New Zealand is unique in the global tertiary education environment because there is a legislative requirement that teaching and research are closely interdependent and that most teaching in universities and all degree-granting institutions should be done by people who are active in advancing knowledge. Moreover, the Tertiary Education Strategy…

Marymount University is a midsized, independent Catholic university whose mission combines a liberal arts foundation with career preparation and opportunities for personal and professional development. The university is moderately selective with a highly diverse undergraduate student population. Approximately half of Marymount undergraduates are…

A number of universities in the United Kingdom (UK) have launched institution-wide initiatives recently to embed inquiry and research more firmly into the student experience. Among these, the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) led a five-year development program at The University of Sheffield (TUOS) between…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

The University of Gloucestershire, located in the southwest of the United Kingdom, is a small university with approximately 7,500 full-time students and 400 teaching staff. It has three faculties, all with a professional or applied focus: (1) Media, Art, and Technology; (2) Business, Education, and Professional Studies; and (3) Applied Sciences.…

At North Carolina State University, inquiry-guided learning offered a compelling framework for integrating the undergraduate curriculum across general education and the major. Rather than adopting a definition of inquiry-guided learning as a prescribed set of approaches, participating faculty and staff members agreed on four overarching intended…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

An introductory statistics course is a common requirement for undergraduate economics, psychology, and sociology majors. An approach to statistics that involves the effort to encourage habits of systematic, critical quantitative thinking through focusing on descriptive statistics is discussed. (MLW)

Teaching the large introductory science course is a challenge, but when the objective is seen not as covering the field but uncovering part of it to illustrate principles common to the whole, the facts are no longer the end result but tools with which the disciplines can be further explored. (Author/MSE)

A course at Hampshire College that examines the character and history of literary natural history and surveys many of its significant American authors and works is described. Issues of the relationship between people and nature are raised and discussed in terms of current environmental debates. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College that joins the literature and analytical approaches of anthropology with certain texts in English, American, and European literature and modern criticism is described. The problems of the relationship of observer to observed, of author to text, and of audience to text are covered. (MLW)

Librarians must help students establish basic research skills, enabling students to find their way in the pertinent indexes, bibliographies, and electronic databases. A course at Hampshire College in bibliographical instruction is described. (MLW)

Many social and intellectual forces focus introductory courses not on the process of inquiry but on its products. Changes that can help refocus these courses include limiting class size, emphasizing writing skills, having all levels of faculty teach the courses, and promoting exchange of ideas in the classroom. (MSE)

Inquiry is seen as a tension among three modes of imagination. These modes are labeled creation, self-criticism, and observation. Most people do not want to inquire. They tend to cling to their beliefs about the world. Freud's theories are used in a class designed to dramatize inquiry. (MLW)