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Article Excerpt
The purpose of this case study was to examine a teacher's guidance of an inquiry learning project in an ordinary elementary-school classroom. The participants in the study were 21 Finnish, grade 4 students (10 years old), from which four students were selected for intensive observation. The technical infrastructure of the study was Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE). The project consisted of a series of 21 lessons. Each lesson was videotaped, and the contents of transcribed videotapes were analyzed by qualitative content analysis. The analysis revealed that although the teacher was able to straightforwardly guide the three, more advanced students through the progressive-inquiry cycle, she had a great deal of difficulty in the case of the less advanced student. Effective teacher guidance appears to be a mediated process, requiring an externalized record of students' inquiry, for example, their postings, or at least a verbalized account of it to help the teacher ground her efforts to guide the deepening inquiry.
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Inquiry learning is a common approach in science education. It has also been applied in a number of other educational programs, and, lately, those assisted by modern collaborative technology (for a review, see Lehtinen, Hakkarainen, Lipponen, Rahikainen, & Muukkonen, 1999); positive results have been reported, such as enhanced individual learning outcomes, overall more positive attitudes towards learning, students' increased interest in and motivation for learning, and a higher quality of social interaction (Goldman, Mayfield-Stewart, Bateman, Pellegrino, & Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1998; Koschmann, 1996; Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Lamon, 1994).
Inquiry learning, however, has also received criticism, such as inefficiency of the method, difficulty of justifying the amount of time needed to conduct genuine inquiry, and the paucity of knowledge gained from that process (Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000). Another claim is that inquiry learning has shortcomings because there is insufficient research about students' and teachers' actual experiences in regular science classrooms to properly understand the inquiry process (Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass, & Fredricks, 1998), and, especially, to know how to support and guide inquiry learning activities (Kolodner, 2001). Technological solutions can help the process of guidance by providing tutoring tools, built-in support and scaffolds, or even entire learning environments (Ainsworth, Wood, & O'Malley, 1998; Davis & Linn, 2000; Fretz, et al., 2002; Goldman, Zech, Biswas, Noser, & CTGV, 1999; Guzdial & Turns, 2000; Muukkonen, Lakkala, & Hakkarainen, 2001; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; White, 1993). Yet technological guidance does not, by itself, create a genuine inquiry culture; a supporting social infrastructure is needed as well (Bielaczyc, 2001). In creation of the social infrastructure, the teacher's personal guidance and coaching has a crucial role. Advancement of inquiry is dependent on the teacher's timely efforts to guide each student's and the whole community's process of inquiry, efforts that have to be carefully tailored to each student's specific needs without being intrusive (Winn, 2002).
In inquiry learning, students are required to engage in more intensive self-regulative efforts than in traditional teacher-directed classroom situations. The teacher does not usually supply or even determine clear, concrete learning goals, but provides context and starting points for the students' own inquiries; the students are themselves responsible for generating their specific learning agenda and setting up their learning goals. Further, learning tasks are often more open-ended and ill-defined, and thus more complicated to work with than those of conventional learning situations. Inquiry learning is also often collaborative in nature; this collaboration poses challenges for students who are accustomed to individual approaches to learning. Therefore, teachers should not rely too much on students' unguided creativity, but should intervene by providing pedagogical guidance and an expert model if students are not able to make progress themselves. In order to productively participate in the process of inquiry, in each pedagogical situation, a balance should be found between teacher-controlled and student-controlled aspects of inquiry (Brown et al., 1993; Brown & Campione, 1996; Hakkarainen, Lipponen, & Jarvela, 2002).
The present study relies on a pedagogical approach called Progressive Inquiry (hereafter, PI, Hakkarainen, 2003; Hakkarainen & Sintonen, 2002), intended to facilitate expert-like question-driven and explanation-oriented working with knowledge at the elementary level of education. Characteristic of PI is to guide young students to (a) systematically generate their own research questions, (b) construct their own intuitive working theories, (c) critically evaluate and assess the various intuitive conceptions generated, (d) search for new scientific information, (e) engage in progressive generation of subordinate questions and (f) build new working theories as the process continues. All aspects of inquiry, from setting up research questions and information search to advancement of communal knowledge, may be shared between students through the Computer-supported Intentional Learning Environment (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), which was also used in the present study as a technical infrastructure. Figure 1 presents a pedagogical model of PI.
Progressive inquiry may be regarded as consisting of phases, each of which has its own particular epistemic objective as well as specific challenges for the teacher and requirements concerning her or his guidance. A starting point for the process of inquiry is creating context for a study project to help students understand why the issues in question are important and worthwhile to investigate. During this stage, the teacher creates a motivational basis for the progressive inquiry process and helps students make cognitive commitments to pursue their personal (or team-based) inquiries. A crucial aspect of any inquiry whatsoever is to guide the students to pose questions or problems that direct their subsequent process of inquiry. It appears that explanation-seeking questions and questions that arise from the students' own need to understand have a special value in inquiry. By encouraging students to systematically create and build their own tentative working theories for problems being investigated, the participants can be guided to trust their own voices rather than merely rely on the teacher's cognitive authority (Scardamalia, 2002). In this process of self-development, students may be helped to deepen their understanding by guiding them to explain the investigated issues...
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