Inquiry-not a pedagogical fad
I showed some data from an article about effectiveness of inquiry vs traditional teaching method today. I suspect all of you have heard the mantra “teach with inquiry”. Given that, I wondered if you may have seen some of the strong data that support pedagogy. Hence the Richard Hake paper, which I believe I said I would post. I will bring some others to the table, perhaps. Matt made the good observation about time required for inquiry doesn’t allow for much flexibility. I agree, and if inquiry is disconnected from your objectives for the course, then it won’t happen.
Another suggested that inquiry was just another, late-arriving pedagogical fad. I doubt that. It is here to stay, I think. Three reasons that come to mind immediately for wanting to adopt more inquiry and student-centered teaching into my classroom practice are 1) students often develop a better attitude toward science (at least in my experience, & they rarely do with lectures); 2) it allows you to naturally embed nature of science into the teaching; and 3), the nature of science is the most important content that we teach in science–but that is my opinion, and I doubt that it is universal, although it is shared by a bunch of people that have thought about it more deeply than I.
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