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...skills likely occurred during guided inquiry projects with little evidence to support that they used full inquiry as suggested in the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC, 1996).
Introduction
We have learned much about "good" science instruction, but more inquiry-based research reflecting the perspectives of teachers in the field is still needed. Keys and Bryan (2001) report, "As yet, we have little knowledge of teachers' views about the goals and purposes of inquiry, the processes by which they carry it out, or their motivation for undertaking a more complex and often difficult to manage form of instruction" (p. 636). To address these concerns, a survey of teachers' reported inquiry beliefs and practices combined with in-depth classroom observations, face-to-face interviews, and document analysis are needed to obtain explicit information about how teachers' conceptualization of inquiry aligns with their inquiry practices.
This article reported the results of a survey on K-8 teachers' inquiry beliefs and practices. The survey in this study was part of the National Science Foundation-supported, five-year, in-depth longitudinal case studies aimed at elucidating K-8 classroom teachers' motivations, goals, and purposes for carrying out inquiry in diverse, low SES schools. In the longitudinal case studies, diverse low SES schools were defined as culturally diverse schools, which had 50% or more of their students receiving free and reduced lunches. The teacher respondents in this study completed a K-8 Master's in Mathematics and Science Program, which focused on the development of teachers as reflective practitioners. The survey provided insights into what teachers believed about their own inquiry practices and how their practices aligned with full inquiry as described in the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC, 1996).
Relevant Literature and History
Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000) stated that inquiry teaching and learning in school programs is less than a century old. As early as 1909, John Dewey, and Joseph Schwab more than fifty years later (1962), promoted the idea of inquiry in school settings. Dewey (1910) advocated that children experience science and not be passive recipients of ready-made knowledge. He contended that knowledge is "not information, but a mode of intelligent practice and a habitual disposition of mind" (p. 124). Schawb (1962), in "The Teaching of Science as Enquiry," echoed Dewey's sentiments on the importance of inquiry-based teaching and learning. He stated, "[I]n the very near future a substantial segment of our public will become cognizant of science as a product of fluid enquiry, understand that it is a mode of investigation which rests on conceptual innovation, proceeds through uncertainty and failure, and eventuates in knowledge which is contingent, dubitable, and hard to come by" (p. 5). Inquiry-based practices have been heralded as essential to students' development of what Dewey (1910) calls "habits of mind," a way of thinking that promotes scientific reasoning skills.
Today, the NSES (NRC, 1996) reemphasizes the need for teachers to implement more "inquiry-based" science teaching and learning opportunities. In fact, in the NSES, inquiry is viewed as the key strategy to effective science teaching: "Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the central strategy for teaching science" (p. 31). The NSES purports that when children inquire into the natural world, they "(1) ask questions about the natural world, (2) plan investigations and collect relevant data, (3) organize and analyze collected data, (4) think critically and logically about relationships between evidence and explanations, (5) use observational evidence and current scientific knowledge to construct and evaluate alternative explanations, and (6) communicate investigations and explanations to others" (pp. 122, 145).
Although there is substantial information on inquiry teaching and learning in the NSES (NRC, 1996), and even an inquiry supplement to the NSES, Cuevas, Lee, Hart, and Deakor (2005) argued that "there is a lack of a clear agreed-upon conception of what science inquiry involves" (p. 338). Anderson (1983), some twenty years earlier, provided meta-analyses of the research literature on inquiry and concluded that it lacked a precise definition. Hence, this argument continues and has...
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