Inquiry Teaching and HigherLevel Thinking

1
Inquiry Teaching and Higher-Level Thinking

• ED. 235 Chapter 9

2
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• Defining Thinking with a Special Look at
  Higher-Level Thinking
• What do we mean by thinking? The word is a
  construct, a label we apply to processes we can
  observe only indirectly through actions or
  products. In other words, when someone behaves
  in a careful, prudent manner, we infer that
  behavior resulted from deliberate thought. When
  we observe an example of complex
  problem-solving-space flight, for instance-we
  infer the incredible amounts of reasoning that
  were necessary.

3
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• Defining Thinking with a Special Look at
  Higher-Level Thinking
• Effective thinking also requires particular
  attitudes, such as a disposition to perceive and
  relate to ones surroundings in particular ways.
  Some people, for instance, are curious about
  their environment others are not. Attitude
  determines in part what we think about and in
  what ways we think about it.
• We arrive at the following definition thinking
  is a complex act comprising attitudes, knowledge,
  and skills that allow the individual to shape his
  or her environment more effectively than
  intuition alone.

4
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• Elements of Critical Thinking
• Identifying issues
• Identifying relationships between elements
• Deducing implications
• Inferring motives
• Combining independent elements to create new
  patterns of thought
• Making original interpretations

5
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• How Successful Have We Been in Teaching Thinking?
• The single best source for standardized and
  nationally collected data on the general topic
  comes from the National Assessment Educational
  Progress.
• Refer to Page 308, NAEP Key Findings

6
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• Core Skills of Thinking
• Perception of a problem or issue
• Ability to gather relevant information
• Competence in organizing data
• Analysis of data patterns, inferences, sources of
  errors
• Communication of the results

7
Helping Students Become Better Thinkers

• Teaching of higher-level or critical thinking
• Develop an overall awareness-a kin of infusion of
  the need to focus on thinking in all classes at
  all times. You must systematically and
  continually instruct them in ways to think more
  effectively.
• Operationalizing inquiry-based teaching
  strategy will greatly facilitate your teaching of
  thinking skills.
• You should know how to use some specific methods
  and teaching techniques that are themselves
  offshoots or relatives of the inquiry model
• You should always bear in mind that the teacher
  is the most important factor in thinking
  instruction

8
Inquiry Teaching

• The Basic Elements of Inquiry Teaching
• Theoretical bases of inquiry methods
• Requires a high degree of interaction among the
  learner, the teacher, the materials, the content,
  and the environment. Perhaps the most crucial
  aspect of the inquiry method is that it allows
  both student and teacher to become persistent
  askers, seekers, interrogators, questioners, and
  ponderers.

9
Inquiry Teaching

• Selected Views
• The objective of inquiry teaching is often a
  process. In many instances, the end product of
  an inquiry activity is relatively unimportant
  compared to the processes used to create it.
• Learners are responsible for planning,
  conducting, and evaluation their own efforts. It
  is essential that the teacher play only a
  supportive role, not an active one.
• Students have to be taught the processes
  associated with inquiry learning in a systematic
  manner.
• Inquiry learning complicates and expands the
  teachers work, owing to the many interactions
  that may emanate from inquiry teaching and
  learning.

10
Inquiry Teaching

• Inquiry Processes
• Refer to Page 313, Inquiry Processes
• Constructivism and Inquiry Teaching
• It is assumed that learners have to construct
  their own knowledge-individually and
  collectively. Each learner has a tool kit of
  conceptions and skills with which he or she must
  construct knowledge to solve problems presented
  by the environment.(Davis)

11
Inquiry Processes

• Constructivism and Inquiry Teaching
• An important tenet of the constructivism
  philosophy is that knowledge is constructed by
  different thought processes and patterns of
  thinking.

12
Inquiry Processes

• Points of agreement between Constructivist and
  Inquiry approaches.
• The focus is on the student
• The pace of instruction is flexible, not fixed
• Students are encouraged to search for
  implications
• Students are encouraged to generate multiple
  conclusions
• Students must justify their methods for problem
  solving
• Neither constructivism nor inquiry sees itself as
  the sole learning model for all content.
• Nature provides the objects, and humans classify
  them.

13
Inquiry Processes

• Inductive Instructional Models
• Empirical Epistemology gaining knowledge through
  observation or experiment.
• Induction thought process wherein the individual
  observes a selected number of events, processes,
  or objects and then constructs a particular
  pattern or relationship.
• Inductive Reasoning method that teachers use
  when they ask students to infer a conclusion,
  generalization, or pattern from a set of data or
  facts.
• Guided Inductive Inquiry if you provide the
  specifics-the data or facts-but want students to
  make generalizations.
• Unguided Inductive Inquiry if you allow students
  to discover the specifics themselves before they
  make generalizations

14
Inquiry Processes

• Steps for Guided Inductive Inquiry
• Refer to Page 317, Steps for Guided Inductive
  Inquiry
• You cannot maximize thinking skills and
  simultaneously maximize content coverage. If you
  wish to build higher-order thinking skills, you
  must reduce some of the content and substitute
  processes instead.

15
Inquiry Processes

• A General Model of Inquiry
• Identifying a problem
• Preparing a statement of research objectives
• Collecting data
• Interpreting data
• Developing tentative conclusions
• Replication
• Characteristics of Guided Inductive Inquiry Model
• Refer to page 319, Characteristics of Guided
  Inductive Inquiry Model

16
Inquiry Processes

• Question Stems Dynamic Subjects
• What is happening?
• What has happened?
• What do you think will happen now?
• How did this happen?
• Why did this happen?
• What caused this to happen?
• Continued on page 321

17
Inquiry Processes

• Question Stems Static Questions
• What kind of object is it?
• What is it called?
• Where is it found?
• What does it look like?
• Continued page 321

18
Inquiry Processes

• Unguided Inductive Inquiry
• Once the class has mastered the techniques of
  guided inductive inquiry, you can introduce or
  allow for student-initiated situations that
  enable the students to take more responsibility
  for examining data, objects, and events. Because
  the teachers role is minimized, the students
  activity increases.
• When you begin to use unguided inquiry, a new set
  of teacher behaviors must come into play. You
  must now begin to act as the classroom clarifier,
  guiding students to develop logical thinking
  skills.

19
Inquiry Processes

• Elements of Unguided Inductive Inquiry
• Learners progress from making specific
  observations to making inferences or
  generalizations.
• The objective is to learn the processes of
  examining events, object, and data and then to
  arrive at appropriate sets of generalizations.
• The teacher may control only the materials
  provided or encourage student-initiated materials
• The students, using the materials provided and
  without further teacher guidance, ask all the
  questions that come into mind.

20
Inquiry Processes

• Elements of Unguided Inductive Inquiry
• 5. The materials are essential to making the
  classroom a laboratory
• 6. Meaningful patterns are generated by
  students through individual observations and
  inferences and through interactions with other
  students.
• 7. The teacher does not limit the
  generalizations students make.
• 8. The teacher encourages all students to
  communicate their generalizations so that all may
  benefit from each individuals unique inferences.

21
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Problem Solving
• Based on the ideas of John Dewey
• Among his major educational contributions was his
  advocacy of a curriculum based on problems.
• Problem anything that gives rise to doubt and
  uncertainty. Dewey held that a problem, to be an
  appropriate topic of study, had to meet two
  criteria
• It had to be important to the culture
• It had to be important and relevant to the student

22
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Steps for Problem Solving
• Becoming aware of a situation or event that is
  labeled a problem
• Identifying the problem in exact terms
• Defining all terms
• Establishing the limits of the problem
• Conducting a task analysis
• Collecting data that are relevant to each task

23
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Steps for Problem Solving
• 7. Evaluating the data for apparent biases or
  errors
• 8. Synthesizing the data for meaningful
  relationships
• 9. Making generalizations and suggesting
  alternatives to rectify the problem
• 10. Publishing the results of the investigation

24
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Jennifer Nelson (1998) uses investigation
  techniques of problem solving by having her
  students study problems associated with the
  history of their own school.
• Murphy (1998) shows how the five themes of
  geography-location, movement, place, region, and
  human environment-are used to solve problems
  associated with the school site.

25
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Techniques that Focus on Critical Thinking skills
• Information-processing psychology asserts that
  learning is an interactive process between the
  learner and the environment.
• Schema Theory asserts that we organize what we
  learn according to patterns that help us make
  sense of the multiple stimuli we constantly
  receive
• Learning becomes an individual meaning-building
  process, in which the student either relates new
  data to existing patterns or creates new schema
  to understand. (see Marzano 1998)

26
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Ten Teacher Behaviors that Encourage Thinking
  Skills
• Plan for thinking
• Teach for meaning
• Ask thought-provoking questions
• Make students aware of their mental processes
• Explain your thought processes frequently
• Keep data before students
• Call on students to explain
• Encourage credibility
• Be consistent
• Be patient

27
Methods for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
Skills

• Metacognitive Skills
• Metacognition means being aware of your thought
  processes while you are thinking