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students to learn inquiry processes and to learn content through inquiry as well as for teachers to teach using an inquiry approach. Both the NSES and the American Association of the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Project 2061 called for students, therefore also their teachers, to have a basic understanding of scientific inquiry. Inquiry was the sole topic in the book Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning (NRC, 2000). Additionally, science education research communities such as the Association of Science Teacher Educators (ASTE) and the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) have accepted and promoted inquiry pedagogy as central to the education of science students.
Even with this emphasis on inquiry, it has been unusual to see inquiry approaches used in the science classroom on a regular basis. Costenson and Lawson (1986) shared that there are many reasons why teachers do not choose to use an inquiry teaching approach in their classrooms. To date, most classrooms remain traditional in nature, entrenched in traditional pedagogy (Bransford et al., 2000; Deters, 2004; Hackling et al., 2001) with teachers continuing to teach the way they were taught and with little improvement in their students’ concepts and skills (Livingston, 2006; Rooney et al., 2006).
John Dewey was one of the first educational philosophers who embraced and promoted the idea of teaching by experience. Dewey (1910) warned the AAAS about the prevalent practice of memorization in science teaching. He argued that the type of information students were memorizing was trivial and did not reflect the true nature of how science was practiced. There was more to science than strictly a body of knowledge. Process and methods were involved as well.
A century later, we find ourselves arguing much like Dewey did about the current state of science instruction. Even though