http://websofsubstance.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/inquiry/
This post about inquiry learning reminds me of how much we tend to dichotomize issues, pick teams, and then make a caricature out of the other side. Sometimes we forget our manners when we do this, which, thankfully, Webb does not really do here. Still, I get puzzled by what some people think of as "inquiry" or "discovery learning." My critique (which seems to be shared by many, including Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007) of the Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) paper is that to them "minimal guidance" really is minimal, assuming that teachers play a passive role in instruction if they're not doing direct instruction. I certainly wouldn't advocate for minimal guidance, nor would I advocate for direct instruction like Kirschner et al. do. There's a middle ground that gets lost too often in our arguments, one that is supported by research. Webb does admit that he is only aware of one major study in favor of inquiry, a 2011 Educational Psychologist paper by Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, and Tenenbaum. I wasn't aware of that one, but in these cases I immediately think of the meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies by Furtak, Seidel, Iverson, and Briggs (2012). That study found greater learning gains for students in guided or structured inquiry approaches than for students in *either* traditional lessons or minimally guided learning. Furtak's findings support a previous meta-analysis by Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, and Lee (2007), which also found positives in inquiry-based approaches. Interestingly, the two meta-analyses do not rely on any of the same underlying studies, so when considering how much evidence this represents, it's important to not think of the Furtak et al. and Schroeder et al. work as just two studies, as together they summarize the findings of 98 smaller studies.
This post about inquiry learning reminds me of how much we tend to dichotomize issues, pick teams, and then make a caricature out of the other side. Sometimes we forget our manners when we do this, which, thankfully, Webb does not really do here. Still, I get puzzled by what some people think of as "inquiry" or "discovery learning." My critique (which seems to be shared by many, including Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007) of the Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) paper is that to them "minimal guidance" really is minimal, assuming that teachers play a passive role in instruction if they're not doing direct instruction. I certainly wouldn't advocate for minimal guidance, nor would I advocate for direct instruction like Kirschner et al. do. There's a middle ground that gets lost too often in our arguments, one that is supported by research. Webb does admit that he is only aware of one major study in favor of inquiry, a 2011 Educational Psychologist paper by Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, and Tenenbaum. I wasn't aware of that one, but in these cases I immediately think of the meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies by Furtak, Seidel, Iverson, and Briggs (2012). That study found greater learning gains for students in guided or structured inquiry approaches than for students in *either* traditional lessons or minimally guided learning. Furtak's findings support a previous meta-analysis by Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, and Lee (2007), which also found positives in inquiry-based approaches. Interestingly, the two meta-analyses do not rely on any of the same underlying studies, so when considering how much evidence this represents, it's important to not think of the Furtak et al. and Schroeder et al. work as just two studies, as together they summarize the findings of 98 smaller studies.