| Higher vocational engineering education plays an important role in economic development but the current higher vocational engineering education system in China cannot provide quality engineers for the Chinese labor market. Specifically, lecture-based traditional strategies cannot provide adequate training for improving learners' problem-solving skills. Inquiry-based learning, a student-centered approach, has been widely studied and utilized in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in the US. Inquiry-based learning encourages learners to construct new knowledge through teacher-guided inquiry-based learning activities. During the learning process, learners' problem-solving and collaboration skills are improved. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the inquiry-based learning approach can improve students' academic achievement, problem-solving skills, and motivation levels in an engineering program in China.;A pretest-posttest exploratory model was implemented to compare the effects of inquiry-based learning and lecture-based traditional strategies on Chinese higher vocational engineering students. A group of 70 randomly selected students were randomly divided into equal-sized experimental and control groups. The two groups used the same reference textbooks and were taught by the same instructors, but two different approaches were administered: inquiry-based strategies for the experimental group and lecture-based traditional strategies for the control group. A pretest was conducted before the treatment and a posttest was administrated six weeks after treatment using a content-related test to investigate students' learning outcomes. The Motivated Strategy Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was used to measure students' motivation. The split-plot ANOVA was utilized to analyze all the data. The analysis indicated that the teacher-guided inquiry-based learning approach had a positive impact on learners' learning achievement and motivation. |
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