Dr. Carol C. Kuhlthau & Dr. Ross J. Todd

Implementing Guided Inquiry at Gill St Bernard’s School Gladstone, New Jersey

Goal of case study: To understand more fully how students build new understanding in a Guided Inquiry project framed by Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, and curriculum content standards for Grade 9.

Participants: 43 Grade 9 students at Gill St Bernard’s School, Gladstone NJ (21 girls, 22 boys).

Guided Inquiry project: The Guided Inquiry took place in a semester long course “Research Project”. The course is a school librarian / teacher partnership which seeks to develop students as effective researchers. Instructional intervention centered on: understanding the information search process, information searching, information analysis and recording of ideas, information structuring and presentation. The Guided Inquiry project was based on free-choice research paper over a 7 week period around the theme "Celebration in Culture"

Data collection: Surveys at three stages in the Information Search Process (Initiation, Formulation, Presentation); structured search logs kept by each student during the progress of assignment; a log documenting students’ feelings through the process, as well as product analysis at completion of the assignment. These protocols enabled us to uncover students’ base knowledge, perceptions on levels of knowledge and their information seeking and use experience, to measure changes in the knowledge construction process, and to examine how their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors changed from initiation to presentation.

Findings:

Initiation Stage
Students' initial representations of knowledge about their topics were:

• typically lists of unrelated concepts, and generalities
• statements were primarily property (is a), manner (describe how something happens)
• average number of statements 4 (range from 0-11)
• knowledge tended to be randomly represented: unstructured, no clear sequence or organization
• guess work was evident
• some inaccuracy / misrepresentation
• typically acknowledge that they knew very little
• because personal choice of topic was part of the inquiry project, the students were motivated to learn, and cited personal experiences, personal connections, knowing intriguing facts about topic, and personal curiosity, as key reasons for engaging in the research.

Focus / Formulation Stage

• dramatic increase in number of propositional statements
• range from 6-34 statements; average number 17
• still a focus on property and manner statements, there was increased embedding of reason statements - explanations of how and why
• evidence of organizational structure of ideas
• some attempt to develop conceptual grouping
• focus on getting a bigger picture (building background) getting a changed picture (correcting misinformation); and getting a clearer picture.
• move from broad, general topics, to more specific targets topics

Collection and Presentation Stages

• clear and precise listing of properties, manner and increasing use of set membership, as well as representations that were also stronger on reasons, outcomes, causality, implications, predictive, reflective
• increased complexity of representing ideas
• average number of statements - 31 (range 8-63)
• for 4 students, decrease in number of statements reflect higher levels of synthesis: coalescing lists of properties and manners into conceptual categories
• higher levels of structural centrality and conceptual coherence -i.e. overall integrated and interlinked structure, yet subgroups of ideas

Key outcome of study: Through Guided Inquiry, where instructional intervention focused on developing students as effective researchers and developing their experience - the output was growth of intellectual quality:

• higher order thinking and deep knowledge: movement from description to complex explanation and reflection
• increased specificity of topic focus and coherence of knowledge structures
• deep understanding, evident in extent of recall and in the types of causal and predictive relationships portrayed
• substantive conversation, as shown in fluency in written statements
• capacity to deal with factual conflict or conflicting viewpoints and formulating their own (choice of topic); also evident in constructing arguments that show a basis for the claims they were making
• use of language specific to the topic domain: not just provision of terms, but clarity of understanding these terms
• increasing complexity of the language used to describe their knowledge, and the ordering of this knowledge into conceptually coherent units

Learning Environment and Social Support: key enablers

• staged process of learning, clear benchmarks to be reached and instruction in critical processes needed to complete task successfully
• feedback at focus, collection and presentation stages
• attention to personal engagement: personal choice: provide a will to know
• high expectations
• social support: community of scholars where consistency of support of teachers and school librarian, teacher and librarian on the same page
• instructional support - knowing the steps of good research
• students' self regulation and direction: decisions about what next to do, identifying problems, opportunity to discuss problems.

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Guided Inquiry © is copyrighted by Dr. Carol C. Kuhlthau and Dr. Ross Todd.