This guide for the improvement of instruction in higher education is designed to aid the educator in planning and conducting laboratory instruction. The examples used refer primarily to science laboratories. Topics discussed include: deciding whether or not to use the laboratory method (with a discussion of discovery learning or the processes of…

The purpose of the study was to determine the influence of wait-time following a teacher's questions on the cognitive complexity of students' responses. The same sequence of three lessons--Exploration, Invention, and Discovery--was presented to 75 fifth-grade students randomly assigned to 18 groups. The Discovery phase of the instructional…

Three ways in which the term "inquiry" is used are discussed: inquiry as a teaching method, inquiry as a mode of learning and inquiry as a logical disciplinary process. The role of guiding principles of inquiry is analyzed, using a discussion of Harvey's work on the heart to illustrate an inquiry guided by the idea of structure-function. It is…

The procedures for the selection of a test population to use and evaluate the short units developed by the Sociological Resources for the Social Studies Project (SRSS), "Episodes in Social Inquiry Series," are considered. They wanted to assess the effectiveness of the materials under a variety of circumstances: classes from different…

Five perspectives are identified for viewing inquiry: "Guiding Principles: (for example the antecedent-consequent principle), Inquiry Factors or logical steps in inquiry, Behavioral Objectives, Affective or Attitudinal Qualities, and Inquiry into Inquiry. Many components of these perspectives are enumerated, together with related student…

This six-part resource guide is designed to help the teacher understand the skills of inquiry, to know how to mold the bits of information into a structural framework, and to be an expert in the technique of self-instruction. Part one, "Orientation to Secondary School Teaching," looks at perceptions about the teaching/learning situation and helps…

Reported is an investigation related to the lack of preparation of elementary school teachers in the use of the new elementary science curricula which employ inquiry. It was suggested that television instruction could bring inquiry-oriented science lessons to the selected 123 students and at the same time provide an example of teaching with…

Reported is an examination of the effects of a newly devised science course upon the logical thought processes of college freshmen. Five tasks designed to determine whether the student did thinking logically when presented with problems of conservation of volume, reversible operations, reconciliation of irrelevant variables, and elimination of…

Reported is a study of the effect of participation in an inquiry activity compared to a reading activity on learning and retention. The subjects were (1) a group of 23 inservice teachers in a six-week summer class, and (2) a group of 31 inservice teachers in an eleven-week college term. The classes were each randomly assigned to two groups of…

Problems in assessing the validity and reliability of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL) tests of the inquiry skills of biology students are discussed by reference to the first trial version of the first Explorations in Biology (EIB) booklets. Since students learn during the two parts of the test, coefficients of stability…

The booklet is part of a series which tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. A series of diagrams of a biological community over a period of 10 years indicates an increasing bird mortality, and students are asked to choose a puzzling event that they would want to investigate if they were biologists. A scrambled programed text…

This booklet is part of a series that tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. Students are presented with several possible experiments to investigate one of the explanations for the changes in bird populations illustrated in Booklet A (SE 011 334). A separate series of data interpretation questions is presented for each…

This booklet is part of a series which tests some skills which biologists use in their investigations. It contains a series of questions related to possible experiments testing one of the possibilities offered in Booklet A (SE 011 336) to account for the "unusual event" shown in a series of pictures of a bird interacting with members of its own…

The booklet is part of a series which tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. A series of drawings of the inhabitants of two fictional villages, and a number of extracts of literature concerning congenital malformations, introduce the first question in this test, which asks students to identify an unusual event shown in the…

This booklet is part of a series which tests some skills used by biologists in their investigations. Students are asked a series of questions about one possible explanation of the "puzzling event" concerning human deformities presented in Booklet A (SE 011 338) and directed to a set of questions on data interpretation. The particular questions…