| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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teaching strategy. Next, students engaged in “operationalization,” where they were guided by the instructor in the creation of inquiry investigations. Students were prodded to the “actualization” stage when they created, organized, and implemented inquiry investigations. Their peers served as students in the secondary science methods classroom during peer teaching practice and they tried inquiry investigations in the practicum classrooms of the local public schools. “Internalization” is said to be reached when the student naturally implements inquiry into the science classroom on a regular basis (Dunkhase, 2000).
Research shows that there are many different reasons why teachers are reluctant to use inquiry teaching strategies in their classrooms. First, teachers who have not had practice using inquiry methods tend to struggle in their understandings of what characterizes inquiry (Akerson & Hanuscin, 2007; Kielborn & Gilmer, 1999). In addition, teachers also reported that they chose not to implement inquiry in their classrooms because they viewed this type of instruction as difficult to manage (Welch, Klopfer, Robinson, & Aikenhead, 1981). This may partially be due to the way that teachers sometime come to conclusions about inquiry without having a clear understanding of what inquiry pedagogy entails (Kielborn & Gilmer, 1999).
Costenson and Lawson (1986) listed 10 top reasons why teachers did not choose to use inquiry in their classroom: 1) it took too much time to develop good inquiry materials; 2) there was not enough time to “cover” all district curricula and inquiry was too slow; 3) the books promoting inquiry in their activities were too difficult for students to read; 4) the risk of the administrators not understanding their teaching methods was too high: 5) tracking caused only concrete-operational thinkers to remain in lower-level biology courses, making inquiry teaching difficult; 6) students were too immature; 7) their teaching habits were