The arts embody "one of the oldest forms of knowledge and knowing" and "action research provides opportunities to experiment with art as an integral part of the creation and dissemination of knowledge." From his 16 years' experience as an elementary classroom teacher, the author has found that young children are drawn to an arts-based approach of…

Increasingly, qualitative researchers are combining methods, processes, and principles from two or more methodologies over the course of a research study. Critics charge that researchers adopting combined approaches place too little attention on the historical, epistemological, and theoretical aspects of the research design. Rather than…

This article explores an understanding of "learning" as authentic enquiry and "language" as a social practice of meaning construction as the theoretical perspectives underlying an educational initiation beyond mainstream tertiary language education. With a general ethnographic approach and relying on multiple data sources, we…

In the March/April issue of "The Horn Book Magazine," author and editor Marc Aronson wrote a lightening rod of an essay about nonfiction literature. In the article, he claimed that some "new" nonfiction is groundbreaking because it shows "new knowledge as it is taking shape" (2011, p. 57). He referred to authors of this new nonfiction as…

Teachers' feelings of uncertainty are an overlooked, though crucial, condition necessary for the promotion of educational change. This article investigates the feelings of uncertainty that preservice teachers have toward the conduct of science as inquiry and the extent to which methods courses can confront and embrace those uncertainties. Our work…

Of great importance for achieving science education reform may be teachers' interest in science and enjoyment of science. This study explores the motivational qualities (rated for "interest," "fun," and "learning" value) of different levels of inquiry of hands-on class activities. The participants, 53 preservice teachers in two sections of a…

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the experiences that nationally award-winning, exemplary science teachers have had over their career and examine the alignment of their responses with calls for K-12 science education reform from a selection of prominent commissioned government reports since 1980. From an assessment of the…

Student-centered education involving research experiences or inquiry have been shown to help undergraduate students understand, and become excited about, the process of scientific investigation. These benefits are particularly important for students in the early stages of their degree (Report and Kenny,…

Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it's easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. Stories are meaning making, providing a means of structuring and reflecting on our experiences in order to understand their significance. Story is also life making, a way of…

Geocaching is an inquiry-based activity encouraging creativity, active learning, and real-world problem solving. As such, it is an educational opportunity for students in all grade levels. Educators benefit by observing students using higher-order thinking instead of rote learning offered by using traditional worksheets, tests, or quizzes. Also,…

Despite years of implementing standards-based accountability systems, many teachers today lack the necessary preparation to develop standards-based instructional strategies and to inform decisions utilizing student assessments. The eMINTS ("Enhancing Missouri's Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies") National Center at the…

This article includes the findings from a formative experiment implementing inquiry with informational texts in a fifth-grade bilingual classroom after the completion of state assessments. The pedagogical goals were focused on facilitating engaged reading and writing for native Spanish-speakers and building content knowledge and related academic…

Oxford College is a small liberal-arts intensive 2-year undergraduate division of Emory University, where inquiry-based courses are a required part of the general education program. We have developed an authentic research experience for undergraduates that mimics--as much as possible--a real undergraduate research experience. Our program provides…

This paper describes an approach for supporting inquiry learning from source materials, realised and tested through a tool-kit. The approach is optimised for tasks that require a student to make interpretations across sets of resources, where opinions and justifications may be hard to articulate. We adopt a dialogue-based approach to learning…

This article synthesizes findings from an on-going line of inquiry investigating the potential of educatively scaffolded digital resources to help teachers understand and implement a complex model of history instruction, problem-based historical inquiry. The digital resources developed for this inquiry provided teachers with wise-practice…