United States science scores have remained stable over the past 12 years, and as a result secondary school students have been deemed less proficient than international peers. Additionally, there has been increased pressure for accountability from both teachers and students. This highly competitive performance-based classroom environment has…

Education for transformation and social justice calls for critical, reflective, imaginative and independent thinkers with enquiring minds and a strong sense of curiosity--the ends and means of what Jonathan Jansen calls a "pedagogy to disrupt" and Gert Biesta a "pedagogy of interruption". For this reason, I introduced an…

Every year, high school students hunch over microscopes and peer at a plethora of tiny creatures. Swimming single-celled protists and whirling multicellular rotifers often steal the show, preventing students from noticing the static algae. However, these frequently overlooked, ordinary algae are inspiring research all over the world as scientists…

The goal of formal education is student learning. By emphasizing experimentation in the classroom or lab, students learn about the results of a particular inquiry. But more importantly, they learn to refine their approach to learning by creating new knowledge rather than merely remembering what they have been told. An inquiry approach where…

Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum. After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously forced to serve, Ford argues that the three distinct tasks of measuring current attainment,…

This paper describes the inaugural success of implementing Inquiry Guided Learning Projects within a college-level human anatomy and physiology course. In this context, scientific inquiry was used as a means of developing skills required for critical thinking among students. The projects were loosely designed using the Information Search Process…

This article takes as its inspiration Ian Grosvenor's conjectural essay presented for the symposium "Historiography of the Future: Looking Back to the Future" held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33 in July 2011 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It contributes to a sensory history of schooling by…

An activity supporting the PhET interactive simulation, Models of the Hydrogen Atom, has been designed and used in the laboratory portion of a general chemistry course. This article describes the framework used to successfully accomplish implementation on a large scale. The activity guides students through a comparison and analysis of the six…

The Holy Cross Chemistry Department has designed and implemented an experiment on buffers as part of our Discovery Chemistry curriculum. The pedagogical philosophy of Discovery Chemistry is to make the laboratory the focal point of learning for students in their first two years of undergraduate instruction. We first pose questions in prelaboratory…

In this article, we describe a fourth-grade inquiry unit on soil. The unit was designed and taught by preservice elementary teachers as part of a university science methods course. Using a student-driven inquiry approach to designing curriculum, the unit engaged fourth graders in learning about the physical properties soil, erosion, worms, and…

This article reflects on the introduction of "matrix management" arrangements for an Educational Psychology Service (EPS) within a Children's Service Directorate of a Local Authority (LA). It seeks to demonstrate critical self-awareness, consider relevant literature with a view to bringing insights to processes and outcomes, and offers…

Recent calls asking science teachers to increase student authority by diversifying instruction appear stalled by a lack of empirical evidence supporting the actual implementation of any such shifts. To better support the practical integration of more student-directed inquiry into the science classroom, we consider one teacher's day-to-day…

In response to a university mandate to include "professional issues" as a component of every major, we have developed a vertically integrated approach to incorporating the study of professional skills and issues into the mathematics curriculum. Beginning in the first year of study, mathematics majors take an inquiry-based course in…

Drawing from a critical qualitative inquiry, this case study tells the story of Hana, a Korean-Canadian mother, and identifies barriers that can be encountered in seeking to interact with school professionals in the special education milieu. The case study presents a conceptual model, called the three-legged stool of parental inclusion, which is…

Identification of macromolecules in food is a standard introductory high school biology lab. The intent of this article is to describe the conversion of this standard cookbook lab into an inquiry investigation. Instead of verifying the macromolecules found in food, students use their knowledge of the macromolecules in food to determine the…