Now that kids are back in schools, the debate over which approach is best to teach them looks set to continue.
Many students have been learning online, at home or via Zoom during COVID-19. Yet now they have returned, the hot debate in schools – whether inquiry-based learning or teacher-led instruction is best for our children – looks set to continue.
In outlining how his government planned to tackle a decline in academic achievement among New Zealand’s 15-year-olds, as demonstrated by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), education minister Chris Hipkins said there was no silver bullet. “Education is a broad church,” he said. “It’s a wide spectrum with traditionalists at the one end and progressives at the other, all of whom believe their formula works best. The key to the changes we’re making is to work hard to capture the best of each worldview and bring the whole spectrum along.”
Yet, for all of education’s complexities, the ways to approach it and improve it are frequently distilled into a dichotomy, where they are then primed for battle in the culture wars.
One frequently arising debate pits teacher-led instruction against inquiry-based learning. The Australian Department of Education defines inquiry-based learning as an education approach that focuses on investigation and problem-solving. “Inquiry-based learning is different from traditional approaches because it reverses the order of learning,” reads the Department’s website. “Instead of presenting information, or ‘the answer’, up-front, teachers start with a range of scenarios, questions and problems for students to navigate.”
Inquiry-based learning differs from the ‘traditional’ teacher-led approach but that doesn’t mean it’s new. Leon Benade, an associate professor and director of research at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Education, says inquiry learning “has been around for yonks”.
“When I was at school, you obviously did projects. In a sense, that’s inquiry-based learning, right?” he says. “What seems to happen in education is that we get all these fads appearing because someone grabs hold of an idea and they begin to push it, and very often when you look at the idea, it’s actually not that new. But it’s given a new name and suddenly we don’t call it projects, we now call it inquiry learning.”
He firmly believes the comparison between ‘traditional’ teaching and inquiry learning is a false dichotomy. “In actual fact, for decades and decades, good teachers have been engaging the students in pursuing research in the classroom in whatever form that takes, and that’s all it is, inquiry learning is a form of research,” says Benade.
The debate has been revived in Australia with the April release of draft maths curriculum reforms from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). Dozens of educators signed an open letter airing their concerns, which included the emphasis on open-ended inquiry.
“The issue with the draft curriculum is that its ‘inquiries’ are unanchored by clear and specific content, by underlying knowledge and skills,” read the letter. “Moreover, the ‘problems’ suggested to be ‘solved’ are mostly exploratory and open-ended, effectively unsolvable and of questionable pedagogical value, and with little or no indication of the specific desired learning outcome.”
But supporters of the proposed curriculum say it will provide a deeper understanding of key concepts and better equip students to understand maths’ real-world applications. In an address at an education summit in April, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority chief executive David de Carvalho gave the example that while a student might memorise Pythagoras’ theorem, discovering for themselves why the formula works every time is “what makes learning exciting”. “And when we understand a topic, it is easier to recall the facts because they are no longer just random bits of information but are organised into intelligible ideas,” he said.
Glenn Fahey, a research fellow in education policy at the Centre for Independent Studies, says that while an inquiry-based approach can be effective for some students, it relies on the students already having foundational knowledge.
“For most learners, particularly people who are learning new concepts that they haven’t been introduced to before, the inquiry-based approaches are very ineffective, and the reason for that is that students don’t have the knowledge they need in order to apply to the exploration that they’re doing,” he says. “So typically, an inquirybased approach is something like doing an applied problem first and then trying to generalise that understanding from the applied case,
whereas a teacher-led approach would require a step-by-step explanation of something, and then apply it to a problem, so it’s flipped in the order that you do those things, and the research is pretty clear that particularly on new concepts, that teacher-led approach is far more effective.”
A frequently cited study in the inquiry learning debate is research carried out as part of the 2015 PISA, which examined the impact of teacher-directed practices on science performance. “Among countries participating in PISA 2015, in all but three education systems (Indonesia, Korea and Peru) using teacherdirected instruction more frequently is associated with higher science achievement, after accounting for socio-economic status,” stated the OECD report titled ‘Empowering and Enabling Teachers to Improve Equity and Outcomes for All’. As for inquiry-based instruction in science, the report said it was “negatively associated with performance in 56 countries and economies”.
“At this stage it is difficult to interpret this correlational evidence, but it is possible that enquiry-based instruction only has a positive impact when teachers are well trained to promote deep learning and creative thinking and able to motivate students to explore or test ideas following a rigorous methodology, rather than experiment with laboratory material following instructions.” The report said further examination of these practices should be explored in other subject domains.
A 2019 paper from the Evidence, Data and Knowledge team at New Zealand’s Ministry of Education used the OECD data to explore the “highly polarised debate in the literature on teaching methods: the effectiveness of inquiry-based science instruction and teacher-directed science instruction”. It concluded: “There is a generalisable ‘sweet spot’ combining both methods, with teacher-directed methods in most to all classes and inquirybased in some, with the inquiry-based instruction supplementary – e.g. as an end-of-module extension – to a general strategy of teacher-directed instruction.”
But Benade believes that it’s misleading to separate teacherdirected and inquiry-based instruction, because the latter approach still requires teacher guidance.
“For inquiry learning to be really successful requires a significant level of teacher input and planning that’s behind the scenes,” he says. “So it doesn’t look like the teacher’s running the show, but actually if the teacher isn’t on top of it, all the students are going to do is just wander off and do something pretty useless. So a good inquiry project requires significant teacher input.”
Benade rejects the fearmongering which portrays inquirybased learning as being about students teaching themselves. “It’s really about finding ways to better engage children in the learning process,” he says, adding that teaching isn’t simply about spoonfeeding. “Because then they never think for themselves, they never learn how to be critical thinkers. They never learn to become a bit more proactive and go and find out stuff for themselves.”
A classroom that rejects all forms of inquiry-based learning ignores the fact that not all students respond in the same way to a particular style of teaching. “You can go into lots of traditional classrooms with teachers running the show where the students are learning diddly squat,” he says.
“THERE IS A SWEET SPOT MIXING BOTH IDEAS.”