As I progress with my inquiry about inquiry learning, I can relate to the rollercoaster of emotions described as typical during an inquiry process in Kuhlthau's Information Search Process. During the task initiation phase I was feeling uncertain, my thoughts were vague and lacked direction. I was floundering in a spiral of confusion, frustration and doubt. But, optimism emerged, as I experienced a modicum of success using Boolean operators to frame search string algorithms. Although my emotions have been in a state of flux through the trial and error (!) process of conducting an inquiry, I am moving forward with improved search skills and confidence to experiment with new search strategies, even with growing excitement. My initial re-search was informed to a great extent by the works of Wiggins and McTighe, and has led me to a new inquiry question. What role do questions play in fostering student understanding of big ideas? To expand my knowledge base, I am interested in learning about questioning from sources other than Wiggins and McTighe. To further my re-search and to hone search skills, I will be using the A+ Education database, which provides access to articles from Australian education journals. Of course people from outside of Australia publish in Australian educational journals, so I will have to be strategic in my searching to exclude Wiggins and McTighe. PRE-SEARCHBefore tapping into the A+ Education database, I considered the things I thought I already knew about questions or questioning and recorded them on a mindmap (below). I had a metacognitive revelation during this process when I was wondering how I know what I know. I realised I was making predictions and connecting to my prior knowledge. I recalled a presentation by David Hornsby where he described the relationship between inviting student predictions and an increase in student engagement in a reading task. I presume the same would apply at the commencement of an inquiry. If students ask and speculate about possible answers to questions before the finding out stage, there could be a positive correlation to student engagement in the inquiry. This is a thread I will follow during my A+ Education database search.
FindingsMy confidence deteriorated and frustration levels skyrocketed - that was my first finding! It was very time consuming attempting to thread together an effective search string that produced results for my inquiry question. The need to broaden, then narrow for relevance resulted in cognitive drain and not many results. I felt like a gold miner hitting rock bottom, when I finally struck gold. My final search string provided only six results, but all were relevant and informed my question. One article in particular by Phil Cam (2006) described the importance of teaching students how to ask questions that would lead to inquiry. He has developed the Question Quadrant for this purpose. Student questions are categorised, in collaboration with the students. Over time, Cam found that students increasingly posed questions that were open-ended and addressed big ideas or concepts that required inquiry. Even though I eventually found some relevant sources of information, my initial inquiry question remains largely unanswered. What role do questions play in fostering student understanding of big ideas? The additional question I posed during the brainstorming process of this inquiry phase also remains unanswered. Do student-generated questions influence student engagement in an inquiry? I am wondering if a database that is not restricted to only Australian published journals may yield greater results using the same or similar search threads. To infiniti and beyond... ProQuest Education, here I come. ReferencesCam, Philip. 2006. Introductory Toolkit. In: Cam, Philip. Twenty Thinking Tools. Camberwell, Vic.: ACER Press.
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