Time is one of the most valuable assets for learners. Yet, as educators, we often waste it on tasks that may not be worth doing. Recent attention to inquiry-based learning and cognitive complexity affords an opportunity to examine how we use our limited learning time while challenging ourselves as educators to be vigilant in expecting students to engage their minds deeply.

MENTAL MODELS

In her study of high school students, Pitts described students’ mental models of research as flawed (1994). Indeed, we find a range of student notions of what to do when given an assignment to write a research paper about marine biology, for example:

• Sam is curious about stories he has heard of people swimming in the ocean and being stung by jellyfish. He wonders how often this really occurs. Is it more common than it used to be? Are jellyfish stings dangerous or just painful? What stimulus causes jellyfish to sting? Are there different types of jellyfish—are some more likely to be stingers? He begins to search for information to respond to these questions…
• Susie finds an article about sharks, gleans information, and writes a report.

To be sure, “the principle of least effort” is alive and well. We, therefore, must design tasks carefully to require mental work beyond superficial fact-gathering or fact-learning—tasks that push into complex questions like those our students will encounter in an increasingly complicated world. We want their mental models to include question-asking and meaning making.

COLLABORATION IS KEY

Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs calls for the school librarian to collaborate with classroom teachers to develop assignments that are matched to academic standards and include key critical thinking skills, technology and information literacy skills, and core social skills (American Association of School Librarians 2009). One tool school librarians can use to progress toward more meaningful inquiry assignments is the guide to deep learning through inquiry shown in Figure 1. School librarians can use such a guide in one-to-one collaboration with teachers or share it in the context of professional learning communities or professional development where deep learning is of interest.

ASSIGNMENT DESIGN

Newmann and his colleagues have produced a set of standards for teaching academic subjects encompassed in a program entitled Authentic Intellectual Work (AIW) (2007). Their framework features three central criteria: construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and value beyond school. While the AIW framework offers research-based guidance for classroom instruction, inquiry assignments are their own category, and school librarians may prefer a set of criteria to guide this specialized type of learning experience?

Figure 1. Guide to deep learning through inquiry.

Concept-based. To develop assignments that are concept-based, we need to recall the meaning of a concept. Erickson defines concepts as having these four characteristics:

• Broad and abstract,
• Universal in application,
• Timeless—carries through the ages, and
• Represented by examples that share common attributes (2002).

If students come to the library to do a report on animals, a conceptual lens for that inquiry could be habitat, for example. The assignment will then shift from usual questions about the animal’s size, food, classification, home, raising of young, and enemies to wondering about its habitat—what does the animal require in its habitat? How is the habitat of this animal changing? What are the consequences of these changes for the animal? Must the animal migrate to find compatible habitat over the seasons? What impact has man had on the native habitat of the animal?

Besides changes in the questions, there must be changes in the conclusion of the inquiry—the “so what” of the project. How will the project conclude to bring together the findings about a number of animal habitats and arrive at discoveries, insights, or speculations? Without analysis that reveals the “so what,” the concept may be lost.

In short, this criterion asks us to consider whether the assignment will focus on fact-gathering or interpretation of factual information to provide new insights or understandings. Analysis, synthesis, and evaluation are processes residing at the higher order of complexity. Concept-based assignments inherently demand higher-order thinking as students compare examples analytically to arrive at conclusions.

Real-world application. An assignment should be meaningful to the student. Such relevance can be related to the content and/or the processes of the assigned task. If students are studying a social movement in American history, it can become relevant when they are asked to examine how the movement has influenced their lives today and their futures. Surely, the women’s movement, civil rights movement, labor movement, human rights movement, and disability rights movement are examples from which students might find insights into the ways their lives have been affected. By focusing on a relevant question, the search for facts about the movement takes on new purpose and promises for insights beyond fact reporting. An expectation that students arrive at insight cannot be implied, but must be an explicit expectation of the assignment.

Besides content, the processes required for successful completion of the assignment can be relevant to real life if process expectations are made explicit and are assessed along with product or content. Such expectations may include participating substantively in group work or assuming a critical stance in evaluating information. These process-oriented factors have direct relevance to the way in which lifelong learners work in life beyond school. Again, explicit expectations and assessment criteria are necessary to ensure that students are conscious of them.

Substantive technology integration. While educators feel pressure to integrate technology into instruction, technology should not be a distraction from deep learning, but rather an enhancement. Technology can decorate an otherwise cognitively simple task and take time away from the deep learning that should be our priority. When integrating technology, we need to think critically about the time investment and ask the difficult question of whether technology is contributing to deep learning or taking away from it. Using an online graphic organizer (e.g., Webspiration) or a collaborative tool (e.g., GoogleDocs) to analyze findings and search for patterns may meet the test of technology that deepens understanding. Using a “cool” technology tool to present a collection of facts may not. If we are to use our limited time for learning well, we need a standard for technology use to be more than an opportunity for creativity or motivation—it must also be a tool for deeper understanding or collaboration.

Active intellectual exploration. Posing questions lies at the heart of any inquiry-based assignment. A question taxonomy attributed to Dahlgren and Oberg offers one way to help students generate research questions likely to lead to intellectual exploration beyond fact gathering (2001). By sharing such a taxonomy of questions with students, we can help them distinguish between a research paper and a report. We can discourage questions that can be called encyclopedic, like “What are the characteristics of the habitat of wombats?” Instead, we can encourage questions fitting one of the following categories:

• Meaning-oriented: How do changes in short-grass prairie habitat affect the animal life that lives there? (understanding of the meaning of habitat change)
• Relational: What are the effects of natural hazards like flooding or wildfire on the landscape?
• Value-oriented: What methods can conservationists employ to educate citizens about the importance of preservation of public land?
• Solution-oriented: What steps can be taken to protect wetlands in our state?

For younger children, we can simply encourage them to ask how, why, or what if questions. The point is that they need explicit guidelines for a good question, and we need to expect them to generate such questions to guide their inquiry. Further, these questions should grow out of what they already know and be questions to which they do not already have the answers.

TAKING ACTION

School librarians can use the guide to deep learning through inquiry shown in Figure 1 with teachers to design assignments and assessment criteria to accompany those assignments. In this way, previous learning time is used to engage students in tasks worth doing—tasks that engage student intellects deeply, relate to real life, and challenge the “principle of least effort.”

An example of active exploration:

In fourth grade life science, we will focus our research project on animal migration. Working with a partner, choose a migratory animal to study. Use the questions generated by our class to guide your research. In the computer lab, use the pathfinder our librarian has posted on the library website to lead you to reliable information sources. Enter your findings in the spreadsheet created in GoogleDocs. After the responses are entered, choose two other animals and compare findings about them to your own findings. Create a chart in which you show the comparisons. Record your sources of information at the bottom of the chart. Write a paragraph to explain what patterns you see in your comparisons. Bring your printed chart to large group so that we can create a whole class chart and draw conclusions about animal migration.