Educators are busier than ever before. What practitioner has time to add "researcher" to his or her job description? Yet the very complexity of education today mandates that educators become researchers. Educators cannot do their jobs properly unless they become researchers who have the goal of fostering a culture of inquiry throughout the entire…

A theoretical model depicting the mental process of inquiry is presented and discussed. It is mainly composed of givens, operations, transitional outcomes and terminal outcomes. The different mental paths followed as well as the various alternative outcomes are also discussed and a number of implications deduced. (Author)

The primary purpose of this exploratory study is to provide insight on how to use online discussions to foster collaborative learning and how to design assessment processes to evaluate the effectiveness of those discussions. This study focuses on the pedagogical role of discussion, effective practices in discussion, guidelines for creating…

Describes learning processes of inquiry and discovery involving six steps of teacher-student interaction: questioning, investigating, analyzing, interpreting, understanding, and answering. Presents examples of dialogue in adventure education that illustrate four learning styles within the inquiry/discovery approach: guided, shared, consultative,…

Two experiments examined the effects of different models of exploration questioning on kindergarteners' associative fluency, or ability to verbalize novel uses for conventional stimuli. In the first experiment, five models of exploration questioning were compared for their ability to facilitate associative fluency with respect to an object…

From the Series "Social Studies Education: The Elementary School -- Focus on Inquiry.

A model for teaching social studies by the discovery approach is presented. The authors maintain that the temporal inquiry teaching model holds considerable promise for encouraging student enthusiasm, emphasizing higher cognitive levels, and stimulating divergent student thinking and activity. (Author/DB)

Teachers are encouraged to examine more critically the assumptions on which science curricula are based so they will be less likely to accept naive approaches to discovery learning. Examples from the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) and Nuffield Physics are used to show how they use discovery learning. (IS)

The writings of 33 authors in either curriculum theory or social studies are analyzed to determine whether each author supports structure-discovery views, reflective-inquiry views, or expresses views that tend to reflect both positions or neither position regarding the new approaches to teaching social studies. The structure-discovery method is…

This publication is a practical guide for teachers to improve their questioning techniques and thus increase their students' motivation, participation, and higher-level thinking. Teachers are urged to re-examine their views on educational practices and develop a teaching plan which accentuates opportunities for student involvement, and allows…

The crucial variable in good classroom teaching is the verbal behavior of the teacher. Through his questioning techniques--what questions he asks, how and when he asks them, how he replies to students, and how he stimulates students to reply to each other--the teacher can evoke a high level of class discussion and force students to go beyond the…

Curriculum guidelines are given for social studies instruction in primary grades in New South Wales. No compulsory topics are suggested, but the rationale, objectives, and areas of inquiry provide a framework within which teachers can work. Based on the assumption that social studies should contribute to the development of individuals who can…

This study investigates the cognitive nature of teacher-pupil questions in "process oriented" and "content oriented" secondary social studies programs. Subjects were five classes selected from a program viewed by both teachers and pupils as process-oriented; five from a program viewed by both teachers and pupils as content…