FQRSC
2007-2011

L'identification et l'évaluation des résultats de la participation dans l'apprentissage et l'enseignement basés sur l'enquête: Lancer les passerelles entre la recherche et la pratique [Identification and evaluation of outcomes of participation in inquiry-based learning and teaching: Bridging the research-practice gap

Aulls, M. W. (McGill), Shore, B. M. (McGill), Kalman, C. S., Stringer, R., Delcourt, M. A. B., & McBride, J.

EDUCATION IS CHANGING. Standards in Quebec and elsewhere require that students learn more than the content; they are expected to learn both the "what" and "how." They must learn independently and collaboratively, value their own knowledge and judgment, generate and solve problems, and influence what and how they will learn. Teaching becomes a creative, adaptive act responsive to individual differences, addressing knowledge production and utilization. This is inquiry-based learning and teaching. We have so far identified nearly 200 qualities of inquiry in education. Others are shared and expanded roles for both students and teachers, focus on process as well as product, and learning guided by questions and interests. New skills are needed to work in this manner. Inquiry-based education is not yet the norm, but it is indeed what good schools do, and it is essential to producing the kinds of graduates needed in the 21st century.

EVALUATION TOOLS ARE NEEDED. Even as inquiry-based education becomes the norm, as required by the Quebec education program, a major gap remains. Success by learners, teachers, and programs needs to be evaluated in new ways, in addition to mastery, involving cognitive, social, and affective domains, and both processes and products. There are almost no evaluation tools available to assess learning, teaching, and programs in an inquiry environment: Our goals are to identify outcomes particularly linked or unique to the inquiry dimension, and to develop practical tools for these three groups. We have been studying inquiry teaching and learning for over a decade, and now ask, "How can a participant or an observer know when inquiry has happened well and how to document it?"

CATALOG THE OUTCOMES, DESIGN MEASURES. Our research program will now examine data, mostly already available, from extensive interviews, surveys, and observations in traditional and inquiry classrooms. We shall convert research instruments into usable tools so that participants can satisfy their responsibility for accountability and recognize arrival at the stage of being inquirers.

CLOSE THE RESEARCH-PRACTICE GAP. We shall continue to use data on hand and apply statistical and qualitative analyses, but we shall also create several new collaborative sources of data with groups of intended users: (a) consultative round-tables with teachers, students, student-teachers, and curriculum experts, to help narrow the hundreds of potential outcomes identified through research to a set of critically representative and meaningful examples, (b) a small network of pilot schools, (c) sessions on inquiry at the annual Quebec teachers' convention, (d) an inquiry knowledge fair for student teachers and student researchers, and (e) a web site on inquiry-education evaluation.