appropriate outcomes to questions and issues that come up
  

One thing the article focused on which I thought was really important is the difference between questions asked in an inquiry classroom vs questions asked in a traditional classroom. In a traditional classroom the teacher is the one asking the questions and waiting to get feedback from the students. Often times the questions are related to a reading that the students did or an activity that they completed. In an inquiry classroom, the teacher asks more open ended and reflective types of questions that get the students thinking on a different level. The types of questions you would hear in an inquiry classroom would be questions like: Why do you think that? What did you notice here? How does this relate to our understanding of the topic?

We need to be aware that the inquiry approach to learning science is so crucial for students and it needs to be taught in the primary grades. If students are exposed to the inquiry approach at a younger age it will make more sense to them, and they will eventually feel more confident in conducting their own investigation.