Hammer, Cognition and Instruction (1995)

Student inquiry in a physics class discussion

D. Hammer, Cognition and Instruction, 13(3), p 401-430 (1995). (link to journal article)

Abstract: There is a long, rich history of arguments for the importance of involving students in a process of inquiry. For many instructors, however, promoting student inquiry is a difficult agenda to pursue, for two reasons. First, there is often tension for instructors between concerns for this agenda and more traditional concerns for the correctness and completeness of students' understanding. Second, it is not easy to recognize when productive student inquiry is taking place. For a teacher in class, what is valuable about the students' participation at any given moment may not be as obvious as the flaws and ambiguities in their arguments.

This article analyzes a short excerpt from a physics class discussion to consider the value of the students' work as inquiry and to illustrate a teacher's negotiation of the tension between inquiry and traditional content-oriented concerns. The approach is to try to discover the beginnings of science in what the students say and do, rather than to apply criteria from a particular model of scientific reasoning. The article presents this exploration for students' knowledge and abilities both as an approach to research on student inquiry and as a mode of instructional practice to support that inquiry.