Young children are called natural scientists for good reason. Even infants investigate their surroundings, using their senses to look, touch, smell, hear, and taste. As children discover objects and situations that are puzzling or intriguing--things that provoke their curiosity--they begin looking for ways to find answers, all in an effort to…

While developing critical literacy in our students is a priority for all of us, Wilhelm believes that we must develop a critical literacy of teaching, as well. He asserts that this can best be achieved by 1) teaching through an inquiry context, and 2) taking on a teacher-researcher stance to think both reflectively and reflexively about our…

At Glendale School in the Calgary Board of Education, Grade 1 students worried that they were too distracted with their studies and other activities to remember to water their plant. So they made other arrangements. The students invented and built Ralph, a robot that waters the plant, as part of their study of robotics, a subject that all Glendale…

This study describes an analytic procedure to examine inquiry processes in science teaching and learning. This procedure was applied to the study of a seismology unit in a ninth-grade earth science classroom. An emergent coding scheme was developed that provided a description of the different activities, science content, and type of scientific…

While publishing has not typically been part of the official job description of teachers in the same way it has been for university scholars, a significant portion of articles in journals like "Voices from the Middle" are written by practicing teachers. Writing about your teaching practice or classroom inquiry for an audience of fellow teachers…

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the integration of Norfolk Public Schools. On February 2, 1959, the "Norfolk 17" integrated the formerly all-white public middle and high schools in Norfolk, Virginia. Less known than their counterparts in Little Rock, Arkansas, the stories of the Norfolk 17 underscore the struggle schools…

There's no better way to celebrate 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, than by curling up with a good book under summer skies. To every civilization, in every age, the skies inspired imagination and scientific inquiry. There's no better place to start your summer reading than under their influence. Here are a few selections identified by…

To give students a tangible model of an ecosystem and have them experience what could happen if a component of that ecosystem were removed; the authors developed a hands-on, inquiry-based activity that visually demonstrates the concept of a delicately balanced ecosystem through a modification of the popular game Jenga. This activity can be…

The relationship between the scholarship of teaching and practitioner inquiry is characterized both by questions of definition (what "counts" as scholarship and who can produce it) and execution (how to facilitate the representation, interpretation and analysis of teaching). This article addresses both issues by beginning with an…

This study attempted to investigate the alternative conceptions that a group of 12 Lebanese students in a grade 9 class hold about electricity. It also attempted to evaluate learning outcomes of implementing in that class an inquiry-based module for the acquisition of conceptual understanding of basic concepts in electricity. Fourteen mostly…

The City of Richgate project worked with eight intergenerational immigrant families and examined immigrant experiences and narratives through a community-engaged process that employed a/r/tography as a methodology. As such, the research also investigated the extent to which a/r/tographical research could visually and narratively portray the…

In this paper we make the case that the language of school science and the language of science are widely divergent. We trace the divergence to a simple view of reading that prevails not only in science education but in most of schooling. Based upon the importance of language in science and the role of language in capturing the essential nature of…

Interviews with key scientists who had conducted research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), together with analysis of media reports, documentaries and other literature published during and after the SARS epidemic, revealed many interesting aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and scientific inquiry in contemporary scientific research…

The paradigm of geologic time is built on complex concepts, and students master it in multiple steps. Concepts in Geology is an inquiry-based geology class for preservice teachers at Wright State University. The instructors used the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) to determine if students' understanding of key ideas about geologic time and…

What is good mathematics teaching? What is mathematics teaching good for? Who is mathematics teaching for? These are just some of the questions addressed in "Transforming Primary Mathematics", a highly timely new resource for teachers which accessibly sets out the key theories and latest research in primary maths today. Under-pinned by findings…