Experimental comparison of inquiry and direct instruction in science

Abstract

There are continuing educational and political debates about ‘inquiry’ versus ‘direct’ teaching of science. Traditional science instruction has been largely direct but in the US, recent national and state science education standards advocate inquiry throughout K‐12 education. While inquiry‐based instruction has the advantage of modelling aspects of the nature of real scientific inquiry, there is little unconfounded comparative research into the effectiveness and efficiency of the two instructional modes for developing science conceptual understanding. This research undertook a controlled experimental study comparing the efficacy of carefully designed inquiry instruction and equally carefully designed direct instruction in realistic science classroom situations at the middle school grades. The research design addressed common threats to validity. We report on the nature of the instructional units in each mode, research design, methods, classroom implementations, monitoring, assessments, analysis and project findings.

Keywords:

• science teaching
• inquiry‐based science education
• direct instruction
• inquiry instruction
• randomized control trial comparison
• science conceptual understanding
• learning cycle

Acknowledgements

Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI/NSF 04‐553) Award #0437655. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.