An Illustration of How Inquiry Learning (Doesn't) Work

Let's start with a definition - According to Wikipedia, "Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios."  Ten years ago, you could not attend a conference without being told it was the future of education and would help our students learn more deeply.  Having experienced an inquiry-based calculus class, I knew this wasn't true, but as a teacher of lab sciences, I am expected to think of inquiry as the end-all-be-all of instructional methods by people who have never experienced teaching that way.  Every lab experience my students have requires a lot of direct instruction both before and after the lab experience.  Otherwise, they just observe phenomena (which people had been doing for millennia before the scientific method); they do not learn from them.  Here's a recent personal example.

In December, my students review the learning of the semester with a song.  I like to give them the lyrics in the form of a booklet, but I don't really know how to make a booklet on the copy machine.  There are people in our school who make programs for events, so I had asked a few times in prior years for someone to teach me.  Kind folk that they are, they would just do it for me.  While I appreciated it, I wanted to know how.

This December, on the day I wanted to make them, the person who knows how to do it had not arrived at the building yet.  I decided I would try to figure it out myself.  For forty minutes, I tried things that proved unsuccessful.  I googled how to make booklets, but the initial results used programs and copy machines that didn't match mine.  At one point, I thought I had found it, but when I looked at my computer, I didn't have the buttons shown in the instructions.  I finally realized it was in Adobe Reader while I was in Preview (not quite the same thing).  When I got into there, I found the right buttons, but the printed result was missing two pages and, for reasons I still cannot explain, ended on the 3rd page of the original.  I kept trying things and changing settings until it finally came out right and made the 81 copies I needed.

For supporters of Inquiry Learning, you are saying, "See - you were motivated, active in your learning, used your tools, and you will remember it longer than if someone had just told you how to do it."  Here's the thing, though.  I don't.  Someone asked me last week how to make a booklet, and I could not tell them.  Here are some issues with my experience:

1. Wasted time - It would have taken someone about five minutes to explicitly teach me how to do it.  I spent over an hour "figuring it out."  My motivation was waning and would not have lasted much longer.
2. Wasted resources - The amount of paper and ink that went in the trash can during my failed attempts would make Greta Thunberg cry.  Once, it printed on 11 x 17 paper, and I don't know why.  Since the original document is 9 pages long, each failed attempt wasted that much.  By the way, had this been chemistry rather than paperwork, misuse of those resources could have also been dangerous.
3. Wasted energy - By the time I finished, I had used a lot of motivational energy.  What might I have done instead?  We'll never know.
4. No permanence - As I said earlier, this did not result in deep learning.  It did not result in permanent learning.  I still don't know how to do it.  The reason is that I never engaged in the sequence from beginning to end while I was "figuring it out."  If I tried to do it now, I might stumble my way into it again or recognize some of the buttons when I saw them again, but I would have no confidence in doing so.  Had someone walked me through it step by step, and then I did it with their feedback, I might know how to do it today.

Students need guidance in learning and the more important and/or complex the skill, the more they need us.  As novice learners, they have only surface-level questions about their observations while we want them to learn the internal structure.  Google can give them information; it cannot give them insight (and I haven't even addressed that many sources they find are unreliable).  Students need our expertise to teach them explicitly or create activities that guide them through the learning process.  They do not have the ability to do it on their own, and they certainly would not achieve the standards we have in our curriculum.  Even if inquiry learning could teach all of those things, it would be inefficient and wasteful.  

Teach your students.  Don't assume they'll learn calculus without help.

Well Meaning But Ineffective - Inquiry

I have spent much of the summer reading books on the science of learning.  This week, I finished How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, and I recommend it highly.  I always post quotes from these books on Facebook and Twitter, but this one had so many good thoughts, I think the most important ones got lost amongst the others.  For that reason, I decided I should reflect on some of them more thoroughly here.  I may do a few posts as there are parts of this book where I highlighted more lines than not.

First, let me tell you a bit about Stanislas Dehaene.  I first heard of him at a Learning and the Brain conference back in 2019, but I didn't get to hear him speak because he suddenly became ill and had to be replaced.  I had already downloaded his book Consciousness and the Human Brain, so I knew missing him was a loss (although the replacement speaker Dr. David Rose was awesome, so shout out to the person whose idea it was to sub him in).  Dr. Dehanene is a cognitive neuroscientist, specializing in numeracy, but he has also authored books on consciousness generally, learning as a whole, and learning reading specifically.

When I started reading this book, I was intrigued but also a bit intimidated because he uses the first quarter of the book to compare human learning to artificial learning, which was fascinating but also technical and difficult.  But once I got to Part 2, I couldn't get enough of this book.  Dr. Dehaene's passion for learning how we learn is evident, and he uses stories to illuminate what would otherwise be dry research.  He finally arrives at "the four pillars of learning" in the final section.  They are: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback, and Consolidation.  At this point, I am fully on board and reading without pause.  

Then, I hit this sentence, and it made me sit up straighter, grip my highlighter and tear up a bit.  “The fundamentally correct view that children must be attentively and actively engaged in their own learning must not be confused with classical constructivism or discovery learning method-which are seductive ideas whose ineffectiveness has, unfortunately, been repeatedly demonstrated.”  

If that sentence didn't grab your heart like it did mine, it could be that you are not a science teacher who constantly fights the idea that as long as you have enough labs, kids will love and learn science while knowing that your students have never learned anything from a lab without your very explicit teaching preparation AND reflective follow up.  You don't constantly feel guilty about not doing enough labs because it is what other people think you should be doing even though you know it is rarely an efficient or deep way to get to deep scientific concepts.  Perhaps, you were a victim of constructivist theory as a student (did you get subjected to inventive spelling, inquiry-based science, or discovery math?) and still don't know how to do the things you were meant to figure out.  I was in a class that used Discovering Calculus, and I remember saying, "There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton to discover calculus; how am I supposed to do it in a semester as a college freshman?  

Please don't misunderstand.  I believe in the elaborate encoding that comes from hands-on activity and demonstrations of scientific principles, but given the amount of time they take, I choose my lab experiments very carefully.  I choose ones that I can carefully and explicitly prepare students for (so it's not inquiry learning because I have told them what they are going to learn), that can be carried out without much technical difficulty, that I can meaningfully follow up on to ensure they have learned what I want them to, and that I can refer back to in multiple chapters (for retrieval and because they address more than one topic).  Otherwise, it is just activity for the sake of appearing active.  There just aren't that many that rise to the level of all those criteria (and if they don't, they don't deserve the class period it takes to carry them out plus the time it takes to prepare for and reflect on).  You are much more likely to be assigned a project in my class than a lab because there is more time for processing and guidance.

Back to Dr. Dehaene.  A paragraph or so after the sentence that stopped me in my tracks, he said, “When children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all. Should we be surprised by this? How could we imagine that children would rediscover, in a few hours and without any guidance, what humanity took centuries to discern?"  I took a moment to congratulate my college freshman self and then mulled over the phrase "abstract rules."  That is exactly why constructivism doesn't work.  They can observe the experiment (which has value), but they have no idea of why the experiment works because the concepts (especially in chemistry) are too abstract.  So, in a science class, where our job is to teach why things happen, we are seduced by the idea that they will figure it out if we merely show them what happens.  It doesn't teach them to "think scientifically," which is the well-meaning theory behind inquiry-based learning.  We are naturally curious, but we are not naturally scientists (which, again, is why it took from the beginning of time until Galileo to think of experimentation in spite of really smart philosophers observing and hypothesizing about the natural world).  We need to build on the past and "stand on the shoulders of giants," not hope they will develop scientific thought processes anew.  

I don't know how to address this in the teaching of other disciplines, but I know there is a lot of push for student-driven learning in all of them as though they know enough to know what they don't know and how to explore it for themselves.  This brings me to the final Dehaene quote of this post. “Perhaps the worst effect of discovery learning is that it leaves students under the illusion that they have mastered a certain topic, without ever giving them the means to access the deeper concepts of a discipline."  

• Should we make learning as relevant as possible to students?   Yes.
• Should we pique their curiosity?  Yes (and I'll write more about that next week).
• Should we work in choices where it makes sense to do so?  Yes.
• Should we help them to understand just how much more there is to learn than what there is time to fit into a school day? vYes
• Should we ask them what they want to learn and how they want to learn it and neglect our own professional judgment?  No.  That is educational malpractice.  And all the research says so.