Why inquiry based learning does not work

Workplace skills. A related point: What assurance do we have that inquiry-based learning will lead to the development of necessary workplace skills?

Cultural mismatch. Inquiry-based learning may work for some learners, but others, especially those from marginalized groups need access to the societal codes for knowledge in a more direct fashion Delpit, Excessive individualization. Lack of experiences to draw upon.

Does everything have to be based on what you already know? If so, how is new learning even possible? The importance of experiences implies that we find ways to incorporate richer experiences into learning.

Dewey argues for making learning social-centered, rather than just child-centered. A related approach is to ask learners to critically engage with books, websites, and ideas that extend their world.

Yet another is to expand direct experiences through field trips, service learning, nature study, or challenging problems. Yet each of the means just suggested for enlarging experiences has its own problems and none are guaranteed to work. Effectiveness for learning specific skills and knowledge. Inquiry-based learning, and other minimally guided instruction, is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches emphasizing guidance. For example, phonics instruction might be effective, but have even greater long-term benefits when embedded within more meaningful contexts.

Certification of skills. Should we tell children not to bother learning to draw because you can take pictures with your iphone? I suspect complaints about the relevance of math stem from the perception that math is hard and the way people rationalize the fact that they have not mastered it.

I definitely do not think that having a long and tedious discussion of how many pizzas are needed to feed the class, where everyone has a chance to express their opinions in the possible absence of mathematical understanding, is an effective way of achieving such mastery. Yet the authors argue this is a valid approach because, as they put it:. In practice, mathematicians identify, or are approached with, a problem. They must decide on the maths they can use to solve it. Then they come up with a procedure, solve using the mathematics and monitor the outcome.

School children are not professional mathematicians. There is a difference in the level of expertise here. Why would we assume that the most effective way of teaching math would be by trying to copy what expert mathematicians do?

Paul Kirschner, a professor at Open University in the Netherlands, has written about this strange conflation , which he describes as confusing epistemology — how new knowledge is discovered about the world — with pedagogy — the best methods for teaching well-established knowledge to novices.

It does not matter which approach looks most like what professional mathematicians do. It matters which approach is most effective. As inquiry is a self-directed form of learning, they must be comfortable with taking responsibility for their own learning , without relying on someone telling them what to do on a continuous basis.

While this does provide for student agency and voice, students may not work well in an unstructured environment if they are unprepared or unequipped for this shift. The workaround: The critical solution to this potential problem is to teach the skills of the inquiry process to learners. All learners have the capacity to ask great questions, and to make judgements about the information they are researching.

However, they must be taught these skills. When teachers base their classroom inquiry on a structured inquiry process, and teach students how to use this process, they provide a scaffold for self-directed learning that enables all students to feel supported along the way. The nature of inquiry-based learning does not lend itself to traditional models of assessment.

The teacher-centred paradigm of pre-preparing assessments that are designed to confirm retention of pre-determined knowledge will not work well in an inquiry setting. This model will standardise and effectively limit the levels of achievement to those that have already been decided by the teacher. When this happens, individual pathways and potential for personalised learning goals are lost. The workaround: The solution is for the teacher to work from within the process, capturing evidence of learning and higher-order thinking as students are developing these skills.

From the very beginning of a unit of inquiry, teachers create an opportunity for diagnostic assessment by asking an essential question. Listening to student voice through their responses will provide a wealth of information about prior knowledge and experience, perspective, ability and interest, while engaging all learners in a conversation that builds curiosity. Ongoing, real-time formative assessment is the answer here, and requires an interactive role from the classroom teacher, to provide formative feedback and support students to develop their learning goals.

Asking questions to drive learning is at the heart of the inquiry model. When teachers are unsure of how to manage this process, they may default to asking closed, content-specific questions, and the rigour of authentic inquiry is lost. It is important for the teacher to have a proper grasp of how to ask effective questions to guide their students towards curricular outcomes, while still enabling learners to think deeply and critically about their own learning.

If the teacher is lacking in this area, it has a trickle-down effect on the students as they will not learn the basics of effective questioning, reasoning, and problem solving.

The workaround: The solution is to ask questions that connect to the essential understandings and deep concepts of the curriculum, rather than to specific areas of surface-level content. These questions are open to a range of perspectives and inspire a range of responses. Students will discover the content more readily when they understand and explore the purpose and relevance of learning it.

Learner portfolios become the collection point for evidence of learning in an inquiry-based classroom, as students work at their own pace and level. If teachers do not manage this process well, they may revert to relying on summative assessment tasks to determine progress.

This is very time-consuming as these assessments are usually large pieces of work that must be individually graded. The workaround: The solution for teachers is to focus on collecting evidence of learning against achievement standards throughout the learning process.

When teachers are able to assign a level of achievement and provide formative feedback in the moment, they add this to the learner portfolio, which becomes a progressive report of achievement rather than a filing cabinet to be sorted out later.

Schools, he says, were created to teach domain-specific, biologically secondary skills, such as problem-solving. His key contention is that we acquire biologically secondary information slowly and with considerable effort using an inquiry-based learning approach, while we acquire it more rapidly and easily via explicit instruction from other people — such as teachers.

Central to this is the role of our working memory, which has very limited capacity and limited duration for retention. Newly acquired information must transfer through this constrained working memory into our large, long-term memory — a memory believed to have no limitations on capacity or duration. When triggered by signals, this stored information can be transferred back to working memory to produce appropriate action.

Education is key to these processes.