Abstract
This nonexperimental, exploratory, mixed-design study used questionnaires with 167 preservice secondary teachers to identify prior educational experiences associated with student-teachers’ inquiry understanding. Understanding was determined through content analysis then open coding of definitions of inquiry and descriptions of best-experienced inquiry instruction, in terms of 23 potential learner-inquiry outcomes. Only two of seven educational-context variables related to understanding: prior experience doing a thesis or research—especially to definition quality and having taken a research-methods course—especially to description quality. How definitions and descriptions of inquiry are different and similar was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Implications for methodology, theory, and practice were presented, for example, research opportunities and research-methods training during teacher education.
Highlights
The main purpose of this study was to assess secondary preservice teachers’ understanding of inquiry and inquiry instruction
One question elicited definitions of what inquiry meant to participants, and the second elicited a description of the best inquiry instruction they reported having experienced during their formal education from the descriptions provided
Our first purpose was to examine the words used by secondary preservice teachers to reveal their conceptual and experiential understanding of inquiry and inquiry instruction
Summary
The main purpose of this study was to assess secondary preservice teachers’ understanding of inquiry and inquiry instruction. No empirical study has qualitatively and quantitatively explored secondary preservice teachers’ understanding of inquiry and inquiry instruction from a constructivist learning view. Prospective secondary teachers should acquire conceptual, situational, and procedural knowledge of inquiry instruction in school subjects. Such knowledge cannot only be conceptual to transform it into strategies for learning how to inquire independently. We inferred inquiry understanding separately from preservice teachers’ definitions of inquiry and descriptions of their best, self-selected, prior experience with inquiry instruction as students. Descriptions represented tacit knowledge and awareness of the experience-grounded concepts, situations, and procedures that might help generate or elaborate inquiry-based instruction. Our central information source was the student-teachers themselves who, in their own words, defined inquiry and described what they had listed as the best example of inquiry instruction they recalled from their formal education
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