Action Research On Direction Of Inquiry Teaching In Elementary Science Classrooms

After the primary school curriculum reform in 2001, "Inquiry should be the core of science study" designated as one of the basic concepts of the standards of the science curriculum. However, after some attempts many teachers began to question the inquiry teaching. They thought that students learn nothing under the autonomy in full swing. The inquiry teaching is facing the difficulties of development. This paper attempts to address this issue to find a feasible method of operation for the primary scientific inquiry. Its framework is as following:The paper starts with the researcher's own teaching experience to demonstrate that inquiry teaching in elementary schools is now facing the difficulty of carrying out. But the root of the difficulties is that teachers do not know how to deal with the relationship of teacher's guide and students'self-determination, which is interdependent. and mutually exclusive. Therefore, how teachers direct students to independently explore in scientific inquiry became the thorny issue in the inquiry teaching.By reviewing different modes of inquiry learning/teaching including Dewey's five-step inquiry, Schwab's structure inquiry, Suchman's reasoning inquiry, Bruner's discovery inquiry and Lansdown's investigation and colloquium teaching, the paper examines the meaning of scientific inquiry, as well as the concept of direction, and the relationship between the direction and the inquiry teaching.Considering the complex issues in the specific context, the author chooses action research as an approach to answer the research questions of this paper. While action research has many sub-branches, Kemmis's theory of action research is selected as framework to guide this study. The process of the action research conducted by the author and her colleagues is explored in the following part. The paper analyzes four inquiry modes in the primary school science and the direction points of the four inquiry modes and proposed "ask-feedback direction", "ask-Summary style direction" "Reflection-constructivist direction" that are used on the direction point of each model. And then the paper proves the above directing methods have some effects in the inquiry teaching from the student questionnaires, the results of interviews, and the feedback from the participation of researchers.Finally, the paper reflects and sums up the weakness of the writing and the possibility to do the following studies.