CAREER: Inquiry Teaching and Learning: Connecting Research and Practice

The developed survey instrument, “Inquiry-Practices Beliefs Survey” (I-PBS) was administered to all K-8 teachers in a large urban school district. It was one of several methods used to select the five teachers for the longitudinal case studies. Of the 272 completed surveys, 230 teachers responded to all 12 inquiry questions and these scores were analyzed for reliability and construct validity evidence. Specifically, exploratory factor analysis resulted in a two-factor solution explaining 41% of the variance. The first factor, ‘general inquiry practices,’ includes five items such as “I am a facilitator of students’ learning,” and “I use students’ interests as a guide when constructing my lessons.” The second factor, ‘advanced inquiry practices,’ includes seven items such as, “I have students develop their own hypothesis,” and “I have students design their own experiments.” Cronbach’s alpha suggests moderate to strong evidence of internal consistency reliability of the scores produced from the two scales with a coefficient of .592 for ‘general inquiry practices,’ and .846 for ‘advanced inquiry practices. The analysis of the survey items showed that consistently teachers reported that they provided student-centered classrooms and facilitated students’ interests in their own learning; yet, they reported seldom using advanced inquiry practices. These findings were consistent with classroom observation data of the five case studies teachers.

The longitudinal case studies data are currently being analyzed. There are a few findings that have been confirmed. In the longitudinal classroom case studies, observations of teachers’ classroom practices closely resembled teachers’ responses about their beliefs about their inquiry practices as reported by the I-PBS. Teachers did not commonly have student’s complete full inquiry from beginning to end where they develop their own question, design their own experiments and come up with their own research design. Full inquiry was rarely used across all five classrooms. When full inquiry was observed it most often occurred as a teacher required out-side of classroom project such as science fair. "Partial inquiry” experiences as described in the National Science Education Standards (1996) are “where students developed abilities and understanding of selected aspects of the inquiry process” which was an often observed practice across all five (5) classrooms and occurred throughout the school year. Longitudinal research data findings are still being analyzed and future findings for both individual classrooms and across classroom sites will be reported.