IBSE Final

16 NaTIoNal SCIENCE TEaChERS aSSoCIaTIoN

Chapter 1 The Teaching of Science: Contemporary Challenges

as not viable. Science teachers need to participate in efforts to clarify what the

education community means by scientific inquiry: It is a content goal—that is,

students should understand scientific inquiry and develop cognitive abilities.

Inquiry also can be instructional approaches to achieve these goals.

Undoubtedly, some confusion about teaching science as inquiry emerges

from the fact that inquiry is both a set of instructional strategies (e.g., labora-

tory investigations and activities) and education outcomes (e.g., knowledge

such as “science advances through legitimate skepticism” and abilities such as

“thinking critically and logically to make relationships between evidence and

explanations”).

A Brief History of Inquiry

Inquiry has been an explicit goal of science education for almost 50 years (Bybee

and DeBoer 1993). In A History of Ideas in Science Education, George DeBoer states,

“If a single word had to be chosen to describe the goals of science educators

during the 30-year period that began in the 1950s, it would have to be inquiry”

(1991, p. 206). Like many goals, inquiry provides a rallying point of apparent

common agreement that fosters a sense of community and support among the

advocates. Also, as is common with most education goals, there emerges the

need for concrete examples of the abstract ideas and attitudes conveyed by the

goal. This discussion provides examples of inquiry in the science curriculum as

one approach to making the abstract more concrete in science education.

An Example of Inquiry in Curriculum and Instruction

From its earliest days, BSCS had included inquiry in its programs. Indeed, in the

late 1950s, the deliberate, explicit, and comprehensive inclusion of “biology as

inquiry” was a radical departure from other biology textbooks. At the time, H.

J. Muller, a Nobel laureate and BSCS steering committee member, stated, “The

trouble is not that there is too much science but too much shortsighted applica-

tion of it, too little dissemination of its deeper meanings, and too little appre-

ciation of the need for proceeding by its method of free inquiry” (1957, p. 252).

Although scientists such as Bentley Glass, H. J. Muller, Bruce Wallace, and John

Moore supported the inclusion of inquiry, Joseph Schwab likely contributed the

most to actually implementing the theme of science as inquiry. Schwab’s classic

statement on the theme, his 1961 Inglis Lecture titled “The Teaching of Science

as Enquiry,” became a foundational statement for curriculum development

(Schwab 1966).

Inquiry in Textbooks and Laboratories

The original BSCS programs used four avenues for implementing inquiry. First,

the texts used expressions that indicated the uncertainty and incompleteness

of science and the possibilities that through inquiry the uncertainty might be