Transforming a General Chemistry Learning Environment: Guiding Instructors Toward Developing an Inquiry-Based Instructional Logic

• In Event: 43.011 - Designing and Supporting Innovative Learning Environments Across Contexts and Disciplines: International Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives
Despite calls over decades for transforming to inquiry-based instructional designs in science courses to promote scientific ways of thinking and equity, how and in what ways these transformations occur remains less understood. This study, therefore, makes transparent how an inquiry-based instructional design was conceived and proposed to approximately 20 instructors (for 1200 students) in the General Chemistry course at the United States Military Academy in 2015. The findings contribute to deeper understandings of what is required of and for instructors to take up new instructional repertoires to transform to innovative instructional designs and learning environments.

Modes of Inquiry
This study is informed by Interactional Ethnography (IE) as a logic-of-inquiry (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003) in a double loop model, for both the instructional processes under study and the research design. Central to IE is Baktin’s (1986) argument that “what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener” (p. 60).
Therefore, we not only show how guided-inquiry was proposed to instructors, but trace the actions taken and decisions made over time that show how guided-inquiry was a developing instructional logic. Moreover, the role of dialogic conversations between internal (author) and external ethnographer(s) from a similar research base to inform the developing study is made transparent as a proposed method of inquiry.

Data Sources
Data sources are material records (i.e., fieldnotes, course documents, presentations) from the first 6 months of the developing instructional design and key decisions and actions that were made visible through dialogic conversations between internal and external ethnographers.

Results
Overtime analysis (tracing) of documentation shows that the guided-inquiry approach was developed to address institutional goals to see science as a way of thinking through chemistry based in a learning cycle (Karplus, 1977). To develop a learning environment and a mindset that would foster this new way of teaching and learning at this institution, instructors were afforded multiple deliberate opportunities that guided their thinking to both contribute to and learn from the developing guided-inquiry approach. Furthermore, challenges of instructors moving to this new paradigm will be addressed.

Scholarly significance
This study shows how and under what conditions an innovative instructional initiative of guided inquiry was proposed to instructors in an overtime and developmental process. By tracing ways in which opportunities were afforded to instructors, we make visible the critical role of an instructional logic as foundational to these transformational processes in developing innovative learning environments.

Authors

• Melinda Z. Kalainoff, United States Military Academy

• Kathleen Guettlein, United States Military Academy