As free online courses draw students to star professors at prestigious colleges, Peer 2 Peer University asks whether instructors are needed at all. This article features Peer 2 Peer University, a three-year-old online institution where students learn together, at no charge, using materials found on the Web. The unusual institution, where anyone…

The purpose of this article is to present a perspective on disciplinary literacy and the Common Core State Standards based on the argument that disciplinary literacy is embedded in the standards. The article highlights possibilities and challenges associated with national efforts to prepare students for success in college and the workforce.…

The Common Core raises the bar for states struggling to decide what should be taught or tested. As low-performing schools strive to improve instruction, the blueprint has been defined. The Common Core defines the curriculum in enough detail and specifies ways to teach that content creatively and innovatively, to produce graduates who are problem…

Two Summer Institutes funded by the National Science Foundation were held for current and future college science faculty. The overall goal was to promote learning and practice of inquiry-based college science teaching. We developed a collaborative and active learning format for participants that involved all phases of the 5E learning cycle of…

This article presents an in-depth case study of a complex community of inquiry. In this community, teachers worked collaboratively to build from situated assessments of students' "learning through reading" to refine and monitor practices designed to enhance student learning in their subject-area classrooms. In this report, we present evidence to…

Research has shown that students in traditional college-preparatory chemistry courses become masters of mathematical equations without an understanding of the conceptual basis for the mathematical relationships. This problem is rooted not only in what curriculum is presented to students, but also in how it is experienced by the students. Ample…

This article reports on research into the student experience of enquiry in two tasks in a university pharmacy course. Students were required to investigate through a field trip how a community pharmacy operated to meet customer needs and the requirements of the Health System in which it operated. Students were also required to investigate…

This study explores how elementary teachers and students use hedges (tentative words such as "maybe") and boosters (expressions of certainty such as "clearly" and "obviously") during science inquiry discussions. Drawing upon semiotic theory, we examine explicit thematic patterns (semantic meaning relations among science concepts) as well as hidden…

Employees in a negotiation training workshop are chatting happily in a company cafeteria near San Francisco. They're not on break. They're on assignment. Their objective: to discover three things they didn't know--and wouldn't have guessed--about each other. The exercise isn't about the information, though. It's about the methods they used to get…

This paper provides a critical review of the changes to the role of practical work in the science curriculum in England over the last forty years. The science curriculum over this period appears to place an emphasis on an approach to practical enquiry that suggests school students can act like "real" scientists. This paper provides a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate students' conceptions of and approaches to learning science in two different forms: internet-assisted instruction and traditional (face-to-face only) instruction. The participants who took part in the study were 79 college students enrolled in a physiology class in north Taiwan. In all, 46 of the…

First-year undergraduates on degree programmes in the arts, humanities and social sciences were found by this qualitative study to experience inquiry and research in four distinct ways. Research as "gathering information" and "exploring others' ideas" was associated with learning by engaging independently with a knowledge base.…

With the emphasis placed on standardized testing, science education has been squeezed out. As a physics teacher, the author knows the importance of building children's interest in science early in their school career and of providing practice in basic science skills and inquiry. In order to make more time for science at her sons' elementary…

In this forum, I expand upon Teo and Osborne's discussion of teacher agency and curriculum reform. I take up and build upon their analysis to further examine one teacher's frustration in enacting an inquiry-based curriculum and his resulting accommodation of an AP curriculum. In this way I introduce the concept of misrecognition (Bourdieu and…

Creating inquiry activities is inherently difficult. Asking meaningful questions requires both background knowledge on the part of the students and complexity on the part of the phenomena. Yet numerous strategies can help teachers conduct inquiry activities. In this article, the authors share a taxonomy of teaching strategies used to create…