Guided Inquiry Process

The Guided Inquiry Process is an educational framework designed to enhance student engagement and learning through structured exploration and critical thinking. This approach encourages learners to ask questions, investigate topics in depth, and construct their understanding with the guidance of educators. Central to the process is the idea that inquiry is most effective when students are actively involved in their learning journey.

Typically, the Guided Inquiry Process unfolds in several stages, starting with students identifying their interests and questions. Educators facilitate this initial stage by helping students refine their inquiries and develop research strategies. As students gather and analyze information, they are encouraged to collaborate and share insights, fostering a community of learning. Ultimately, the process culminates in students presenting their findings, allowing for reflection and discussion.

This educational method is particularly beneficial in diverse classrooms, as it accommodates various learning styles and promotes inclusivity. By valuing students' voices and encouraging self-directed exploration, the Guided Inquiry Process aims to develop critical thinkers who are prepared to navigate complex information landscapes. As such, it serves as a powerful tool for cultivating lifelong learning skills in an ever-changing world.

Published in: 2021

By: Joseph Dewey, PhD

Subject Terms

Guided Inquiry Process

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Since its inception in the mid-1990s, Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Process Learning (POGIL) has offered teachers at every level from preschool to college a revolutionary way to be decidedly un-revolutionary: Observe phenomena and inquire carefully about them to discover their patterns. Guided Inquiry Process re-approaches the learning process by returning students to the fun and rigors of hands-on learning. Reorganizing the classroom into small-group interactive learning pods designed to promote critical thinking, teachers guide students, who are rewarded with a better understanding of how the scientific mind works through problem-solving inquiry.

Overview

Begin with a fact: Magnets involve the attraction between metals, or an ice cube melts at a certain temperature, or a leavening agent causes bread dough to rise. These are data points, evident facts, pieces of long-established scientific information, but at one time they were not known facts—they were more like puzzles. Accomplished scientists using advanced available data explored and defined the implications of those phenomena to explain them. It was exciting and exploratory. Imagine bringing that level of investigation into a modern science classroom.

From the end of World War II to the dawn of the digital age, educators were largely locked into a clean and obvious system for education delivery: Describe the critical points, expect the students to read textbooks that confirmed those primary points (or chart out elaborate outlines or fill out stacks of note cards), and periodically give an exam that would demonstrate that the student had mastered those critical key points or a sufficient number of them to be passed along to the next grade. Education became essentially passive: students were challenged not so much to learn but to listen, take careful notes, and pay attention through long sessions of watching teachers perform and deliver material. Of course, science courses offered the opportunity to perform lab work—but even those labs were highly controlled and very narrow in their expectations.

Students simply were not trusted to be in command of their own education. Tests were formulaic, containing true/false or multiple choice questions worded carefully and generically to make them virtually useless at getting students to think in terms of exceptions and alternatives, which historically had always been the way to new knowledge. The exam process itself had become a game in whether students would unpack the question for telltale words that might eliminate a choice. The material being learned became secondary—indeed more study was put into how to handle text anxiety.

It was a system inevitable, agreed even its most passionate defenders, given the accelerated rise in the numbers of school-age children coming out of the Baby Boomer generation, and given the often fierce fight for public funds to guarantee an acceptable rate of graduation. Lots of schoolchildren needed to be told lots of information, particularly in the areas of the hard sciences, engineering, and technology. What was lost was the traditional sense of a class operating as an open and unscripted arena of inquiry where students, at the very age they should be discovering this intellectual capacity, were being told, not shown, how knowledge is produced. This was lending the wildly incorrect notion that somehow knowledge as a human endeavor was finished, that everything humanity needed to know was known. In addition, students were turned off by classroom experiences that offered little hands-on interactive opportunities to learn, creating generations of drones, uncertain and lacking the confidence or skills to engage firsthand in the challenge of problem solving. Employers agreed—educated hires were not perceptibly better at problem solving.

Applications

Traditional classroom presentations simply did not work. In high schools and colleges, classes were too big, schoolrooms became auditorium-sized, and students grew easily bored and found themselves detached from the class (Myers, Monypenny & Trevathon, 2012). The distance between teacher and student increased. POGIL offered a significant alternative. Although speaking directly to data derived from studying the positive impacts of introducing guided inquiry process into the undergraduate engineering classes in the University of Florida system, Professors Douglas and Chiu argued in 2013, “[W]hile there may be differences depending on the type of method chosen, the experience of the instructor, and the characteristics of the students, in general active learning techniques result in improved student outcomes compared to lecture classes.”

Learning material was not the same as learning science. “While content is important for operating in any discipline, the ability to develop a deep understanding of a concept and the ability to apply that knowledge to solve novel problems—the process component of learning—is the critical skill” (Soltis, 2015). A new generation of science teachers from all levels of academia in an accidental conspiracy recognized the potential here to revolutionize classroom presentation of science as a forum for delivering concepts, formulas, and laws and for dreary rewarding of simple memorization, education at its most passive. With the concomitant rise of the Internet, science teachers realized they needed to act quickly to reshape, even revamp the traditional classroom.

Why not, under the careful direction of a teacher, let students find their way to scientific laws and basic scientific concepts? The lecture/response model was clearly limited—larger classrooms tended to bog down into boredom and restlessness and, worse, science teachers were not instilling their love of science and inquiry into their students as a way to not only make sense of the world around them but also to see opportunities for science to make genuine improvements in that world. At the heart of Guided Inquiry Process was the rediscovery of the steps for critical thinking, education suddenly not about what a student knows but how a student learned it in the first place.

Although the applications of Guiding Inquiry Process are relatively new, and although the most groundbreaking work in the pedagogy has been accomplished in the sciences and has only begun to be applied in the humanities, the model for a classroom of inquiry rather than teaching has begun to assume certain elements. Instead of listening about science or taking notes on science, the students actually do science—and they do it together in small inquiry groups of three or four. That was key. No student worked alone. As Roller (2015) argued about introducing POGIL methodologies into established nurse training programs, “The POGIL method uses activities to teach content and encourage analytical critical thinking and teamwork.” Collaborative learning was at the center of the program’s appeal. As Vanags et al. argued in 2013, after testing a wide variety of chemistry students, new information was far more likely to be remembered if the student helped discover it. In addition, most professionals would need exactly that skill.

Say that a high school physics class is focusing on concepts of heat distribution, heat transportation, and heat insulation as well as how heat and temperature are affected by the time/space dynamic. It is a complex science lesson that could easily lend itself to a software presentation to tell the students the concepts behind, say, a basic oven mitt. However, in a Guided Inquiry Process classroom, the teacher may group together student researchers and give each group a swatch of an oven mitt that failed to protect the hand. They are given a research question: Why did this mitt fail? The teacher provides only those critical terms or definitions/data that a scientist in any public laboratory facility might have to help approach the question.

The students would be given opportunities to tap the Internet should they come up with an idea for potentially useful knowledge that might help answer the question. At a critical point in their inquiry, often with an instructor’s direction, the team will pose a critical hypothesis to account for the phenomenon. They will, in turn, reconstruct the data that led to that hypothesis. With the help of the initial question, the group will summarize their findings in a tidy conclusion.

As Myers and colleagues summarized in a 2012 article, advocates of group inquiry have defined four critical roles for group members, to improve efficiency and organization of the inquiry process. These positions can be assigned by the teacher or selected by the students themselves. The students in a group immediately move into their assigned roles: the manager, who keeps the investigation on point, gathers data the group needs, and acts as liaison with the teacher for any clarification; the recorder, who keeps meticulous notes about the ongoing investigation and will frame the group’s finding; the advocate, who raises questions and tests every assertion the group makes in an effort to find where it might be vulnerable or even inaccurate; and the presenter, who will clarify the group’s finding for the wider classroom.

The process, of course, is imperfect—teachers must work the room, moving table to table to make sure the inquiry stays on point. Indeed, proponents of the traditional classroom system will point to the time wasted in arriving at answers the teacher obviously already knows (although open-ended guided inquiry processes have already begun to define the structure of cutting edge postgraduate courses in chemistry and other hard sciences).

Interestingly, the principles of process inquiry have begun to be applied in curricula other than scientific. Templates have been worked out into lesson plans involving the analysis of the causes and impacts of tipping-point historic events, the definition and impact of artistic movements, the relationships between agriculture and climate, and even the process of discovering layers of suggestion in the symbols of major works literature.

Viewpoints

Advocates quickly point out the value of allowing students to become owners of their own education. Not passively receiving enormous blocks of inherited information but instead, by being given the chance to work their way toward the discovery of that information, recreates for the students the initial thrill of learning. Not surprisingly, when school districts begin to introduce this paradigm for science instruction, there are significant and often vociferous objections.

Students complain they are being to ask to do the teacher’s job. Parents worry that the deliberate pace of the class might threaten covering the year’s worth of information that would allow the students to pass on to the next grade level. Both administrators and parents are uncertain how this knowledge-first approach to education might ultimately affect the slick packaged education commodity-driven logic of standardized tests, which hold a large degree of sway in the interpretation of the effectiveness of a school district and the intelligence of its graduates. Ironically, its detractors say, although the guided inquiry system undoubtedly makes them better scientists, better researchers, and better thinkers, the process might actually make them less valuable students.

In many ways, that speaks to the larger goal of Guided Inquiry Process education. Teachers aren’t supposed to produce successful students; they are supposed to produce successful thinkers and successful people. By introducing students to the role of researcher, teachers help create habits (and skills) that will make students better prepared to succeed long-term in their studies and, far more important, to become the innovators and problem solvers that international corporations and agencies are desperate to hire. Of course, it means re-teaching instructors who have grown comfortable in their role as information dispensers and correctors of student work (in this system, a student error means the instructor redirects the group to potential areas where such miscalculations might have occurred, to test whether a different hypothesis might lead to better results).

It is hands-on learning from start to finish. The commitment by an entire school system or by a university division cannot be half-hearted—the commitment must be genuine and across the board. For teachers, the system allows for critical emotional bonding—by providing the materials to solve scientific problems rather than simply providing scientific solutions, teachers can actually observe firsthand the scientific process, can sympathize with student struggles. They can become better at helping to work through a collaborative education process simply not available through lectures and note-taking. This empathy is critical in developing a mutually respectful and cooperative classroom (Vaughan, 2013). In addition, the process, correctly supervised, allows for a freer, more interactive classroom in which every day brings a different feel and a different challenge.

More to the point, Guided Inquiry Process is not for every school. No quick fix, this theory of education presentation has the best chance to develop successfully in school bodies where students are engaged by their education and in the process of education itself, where student class size still allows for more one-on-one approach. After all, the greatest energy in this system is necessarily sustained among instructors and students themselves, in communities where taxpayers are willing to investigate new approaches that may take some time to be successfully implemented rather than demanding immediate and tangible results, where parents are patient and able to see long-term objectives as beneficial to their children’s eventual career success, where administrators are willing to let programs develop, and where faculty is of the age at which dramatic changes in their teaching approaches are still viable.

For its defenders, Guided Inquiry Process education creates classrooms that are driven largely by the intellectual energy and intuitive reach of the students themselves who are energized to discover they can access information—not merely write it down, memorize it, and repeat it on a test. These, advocates argue, are not classroom skills but lifetime skills. Students who engage in guided inquiry processes more easily see hard evidence of their own ability and can actually see how facts come to be asserted. “[Guided Inquiry Processes] can promote such self-efficacy since students are engaged primarily in concept invention which helps them to facilitate/promote their own understandings” (DeGale, 2015). That confidence, advocates see, will pay even bigger dividends in the students’ professional careers.

Terms & Concepts

Critical Thinking: The ability of a student to investigate a subject carefully and draw qualified conclusions from that independent investigation, as opposed to being given the information.

Empathy: The difficult emotional bond between student and teacher in which both elements of the education dynamic appreciate the challenges and frustrations of the other.

Hypothesis: A potential explanation for a phenomena based on gathered evidence and reasonable inquiry.

Inquiry-Based Education: An education system that begins with a question that students, with the direction and cooperation of an instructor, work to solve collectively.

Interactive Learning: A style of small-group education that rejects conservative classroom design and function and values students’ practicing hands-on efforts, trial and error, discussion and open questioning, and research trials to ascertain reliable information.

Passive Learning: An approach to teaching that places the instructor as the dispenser of information and directs students to listen and learn that same material and then to be tested on the retention of that material.

Rubric: A pre-set format for presenting the solution to a problem.

Bibliography

DeGale, S., & Boiselle, L. N. (2015). The effects of POGIL on academic performance and academic confidence. Science Education International, 26(1), 56–79. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=101826837&site=ehost-live

Douglas, E. P., & Chui, C. (2013). Implementation of process oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) in engineering. Advances In Engineering Education, 3(3), 1–16. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=90648600&site=ehost-live

Myers, T., Monypenny, R., & Trevathon, J. (2012). Overcoming the glassy eyed nod: An application of process oriented guided learning inquiry in informational technology. Journal of Learning Design, 5(1), 12–22. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=88991299&site=ehost-live

Roller, Maureen C. (2015). Fundamental nursing: Process-oriented guiding-inquiry learning research (POGIL). Journal for Leadership and Instruction, 14(1), 20–23.

Soltis, R. B., Verlinden, N., Kruger, N., Carroll, A., & Trumbo, T. (2015). Process-oriented guided inquiry learning strategy enhances students' higher level thinking skills in a pharmaceutical sciences course. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 79(1), 1–8. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=101518613&site=ehost-live

Vanags, T., Pammer, K., & Brinker, J. (2013). Process-oriented guided-inquiry learning improves long-term retention of information. Advances In Physiology Education, 37(3), 233–241. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=91939508&site=ehost-live

Vaughan, N. (2010). A blended community of inquiry approach: Linking student enjoyment of the course. Internet & Higher Education, 13(1/2), 60–65. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=502996273&site=ehost-live

Guided Inquiry Process

On this Page

Subject Terms

Guided Inquiry Process

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Viewpoints

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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