Inquiry-Based Teaching: Is it Helpful or Not?

Are you one of the people who are familiar with how teaching inquiry can improve school performance? If not, let me tell you how teaching inquiry can improve performance. Inquiry-based teaching is a form of teaching method wherein students are asked to learn in an active manner by assessing them on how much they evolve in terms of skills.

So how can teaching inquiry improve the performance of a student? This article will guide you through the advantages and disadvantages of teaching inquiry. Is it going to be helpful for a student or not? Let us see.

Teaching inquiry is also called a problem-based type of teaching. What happens is that lessons are based on what the children do not understand and that can be known through assessing them with their questions and skills. Educators are there to accompany them in developing questions that they need to ask for them to understand the lesson well.

One of the advantages of teaching inquiry is that through the development of their own queries and skills, they could link their questions to their every day lives and in that way, they could easily learn new things since they can relate to whatever they have developed asking.

How teaching inquiry can improve school performance is also a huge advantage for students who are not the type who loves to read long texts on books. Because of the hands-on development of investigations, it would be interesting for a student who does not have the attention span to sit and read books for hours. Those long unbearable hours of trying to understand each lesson in a textbook could be the reason why a student is categorized as a low-achiever. Schools that have been using inquiry teaching have reported that this method of teaching has created wonderful results out of low-achiever students.

This method of teaching could also be an advantage for the educational system issues pertaining to the racism and the gender inequities. Studies showed that educators who was trained to do inquiry teaching was more successful in maximizing the students potential when it comes to learning the subjects at hand. Teaching inquiry is the key to the problems about not giving fair equal education that the American system could not offer to all of the races or in both genders.

Teaching inquiry is a great way to teach students who are culturally challenged or those who are in need of special attention. In other words, students who do not possess the ability to learn and understand a lesson right away are said to have maximized their potential through inquiry teaching. Through the hands-on teaching, students are more likely to relate themselves through their own experiences, which is why it is more effective for them than the traditional way of teaching.

One issue about inquiry teaching is that it has been said that the ideal time to introduce this method of teaching is during the latter part of school years. Young ages should still receive the traditional way of teaching and as they go through their school years, inquiry teaching could be used already for them to learn. Another issue about inquiry teaching is that since the lessons and learning are based on what the students think and how they formulate their questions, people see this as a fall back on educators. Educators look like they are just putting all the work on the students and they do not do anything anymore.

In spite of the negative comments about how inquiry teaching can improve school performance, it has been proven that a lot of students are already benefiting from the program. Inquiry teaching has been said to improve school performances and it already outweighed the traditional ways of teaching.

Educational Literature on Inquiry

1. School Choice as Education Reform: What Do We Know?-ERIC Document
2. Selected Procedures for Improving the Science Curriculum-ERIC Document
3. Teaching Science through Inquiry-ERIC Document
4. Thinking in Outdoor Inquiry-ERIC Document