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What is Inquiry-Based Learning?
What is Inquiry-Based Learning?
This method shifts the role of teachers to facilitators who guide students through the discovery process. Instead of providing answers, teachers help students ask meaningful questions, explore resources, and develop conclusions supported by evidence.
What is Inquiry-Based Teaching and Learning in the classroom?
At its heart, inquiry-based education in classrooms begins with questions rather than answers. This approach:
- Taps into students’ curiosity.
- Promotes ownership of learning as students pursue topics of personal interest while meeting curriculum objectives.
- Balances freedom and structure. Teachers provide frameworks and scaffolds for support, while students take charge of their learning.
- Encourages reflection, metacognition, and the presentation of findings to authentic audiences.
- Empowers learners to explore, hypothesize, and take action, providing opportunities for students to become self-directed thinkers and problem-solvers.
Key Components of Effective Inquiry-Based Learning
1. Essential Questions
Good Driving Questions are provocative, challenging, and open-ended questions with no single correct answer, and go to the heart of a discipline or topic.
Examples:
- Social Studies: How might we increase access to fresh local veggies in our neighborhoods that are designated food deserts?
- Science: How might your community’s water cycle and weather be impacted due to global warming?
- Math: How can we model real-world problems using data and equations?
2. Active Exploration
In an inquiry-based classroom, students engage in hands-on exploration and authentic learning experiences. They conduct experiments or create models in math and science, participate in debates and socratic seminar in humanities.
Additionally, if inquiry takes place within a project-based course, students collaborate to generate “knows” and need-to-knows,” driving their own inquiry and next steps. In response to the “need-to-knows, students investigate authentic sources, including interviews, primary documents, and multimedia resources. This phase allows students to make choices about their project direction and products.
Student Investigation
Inquiry requires students to gather information from diverse sources through independent investigation, teacher-provided materials, and real-world data collection.
Teachers play a key role in the inquiry process by:
- Teaching research skills and source evaluation.
- Encouraging students to drive their own search for answers.
- Supporting decision-making about project direction.
- Require students to be working on different, appropriately challenging tasks that support their specific needs and communicate high standards and expectations.
Reflection and Synthesis
Inquiry-based learning isn’t complete until students analyze their findings, make connections, and synthesize ideas into clear conclusions.
- Students reflect on how they learned, not just what they learned.
- Synthesis prepares students for presenting their findings to authentic audiences through reports, presentations, or other public products.
- Regular formative assessments and feedback help teachers adjust instruction while creating differentiation and high standards.
- Teachers utilize consistent assessments and additional data gathering opportunities (pre, during, post) to inform current and future learning opportunities.
Inquiry-Based Teaching and Strategies for the Classroom
Problem-Based Learning Integration
Like project-based learning (PBL), problem-based learning (PrBL) engages students in complex tasks, requires students to ask questions, employs student-centered instruction, small group work, and positions the teacher as a facilitator of learning. PrBL accurately reflects the types of explorations, discussions, questions, and interactions that are authentic to mathematics as a discipline. PrBL also uses formative and performance-based assessments to give feedback and check student progress. To learn more about the similarities and differences between PrBL and PBL, read Project-Based Learning vs. Problem-Based Learning: Which is right for your Classroom?
Benefits of Inquiry-Based Approaches for Students
There are many benefits to creating a student-centered, inquiry-based environment. Most notably, inquiry engages students more deeply and strengthens relationships between teachers and peers.
Paul Gorski notes in Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty that:
“Low-income students disproportionately are subject to the most rote, least engaging, lowest-expectation teaching… Low-income students, like all students, learn best when we teach in student-centered ways that emphasize deep engagement and higher-order learning.” (Gorski, 2013)
When schools commit to inquiry-based instruction, students engage in authentic, complex thinking and problem-solving that foster autonomy and self-direction. Research also shows that students grasp core concepts more effectively when they can see the direct application of what they are learning (National Research Council, 2000).
Implementing Inquiry-Based Learning in Your Classroom
Getting Started
New Tech Network (NTN) promotes both project-based learning (PBL) and problem-based learning (PrBL) as inquiry-based, learner-centered instructional approaches. In contrast to teacher-led instruction, PBL and PrBL encourage student engagement, collaboration, and problem-solving, empowering students to become active participants in their own learning. To learn more about PBL read: The Comprehensive Guide to Project-Based Learning.
Creating a Supportive Learning Environment
NTN’s Focus Area of Supportive Culture supports school communities in fostering a school-wide culture of belonging, care, community, and growth for adults and students. When classrooms focus on the work of a supportive culture, they cultivate a learning environment that feels safe and supportive by creating rituals and routines that foster relationship building and well-being.
Examples of these supports are in NTN’s Culture Practices Cards:
- Co-Create Community Agreements: Can generate active cooperation, collective sense-making. Ensuring each and every student has an opportunity to co-create shared processes for engaging in learning is a key component to equitable learning environments.
- Community Circles: A ritual and routine that involves learners collectively connecting, reflecting, and developing social and emotional learning skills. When used routinely, community circles support the cultivation of belonging, care and community within a learning environment.
- The Incredible 5-Point Scale: a tool used to assist learners in becoming aware of their emotions and helping them advocate for what they need to self-regulate.
Culture practices like these are required to create the kind of classroom community that is supportive and inclusive for all students.
You can find these cards by downloading the NTN Practices Cards Sample Deck here.
Assessment in Inquiry-Based Learning
Focus on Application vs. Memorization
While traditional assessments like quizzes, exit tickets, and problem sets often find a place in an inquiry-based classroom, the primary measure of student learning comes from authentic and real-world project products and tasks. PBL tends to culminate in “performance assessments” like proposals, reports, presentations, and other products where students demonstrate their learning through tangible artifacts that can be assessed against clear and explicit criteria using a rubric or similar tool.
Ongoing Assessment vs. One-Time Evaluation
For assessment to be a tool for student learning, we know that it needs to be moved earlier in the learning process rather than postponed until the end of instruction. The most effective assessments for learning are those that are “formative assessments” in that they are part of a process of making decisions about where a student is in their learning and where they need to go next.
Feedback and Revision
Providing feedback to students on their performance is critical to their growth and development, but in order for feedback to impact student learning, it needs to be timely, meaningful, and actionable. In more traditional classes, the majority of feedback students receive comes in the form of grades and comments as summative feedback on assignments and tests. While this data gives students information about their performance, it is limited in how it can help motivate a student to take their learning to the next level. PBL lets us move assessment into the middle of the learning process; therefore teachers situate feedback as part of the students’ process of working through the project. Previously unread comments on a student essay take on new importance for the student when they are part of their feedback on a draft proposal, report, or other project artifact as part of a PBL unit.
Click here to learn more about How to Use Assessments in Project Based Learning (PBL) for Effective Student Learning.
FAQs
What’s the difference between inquiry-based learning and project-based learning?
Effective PBL emphasizes real-world problems, inquiry, and topics that allow students to connect academic content to meaningful contexts. By learning through authentic problems and engaging collaboratively on tasks, students develop knowledge and skills, a deeper understanding of the subject matter and its relevance in their lives. PBL centers around inquiry but inquiry-based learning does not have to include PBL. Smaller problems and questions presented to students in a class period is a good way to take small steps into inquiry-based teaching.
How can I assess student learning in inquiry-based classrooms?
Frequent formative assessments and ongoing feedback are crucial in guiding students through each benchmark in the project process or in a unit. Prioritize asset-based feedback in each lesson, to lean into learner strengths and growth in critical thinking skills over time.
In an inquiry-based environment, all students take an active role in their own learning. This takes on many forms including allowing students to give and receive feedback so that reflection and revision on their work can occur.
How do I help students who struggle with the open-ended nature of inquiry learning?
Scaffolding activities should be in response to student inquiry. PBL educators revisit essential questions regularly to track progress and connect daily tasks with learning objectives and project goals. This iterative process fosters sustained inquiry and reinforces the relevance of each activity. Scaffolding can take the form of a teacher providing scaffolded learning by hosting small group workshops or students engaging in whole class socratic seminars, independent research, learner-centered activities, lab investigations, formative assessments, and more.
Each task and activity builds upon the previous one, providing a clear pathway to success while maintaining the flexibility to address individual needs. Resources such as graphic organizers, sample outlines, and learner-centered practices can offer initial scaffolds as students learn something new or connect to students’ prior knowledge. Over time, educators may gradually reduce these scaffolds, encouraging students to work independently.
When teachers use inquiry-based learning, they create classrooms where curiosity drives exploration and discovery. This approach engages students, deepens understanding, and prepares them to be lifelong learners. By fostering authentic investigation and presenting their findings, inquiry provides a powerful way to help practice the skills students need to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
Work cited:
Gorski, P. (2018). Reaching and teaching students in poverty: strategies for erasing the opportunity gap. Second edition. New York, NY, Teachers College Press.
National Research Council. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.
