Educators have long debated the best way to teach, especially the subjects of science and math. One side favors direct instruction, where teachers tell students what they need to know or students read it from textbooks. Some call it explicit or traditional instruction. The other side favors inquiry, where students conduct experiments and figure out the answers themselves like a scientist would. It’s also known as exploration, discovery learning or simply “scientific practices.”
The debate reignited among university professors during the pandemic with the 2021 online publication of a commentary in the journal Educational Psychology Review. Combatively titled “There is an Evidence Crisis in Science Educational Policy,” four experts in science education argued that the evidence for inquiry instruction is weak and that proponents of inquiry “exclude” or “mark as irrelevant” high-quality studies, particularly controlled trials, that “overwhelmingly show minimal support” for inquiry learning.
One of the authors is the prominent Australian psychologist John Sweller, who formulated cognitive load theory, the widely accepted idea that our working memory can process only so much information at once. Other academics took notice. Traditionalists applauded it.
Sweller and his co-authors’ complaints date back to an influential 1996 report of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences that shapes science education policy. The report encouraged science teachers to adopt an inquiry-based approach, and it was followed by similar calls from other policymakers. But the authors of the 2021 article said the council’s references for this policy change were “theoretical ideas packaged in conceptual articles rather than empirical evidence.”
The critics say that much of the positive evidence for inquiry comes from classroom studies where there are no control or comparison groups, making it impossible to know if inquiry is really better than alternatives. And they say that this research frequently lumps together inquiry instruction with other teaching practices and interventions, making it hard to disentangle how much the use of inquiry is making a difference.
Soon after, another group of prominent education researchers issued a rebuttal. In March 2023, 13 scholars led by a Dutch researcher, Ton de Jong, took on the debate in the academic journal Educational Research Review. Titled “Let’s talk evidence – The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction,” their article acknowledged that the research is complicated and doesn’t unequivocally point to the superiority of inquiry-based learning. Some studies show inquiry is better. Some studies show direct instruction is better. Many show that students learn the same amount either way. (As they walked through a series of meta-analyses that summarized hundreds of studies, they pointedly noted that inquiry critics also ignored or mischaracterized some of the research.)
Their bottom line: “Inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction.”
How could two groups of scholars look at the same body of research and come to opposite conclusions?
The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for different learning goals.
The second takeaway is that even this group of 13 inquiry defenders argue that teachers should use both approaches, inquiry and direct instruction. That’s because students also need to learn content and procedural skills, which are best taught through direct instruction, and in part because it would be boring to learn only one way all the time.
Indeed, even the critics of inquiry instruction noted that inquiry lessons and exercises may be better at sparking a love of science. Students often say they enjoy science more or become more interested in the field after an inquiry lesson. Changing students’ attitudes about science is certainly not a compelling reason to teach this way all the time, as students need to learn content too, but even traditionalists admit there’s something to be gained from fun exploration.
My third observation is that the inquiry defenders listed a bunch of caveats about when inquiry learning has proven to be most effective. Unstructured inquiry lessons where students groped in the dark weren’t successful in building any kind of understanding.
Caveat 1: Students need a strong foundation of knowledge and skills in order for inquiry learning to be successful. In other words, students need some facts and the ability to calculate things in different ways to take advantage of inquiry learning and arrive at deeper conceptual understandings. Complete mastery isn’t a prerequisite, but some familiarity is. The authors suggested, for example, that it can be beneficial to start with some direct instruction before launching into an inquiry lesson.
Caveat 2: Inquiry learning is far more effective when students receive a lot of guidance and feedback from their teacher during an inquiry lesson. Sometimes the most appropriate guidance is a clear explanation, the authors said, which is the same as direct instruction. (My brain started to hurt, thinking about how direct instruction could be woven into inquiry-based learning. Is it really inquiry learning if you’re also telling students what they need to do or know? At some point, shouldn’t we be labeling it direct instruction with hands-on activities?)
The 13 authors admitted that each student needs different amounts and types of guidance during an inquiry lesson. Low-achieving students appear to benefit more from guidance than middle- or high-achieving students. But low-achieving students also need more of it. And that can be tough, if not impossible for a single teacher to manage. I began to wonder if effective inquiry teaching is humanly possible.
Not only can inquiry include a lot of direct instruction, but sometimes direct instruction can resemble an inquiry classroom. While many people may imagine that direct instruction means that students are passively absorbing information through lectures or books, the inquiry defenders explained that students can and should be engaged in activities even when a teacher is practicing direct instruction. Students still solve problems, practice new things independently, build projects and conduct experiments. The core difference can be a subtle one and hinge upon whether the teacher explains the theory to the students first or shows examples before students try it themselves (direct), or if the teacher asks students to figure out the theories and the procedures themselves, but gives them explicit guidance along the way (inquiry).
Like all long-standing academic debates, this one is far from resolved. Some educators prefer inquiry; some prefer direct instruction. Depending upon your biases, you’re likely to see a complicated, mixed body of research as glass half full or glass half empty.
In December 2023, Sweller and the inquiry critics wrote a response to the rebuttal in the same Educational Research Review journal. Beyond the academic sniping and nitpicking, the two sides seem to have found some common ground.
“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote. “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”
The real test will be watching to see whether that consensus makes it to the classroom.
This story about teaching strategies was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.
Scenario 1: Teacher has students dissect frogs. She starts the activity with a diagram of a cross-section of the frog on the board. She has students fill in a worksheet of the diagram, along with answering a few questions. Maybe she leads a quick discussion asking students to predict what they will find.
Then, the students dive in and dissect the frog. The find organs, they are grossed out, they laugh. And they likely get something out of the whole experience. BUT, in my experience as an educator for almost 20 years, I’ve found that the “winners” in the class, those who seem to always do well, get more out of the activity than those who feel they are always behind, who are struggling to understand textbook material, who might be intimidated by school.
Scenario 2: Teacher hands out the frogs. She gives them one simple instruction: cut the frog in half and see what you find. Students do, and they start asking all kinds of questions. They laugh, they are grossed out, they wonder. At the right time, when students want the information, the teacher puts up the same diagram of the cross-section. The students look to see if their guesses were right. They look to find answers to the questions they formed. In other words, information is given when students most want it.
Anyone who how the brain learns knows that this is the best time for new information to be integrated and processed. And, while there are no guarantees, the open-ended nature of this type of experiencial and inquiry-based activity makes it more likely that all students benefit and have an opportunity to ask questions, notice things, and have curiosities. It’s not just the top 30% of students (although this activity is great for them as well, to sharpen and extend their thinking).
I’m an academic coach, and I work with a teacher who did both scenarios. She did scenario one for many years before trying the second. She is now a huge proponent of scenario 2. She said the level of engagement was pretty high with both, but in the second scenario, the questions and discussions were more scientific, and that the students were begging for the teacher to tell them the “answer”. She said she’d never go back to Scenario 1.
My take is that if we want students to think like scientists, and approach the world using empirical reasoning, we have to let them have the same experiences that scientists have on a regular basis. We have to create conditions for some open-ended noticing and wondering before dropping “teacher-knowledge” into the mix.
Sometimes, inquiry based learned can be doing the exact same activity, with the same materials, as explicit direct instruction. The difference is the order, where there is time given (usually at the start) for students to think in an open-ended way with no immediate answer.
Finally, in all of these articles about which method is more successful, I’m aways asking myself, “why aren’t we talking about the validity of the assessment that was used to qualify which method is more successful?” Having 2 kids of my own in middle school, I can say that I don’t really care if my kids have memorized facts that allow them to ace a multiple-choice test about plate techtonics or the Krebs cycle. I’d much rather that they have the opportunity to think and wonder about plate Techtonics or the Krebs cycle, to work collaboratively with others, do research, and to figure out how to find the information they need to reach the teacher’s goals. I want the teacher to allow, or even promote “messy thinking” where the students are struggling to make sense of something before finally understanding. These are skills that my kids will use in college, work, and life.
I think we need to be very careful about drawing conclusions about the success or failure of a method when we haven’t carefully examined what the assessment actually measures.
“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote. “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”
My experience is quite the opposite… especially with anything abstract (such as math concepts or big ideas in science) and reflected in the previous comment by Vince Wolfe: Novice students need exploratory experiences in order to understand the abstractions shared in direct instruction. Students with more prior knowledge and familiarity can benefit from direct instruction because they can relate the abstractions to existing funds of knowledge and experiences.
I believe Nic is correct and on point in the comments. When we have novice teachers providing direct instruction, we have many misconceptions being taught; absolutes that aren’t true; metaphors that break down; etc. When we have novices giving experiences for students to use reasoning and sense making, the student’s make justified claims about what’s happening mathematically or scientifically. Math and science proves itself rather than a novice teacher tripping up on the details and guiding students down tunnels that lead to dead ends.
Consider a teacher showing how to solve problems involving proportional reasoning. In most cases, novice teachers utilize things such as the “butterfly method” or cross multiplication etc. with little to no conceptual framework for why the problems are proportional or how to setup the proportionality. The are given problems to repeatedly practice after being given examples of how to solve. This leads towards students misusing this procedure in related concepts such as addition of fractions, multiplication of fractions, etc. These isolated direct instruction events often do little to encourage students to think and make sense of the mathematics.
Consider giving a novice teacher the opportunity to facilitate students through a problem solving task that involves proportional reasoning. Students may come to the problem with varying techniques to reach a solution. Rather than utilizing methods previously mentioned (which they may develop or discuss during the activity) they use repeated reasoning with addition, scale factors, common factors, unit rates, and so many other facets to show equivalency of two rates. Rather than mathematics being a process ascribed to the teacher the process of mathematics becomes the teacher.
Blessings from the SouthEast US,