The paper describes the integration of web resources and technology as instructional and learning tools in oral history projects. The computer-mediated oral history project centred around interviews with community elders combined with new technologies to engage students in authentic historical inquiry. The study examined learners' affective…

This article reports a design experiment conducted over three successive school years, with the teacher's goal of having his Grade 4 students assume increasing levels of collective responsibility for advancing their knowledge of optics. Classroom practices conducive to sustained knowledge building were co-constructed by the teacher and students,…

Attend a conference of music educational researchers and you will have entered a field of enquiry concerned to understand and explain the issues and problems identified by those who move within the field of enquiry. The inhabitants of this realm sometimes speak of young people, sometimes reveal the ways in which they have consulted them, probed…

Every schoolyard presents a wealth of opportunities for science exploration. To capitalize on this resource, the authors developed an activity in which students assessed whether their schoolyard could provide a viable habitat for treefrogs. This inquiry-based module was composed of three lessons: A Hoppin' Treefrog Adventure, Field Research Means…

In this inquiry-based activity, Roborovsky hamsters are used to provide students with an opportunity to develop their skills of analysis, inquiry, and design. These hamsters are easy to maintain, yet offer students a means to use conventional techniques and those of their own design to make further observations through measuring, assessing, and…

We summarize a conference on scientific inquiry bringing together science educators, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science with three goals: (1) to establish how much consensus exists about scientific inquiry; (2) to discuss implications of that consensus for teaching science; and (3) to identify areas where consensus is lacking to…

In this article it is argued that communities of enquiry can and should be developed in courses delivered online. These communities make the most of the available technological resources and overcome some otherwise daunting challenges faced in online course delivery. Indeed, asynchronous tools like discussion boards offer a range of benefits for…

This two-year study focused on the lived terms of inquiry in middle-school science classrooms. The conditions that enable teachers to see and act on science learning as ongoing inquiry were deliberately sought in Year 2. Nine science teachers participated in search of capacities connecting curriculum, teaching, and assessment for greater student…

Project work (PW) provides one of the pathways for students' self-inquiry learning and collaboration in Singapore schools. In this context, PW teachers function as facilitators. This study investigated quantitatively how a group of 270 secondary-school students (aged 14 years) perceived their seven PW teacher-facilitators' face-to-face…

There are thousands of school gardens in the United States, and there is anecdotal evidence that school garden programs can enhance students' learning in academic, social, and health-related domains. There has been little rigorous research, however, on the effects of school gardens or on the factors that promote the sustainability of these…

This article describes one teacher's journey to improve her teaching of mathematics by conducting classroom-based inquiry to meet the specific mathematical needs in her second grade classroom. Her process to develop and improve computational fluency through research-based methods is detailed. (Contains 9 figures.)

Teaching and learning continues to be driven by a version of professionalism that construes practice to be a form of applied science. This paper challenges that paradigm. In particular, subjecting and assimilating practical activity to a technical mode of rationality is challenged as not being the most appropriate way to approach teaching,…

This study reports changes in kindergarten students' understanding of magnets after participating in a series of hands-on, inquiry-based lessons. The lessons focused on the dipole nature of magnets and employed a visual representation of a magnet as an arrow for the kindergarten students. This dipole model was used to describe how magnets interact…

One way of helping faculty understand the integral role of writing in their various disciplines is to present disciplines as ways of doing, which links ways of knowing and writing in the disciplines. Ways of doing identified by faculty are used to describe broader generic and disciplinary structures, metagenres, and metadisciplines. The author…

Math is not the only topic that will be discussed when young children are asked to care for and count "mealworms," a type of insect larvae (just as caterpillars are the babies of butterflies, these larvae are babies of beetles). The following activity can take place over two months as the beetles undergo metamorphosis from larvae to adults. As the…