The Inquiry Model

When giving our presentation on the Inquiry Model to the class, our objectives were to define what the inquiry model is, inform the class about the importance of inquiry, identify the outcomes of inquiry, explain how it differs from other approaches, and explain the benefits. We felt like going over these aspects would give the class a clearer and better understanding of the topic.

Our opening statement was giving the class a clear-cut definition of what the Inquiry Model means. It contains many different things in the definition. A few of the things that we highlighted were that it “implies involvement that leads to understanding; you have to possess skills to seek resolutions to questions while acquiring new knowledge, it means seeking information through the form of questioning, and most importantly it’s a student-centered and teacher-guided instructional approach (thirteen ed online).” Some of the most important parts of inquiry-based learning are “generating new questions, asking questions, creating hypotheses, investigation, constructing new knowledge, reflecting on discoveries, and applying newly-acquired knowledge in your own life (inquiry learn).”

We then went on to discuss the background information and how all of this started. One of the key events that we shared was the Ten Rational Powers which occurred in 1961. “The Educational Policies Commission came up with “ten rational powers” that they felt were essential for students. The “ten rational powers” were recalling and imagining, classifying and generalizing, comparing and evaluating, analyzing and synthesizing, and deducing and inferring. Today these are distinguished as the basic fundamentals of inquiry-based learning (thirteen ed online).”

Reviewing the history of the Inquiry Model and going over how it originated spurred our group to then discuss the importance of using it as an individual. The major idea that we wanted the class to take away from this was that it’s far more important to actually understand the information than to just memorize facts about the information given. Sure in certain situations or courses this may not be the case, but in life in general this is definitely true. Memorizing things is not suggested because the most important thing is to comprehend something as a whole rather than little specific random facts. Another thing that we highlighted was that in order to learn at an efficient pace, seeking appropriate resolutions to questions is absolutely mandatory. For instance in a chemistry class, your assignment is to come up with a hypothesis for the current lab you’re doing.