Questionnaire #3

1. What do you know about your topic?

Having read so much over the past months about Inquiry Based Learning, I find myself reflecting on statements by people such as Chen (2003), who suggests that "Learning occurs only when the learners are actively involved in the construction and reorganization of concepts..." as well as Phye (1997) who says that Inquiry based learning "...combines congnition from a developmental perpective with other important issues, such as motivation, self-directed learning and a focus on the social context of learning". These statements both imply that what we need to teach children needs to be made interesting and important to them.

2. How interested are you in this topic?

a great deal

3. How much do you know about this topic? Circle the answer that best matches how much you know.

Quite a bit - still lots to learn

4. Thinking back on your project, what did you find find easy to do?

Start thinking of ideas to take into the classroom to use with the children.

5. Thinking back on your project, what did you find most difficult to do?

I still find refining of searches difficult to do. Taking the project back into the classroom, I found it very difficult to help the children with learning difficulties to open up and use the variety of search tools effectively. It was also difficult helping them to come up with "researchable questions".

6. What did you learn in doing this research project?

I learned that the way we teach and structure our learning tasks for children has a huge impact on what they come away with. I learned that it is important to allow children to falter as they move along in their learning journey, to enable them to get the most out of what they have learned. By the same token, I also beleive that this method of teaching is not suitable for all children, as much as the experts say it is. I observed a few of the children in my Year 7 class who have learning difficulties become very frustrated and agitated during the process and this hindered their ability to find the information they wanted as they felt quite helpless at times. With these children one needs to guide them a lot more and even supply the places where they may find the information. The information they find is not always easily accessible to them due to their levels of reading and comprehension. Sometimes it may be that we need to guide children like this to the answer. I realise that this is open to debate and that I may be "shot down" for making these suggestions, but sometimes reality bites!