Inquiry Pedagogy and the Preservice Science Teacher By Lisa Mar ...

Soviet Union in the quest for scientific superiority. In response, educators began to rethink their methods of teaching science to the schoolchildren who would one day hold governmental and scientific positions. They began to question how students best learned the subject of science.

Prior to the 1950s, science was regarded as a body of knowledge to be learned and passed on from generation to generation (NRC, 2000). Textbooks contained an encyclopedic number of facts which students were expected to learn by memorization—the tradition of over a century. The NRC referred to John Dewey (1910), when he warned the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) about this practice of memorization during an address regarding science teaching. He argued that students were basically accumulating trivia type of information and not enough of science as a way of thinking. He said that science is more than a body of knowledge to be learned; there is a process or method to learn as well. In the 1960s, the educator Joseph Schwab added to the rationale for students learning through inquiry. “If students were to learn the methods of science, then how better to learn than through active engagement in the process of inquiry itself?” (NRC, 2000, p. 15)

Schwab said that science learning and teaching should reflect the methods of science (NRC, 2000). His ideas echoed Jean Piaget's work in cognition. When many schoolchildren are in a concrete-operational stage, it would not make sense to only introduce them to concepts in an abstract fashion that is formal-operational. Instead, Schwab recommended, students need to begin with a concrete experience before learning the formal explanation of scientific concepts and principles. He thought that the science classroom should more closely mirror the science laboratory where evidence is considered and explanations are refined.