Some studies suggest that the more experience teachers have in performing authentic scientific inquiry, the better their ability to teach inquiry becomes (Blanchard et al. 2009).
The teachers revealed three key considerations that affected their practice of inquiry: (1) assessment demands, (2) lack of resources and (3) lack of time to plan and to teach inquiry lessons.
Teachers who have better understanding of the National Reasearch Council guide (2000) also tend to have incomplete views of inquiry since there are limited discussions among science teachers about what scientific inquiry is and how to teach inquiry in science class (Demir, 2006).
A recent study of science graduate students found that those who teach inquiry-based methods improve their research skills in formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test these hypotheses (Feldon et al., 2011).
Proponents of inquiry-based instruction argue that teaching through inquiry improves student engagement in science learning and promotes deep conceptual learning of scientific concepts because it introduces students to a type of learning that 'parallels the work of practicing scientists' (Capps and Crawford 2013; Hodson 1992).
Am I teaching science inquiry or am I teaching them how to answer questions for exams?
This breadth has made the Toolkit an important resource for experimental biology and for teaching bioinformatic inquiry.
The two teachers were chosen for this research because they were both experienced biotechnology teachers with many years of experience in teaching different inquiry programs (Table 1).
Some benefits of open science practices for qualitative inquiry include transparent documentation of the research process, opportunities for collaborative and pluralistic analyses, access to data across multiple research sites and from difficult-to-access settings and participants, and opportunities for teaching qualitative inquiry.
However, a debate still exists regarding the goals, methods, and strategies used to incorporate inquiry into the science-education classroom (European Commission 2007; Tamir 2006; Windschitl et al. 2008), and many issues remain unclear regarding the learning goals and suitable strategies for teaching scientific inquiry (Furtak et al. 2012; Minner et al. 2010).
