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Inquiery based learning



I am posting this to several lists and I know that many of you are in all three
and I hope you do not mind the cross posting too much. This is actually
related to the planetaria notes on the astro-list.

A week or two ago I got up with my daughter (5:30 in the morning) and while she
got ready for school I watched a "Teacher to Teacher" program on Nick. The
show was hosted by Don Herbert (sp?) (Mr. Wizard). It was on an "inquiry based
learning" experience to learn stuff about wind. It gave one teacher's
experience with this particular curriculum. The show was obviously designed to
praise this form of learning science, but all I saw was a bunch of second
graders wasting a couple of hours to learn that wind blows, that it is all
caused by hot air rising, and that if you give a young kid a glass of water and
a straw and tell him to blow on the water you get a mess.

Inquiry based learning is designed, I believe, to let kids explore nature with
a little guidance (actually very little if what I saw was correct) and come to
their own conclusions (sort of). Does anyone know more on this and are you as
appalled as I am? If not, what are the genuine strengths of this system (no
edubabble please)? I am getting bright students in my college classes who have
absolutely no science background what-so-ever. Almost all of the finger
pointed around here goes to the middle schools (the local bastions of esteem
education), but I wonder if their elementary school science education is blown
on hours wasting learning lite.


David Emigh