Developing student expertise in scientific inquiry

The role of developing student expertise in scientific inquiry often falls on laboratory work. Domin’s taxonomy of laboratory instruction styles has been expanded with more detailed scrutiny of inquiry instruction. The most common form of laboratory teaching is the confirmation style where students follow recipes to reproduce known results in a straight-forward and resource-efficient manner. This style achieves few pedagogic goals of laboratory education and inquiry-based instruction is better suited to the acquisition of the skills, methodology, and procedures of scientific inquiry. A guided inquiry instruction style improves on the confirmation style by reinforcing the point of the experimental work, even though students will still to follow-the-recipe where they can. Tutor support is needed when students apply what they know about the scientific method to an experiment design task. In the absence of support, students are unable to engage in scientific inquiry. With extensive support even novices can design and carry out good experiment work. Advice for and examples of the implementation of inquiry are provided to help the reader do this in their own teaching.