This paper is concerned with the relationship between authenticity and adult learning and prompted by some studies in which adult "authentic learning" is a central concept. The implication revealed by them is that real-worldness of learning contexts, learning content and learning tasks is perceived as conferring authenticity on learning. Here,…

This paper reports on strategic developments to enhance student learner autonomy skills through the use of enquiry-based learning (EBL) in the design of higher education programmes. The UK's Sheffield Hallam University is a recognized Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in the field of developing learner autonomy. Central to the…

Teaching by inquiry is touted for its potential to encourage students to reason scientifically. Yet, even when inquiry teaching is practiced, complexity of students' reasoning may be limited or unbalanced. We describe an analytic tool for recognizing when students are engaged in complex reasoning during inquiry teaching. Using classrooms that…

There are continuing educational and political debates about "inquiry" versus "direct" teaching of science. Traditional science instruction has been largely direct but in the US, recent national and state science education standards advocate inquiry throughout K-12 education. While inquiry-based instruction has the advantage of modelling aspects…

Portugal has long been touted as a popular destination for savvy travelers, but now educators are touting it as something else--a professional development (PD) powerhouse for inquiry-based science! This article describes Portugal's ongoing efforts to reform its country's elementary science education program through a project known as the…

A fear of snakes developed into an opportunity to teach students about the process of science: formulating questions, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating findings to the public. By using snakes to help students "think like a scientist," the authors engaged students in a five-day unit on inquiry while providing information about snakes…

After years of generating divergent approaches to scholarship, cast mostly as reactions against a historical orthodoxy, the curriculum studies community is now looking at a new dialectic--one marked by a physics that pull ideas inward toward some centripetal center. The tension between looking for unifying ideas as they articulate with a…

Although inquiry-based science teaching has been around since the 1960s, many teachers are slow to incorporate inquiry principles into their science lessons. The authors address this issue by using an analogy between a magician's card trick and open inquiry. This analogy was chosen to portray a difference of perspective and demonstrate how the…

Authentic assessment exercises are similar to real-world tasks that would be expected by a professional. An authentic assessment in combination with an inquiry-based learning activity enhances students' learning and rehearses them for their future roles, whether as scientists or as informed citizens. Over a period of 2 years, we experimented with…

How many of our students come to the classroom with little background knowledge about the world around them and how things work? To help students develop conceptual understanding and explore the design process, the author brought the NASA "Engineering Design Challenges" program to his school district, redeveloped for elementary students. In this…

How does classroom interaction support students' apprenticeship into the ways of speaking, writing, and diagramming that constitute the practice of mathematics? We address this problem through an interpretative analysis of a whole-group conversation about alternative ways of solving a problem involving percent discounts that occurred in a sixth…

Artistic, scholarly, and professional works by individual faculty members in the field of film and digital media are not being adequately recognized or rewarded as scholarship activity during performance evaluation in institutions of higher learning. Conventional systems for the recognition and evaluation of work prioritize scientism and compel…

The authors are responding to the critical need for empirical evidence on effective strategies to improve preschool science instruction in preschool. By focusing on the Head Start community, "Foundations of Science Literacy (FSL)" is a credit-bearing professional development course that directly addresses the achievement gap in early…

This study explores the experiences of 4th grade students in an inquiry-based space science classroom. At the heart of the study lies the essential question: What is the lived experience of children engaged in the process of space science inquiry? Through the methodology of phenomenological inquiry, the author investigates the essence of the lived…

"Developing Inquiry for Learning" shows how university tutors can help students to improve their abilities to learn and to become professional inquirers. An increasing proportion of students entering higher education seem to assume that learning is a relatively passive process. This may be the largest single limitation to their achievement.…