| In recent years, inquiry learning has been paid close attention to by educators, and it is an important subject to help students understand science and develop the ability to inquire for the reforms in scientific education. Little research, however, has been done on the inherent process of inquiry learning in a systematic way. In view of these facts, this thesis attempted to investigate how inquiry learning occurs and what are the decisive factors that influence inquiry learning.The thesis consists of eight parts. In the first part, the necessity to inquiry learning was discussed in terms of the development of society, philosophy of science as well as the process of cognition, and then we developed the definite purposes of the thesis on the basis of summarizing the studies that precede.In the second part, constructivism, as the theoretical basis for inquiry learning, was discussed from three aspects. Generally, from a constructivist perspective, knowledge is a learner's activity rather than an independent body of "know"; constructivists view learning as the adaptations students make in their functioning schemes to neutralize perturbations that arise through interactions with our world; at the same time, constructivists hold that each person has his own knowledge and students should be the role of explorer in classroom.The third part is the meanings and features of inquiry learning. In this part, we figure that, in essence, inquiry learning is the activity of constructing that based on problem solving, and it includes three essential features, that is, students-centered, literacy-oriented as well as the unity of scientific process and knowledge.inAfterwards, we put forward a tetrahedral model of inquiry learning in the light of the above-mentioned understandings. In the model, all elements are divided into two. One represents the cognitive activity, the other represents the metacognitive activity. In the cognitive part, there are also two kinds of symbols, one is rectangle which means the inherent process that students engaged in, it comprises conflict, construct and integrate successively which make up the normal section of the tetrahedral, the other is circle which, correspondingly, represents the cognitive structure of students in each inherent process, all the circles make up the bottom of the tetrahedral, that is to say, we describe the students' cognitive activity from two different levels. Similarly, triangle, lying on the vertex of the tetrahedral, is used to represent the metacognitive activity that means metacognitive activity can be found through the process of cognition. Moreover, each specific process was given a minute description.In the fifth part, we posed that epistemology, prior knowledge and self-monitoring are the factors that influence inquiry learning, what's more, each factors was elaborated on in the thesis.In the next part, the experiment about inquiry learning was carried out. The data were derived not only from interviews with students and written tasks, but also from the students' engagement with actual inquiring activities which were carried out in the authentic context of a naturalistic setting. From the experiment, the following findings were obtained:1. Conflict, construction and integration are really in existence during inquiry learning, and there does exist the regulation and control of metacognition, but there are some differences among different students.2. Students' epistemology influences their attitude towards inquiry learning. Students having epistemological beliefs more aligned with construction engage in more positively learning when inquiring, whereas students having mechanical epistemological beliefs tend to take a passive attitude during inquiry learning.IV3.Students' prior knowledge affects not only the number and kinds of hypothesis that they posed, but also the types of interpretation that they gave. Students with rich knowledge tend to give theoretical hypothesis and microscopic interpretation. In contrast,...
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