The importance of STEM education to societal developments provides justification for assuring K-12 teachers are prepared to teach the related content. Inservice teacher professional development is critical to achieving the goal of enhanced student knowledge of STEM. Combining the need for increased capacity to teach STEM and the extant literature…

This study of over 2000 US college students examines the Community of Inquiry framework (CoI) in its capacity to describe and explain differences in learning outcomes in hybrid and fully online learning environments. We hypothesize that the CoI model's theoretical constructs of "presence" reflect educational effectiveness in a variety of…

This study is part of ongoing research investigating the experiences of undergraduate students who enroll in an integrated inquiry-based biology program during their freshman year. The purpose of this study was to explore students' perspectives on the program and their perceptions of science and scientific inquiry after completing the program.…

The pedagogical value of problem-based and inquiry-based learning activities has led to increased use of this approach in many courses. While scenarios or case studies were initially presented to learners as text-based material, the development of modern software technology provides the opportunity to deliver scenarios as e-learning modules,…

This article is about a group of eight people joined by a common idea--a strong call to enrich education in Croatia so that it motivates leadership and empowers children. Through use of philosophy and methodology of Appreciative Inquiry, this informal group of people has gradually developed into the core team of a potential national movement.…

Fielding questions and curiosity about your research prompts you to consider how it is being read and understood. As a reader of research my inquisitiveness is about what its relationship is with other research, why the research is designed in a particular way and how researchers arrive at their findings. In other words, one looks for conceptual…

In any demonstration to students, producing light and sound usually ensures interest and can enhance understanding and retention of the concepts involved. A guided inquiry (Predict, Observe, Explain: POE) approach was used to involve the students actively in their learning about the explosive combustion of fine flour particles in air in the…

We have developed a two-week guided-inquiry laboratory in which first-semester general chemistry students investigate a suspected arson using gas chromatography--mass spectrometry and paper chromatography. In the process of evaluating evidence from the crime scene, students develop and test hypotheses and learn the fundamentals of chromatography,…

Questions are powerful tools that are central to scientific inquiry. Given the importance of investigable questions to scientific inquiry, what can teachers do to help students learn how to generate them? Possibilities the author explores in this article are (a) demonstrating to students that we value their questions, (b) providing students with…

One way to advance inquiry in the classroom is to establish a systematic strategy for reflecting on our practice and our students' readiness to engage in increasingly complex scientific reasoning. The Matrix for Assessing and Planning Scientific Inquiry (MAPSI) is a tool that promotes this valuable reflection so that we, as teachers, are better…

This paper reports on a strategy for exploring the life-centric practice of a lecturer in Higher Education. The initiative for this inquiry arose out of the realisation that there did not appear to be positive, heart-lifting stories in a lecturer's current teaching experiences. Using an appreciative eye and supported by a critical friend,…

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) poses significant challenges for teaching in the context of an undergraduate laboratory, foremost because of high equipment cost. Current off-the-shelf data-acquisition hardware, however, is sufficiently powerful to constitute the core of a fully digital NMR spectrometer operating at the earth's field. We present…

This article disseminates findings from a multi-year study regarding secondary preservice science teachers' perceptions toward inquiry-based science teaching, and the extent these perceptions are augmented by their practicum. While findings indicated that preservice teachers did improve their understanding and capability of using scientific…

Expanding upon previous theorizing of Art[middle dot]I/f/act[middle dot]ology published in "Qualitative Inquiry" in 2008, this article offers autoethnographic re:collections of a performance/paper presented at the international "Academic Identities in Crisis?" conference at the University of Central Lancashire, held in…

This article presents a commentary exchange between authors Laurie Grobman and Richard C. Raymond regarding Raymond's article "Re-placing Lit in Comp II: Pragmatic/Humanistic Benefits." Grobman said that in her brief commentary on Raymond's article, she chooses not to explicitly address his thesis that literature belongs in a research-based…