Using Levels of Inquiry in the Classroom

If you are a physics teacher, I am sure you have wrestled with the level of inquiry with which you present activities to your students. Should all laboratory experiences in a physics class require a similar level of student inquiry? Do you believe the students in your class have an innate ability to ‘do science’ as scientists, or do you think that you need to develop these skills in them? As you consider these questions, let us look at one class's experience as they investigate the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration.

The Student Experience
On Monday, students enter the physics classroom to find a room full of exploration stations relating to the concept of force. As they make their way from exhibit to exhibit in this hands-on, museum-type experience, they encounter a series of brief tasks they are asked to perform, followed by a thought provoking question at each. For example,


“You notice a fan apparatus that is attached to a cart. After
you turn on the fan and release the cart, carefully observe
the type of motion that results. Let’s assume that the fan
provides a constant force on the cart. What type of motion
occurs when a constant force acts on an object?”



Exploration is an important first step as students encounter new phenomena and new experiences. Although students begin to generate their own set of questions in Monday’s activity, the teacher is the one who asked the initial questions and provided the specific tasks to perform.

On Tuesday, students participate in an interactive demonstration involving a piece of equipment and phenomenon that they had already ‘played with’ the day before. The demonstration is designed to address a common misconception that students have and to give them a chance to share their beliefs concerning the concept at hand. As the teacher and students collect data, make observations, and perform the demonstration, the teacher is careful to ask questions that not only address the misconception but also help students reflect on their thought processes and methodology. “How can we know that a constant force was acting on the cart? How can we measure the fan’s force while the cart is in motion?” Students might discuss their answers with a classmate and then write about not only what they learned but how they know it. Here the teacher has asked the questions and, through guided inquiry, has helped the student think through how these questions might be answered.

On Wednesday, a brief question is posed by the teacher in a context that is relevant for students. As students move to the laboratory, they seek to discover an answer to this question by (1) using equipment that they are familiar with from the past two days, and (2) considering how this equipment might be best used in light of the previous day’s demonstrations. “How does changing the mass of a cart and changing the force on the cart affect its acceleration?” is the question posed. Here the teacher has asked the question, but the students must design their own procedure to answer this question. To the lab they go!

As the week comes to a close, students are now faced with the need to apply in the ‘laboratory’ what they have explored, interacted with, and discovered. They are faced with a challenge, a competition, or a problem. They must apply and evaluate what they have learned—or perhaps create something! As this particular week comes to an end, students are given the class challenge to use their teacher’s car as the object with which they must creatively apply the force-mass-acceleration relationship that they have discovered. They decide to determine the car’s mass by pushing it with a constant force and by determining its acceleration. In this activity, not only did the students design the experiment, they helped form the question to investigate. To the parking lot they go!


Levels of Inquiry
In the article, “Structuring the Level of Inquiry in Your Classroom,” authors Fay and Bretz suggest four levels of inquiry (numbered 0 through 3) as summarized in the table below. One might notice that as the force-mass-acceleration relationship was developed in the activities above, the level of inquiry was increased from level 1 to level 3 as the locus of control shifted from the teacher to the student.

Level	Problem/Question	Procedure/Method	Solution
0	Provided to student	Provided to student	Provided to student
1	Provided to student	Provided to student	Constructed by student
2	Provided to student	Constructed by student	Constructed by student
3	Constructed by student	Constructed by student	Constructed by student

The figure below, adapted from “Levels of Inquiry: Hierarchies of Pedagogical Practices and Inquiry Processes,” illustrates the continuum that was used in the above classroom example.



Although the trajectory of inquiry suggested above—that is, moving from low inquiry to high inquiry—is one of many and is not meant to be a formula for which every concept should necessarily be developed, it has been chosen as a framework that affords students the opportunity to grow in their ability to use inquiry as their level of conceptual understanding and comfort with the equipment at hand deepens. Such a hierarchical inquiry paradigm models Bloom’s taxonomy, provides teachers a framework upon which inquiry activities can be built, and most importantly, works for students.


This month's article is contributed by Jeff Rylander. Jeff is a graduate of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He has been a high school physics teacher for 20 years. Jeff is currently the Supervisor of the Science Department at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, IL, where he has served since 2006. Jeff has been instrumental in encouraging science teachers to implement inquiry-based activities into their science classes and to adopt the use of lab notebooks and lab journals. In addition to his duties as science supervisor, Jeff teaches Regular Physics at Glenbrook South.