For the past two months I have been involved in a revision of Science As Inquiry, a book I published with Goodyear Publishing in 2000. The book revision will be finished at the end of April, and the new edition will be published in the Fall of 2011.

I’ve developed a website for the 2nd edition, and you can find it at Science-as-inquiry.org.  The website is under development, but you can visit it to get a feel for the nature of science as inquiry, a book that integrates active learning, project-based science, and Internet-focused science to enhance student learning.

The philosophy of science teaching that has been developed at this weblog is the underpinning of science-as-inquiry.  Inquiry by its nature is a humanistic pursuit of our understanding of the universe, and should guide science teaching and learning.  Inquiry puts the student at the center of learning, and as teachers our role becomes one of helping students develop the abilities to do inquiry, and to enable our students to be able pursue avenues of science that relate to and appeal to them.  Unfortunately, in the testing and standards-driven culture that dominates education today, science teachers who embrace inquiry as the mainstay of their approach to teaching need support and understanding from policy makers, scientists and parents.

Inquiry is one of the most researched concepts by science education researchers.  If you do a search of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) or the journal, Science Education, you will find thousands of hits for inquiry.   In fact, the first “virtual” issue of the JRST was focused on scientific inquiry.  Below are the titles for this interesting issue on inquiry in science teaching.

• Building a bridge between research and practice
  Julie A. Luft
• Embracing the essence of inquiry: New roles for science teachers
  Barbara A. Crawford
• Progressive inquiry in a computer-supported biology class
  Kai Hakkarainen
• Folk theories of inquiry: How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific method
  Mark Windschitl
• Developing students’ ability to ask more and better questions resulting from inquiry-type chemistry laboratories
  Avi Hofstein, Oshrit Navon, Mira Kipnis, Rachel Mamlok-Naaman
• Characteristics of professional development that effect change in secondary science teachers’ classroom practices
  Bobby Jeanpierre, Karen Oberhauser, Carol Freeman
• Science inquiry and student diversity: Enhanced abilities and continuing difficulties after an instructional intervention
  Okhee Lee, Cory Buxton, Scott Lewis, Kathryn LeRoy
• Inscriptional practices in two inquiry-based classrooms: A case study of seventh graders’ use of data tables and graphs
  Hsin-Kai Wu, Joseph S. Krajcik
• Exploring teachers’ informal formative assessment practices and students’ understanding in the context of scientific inquiry
  Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Erin Marie Furtak
• The development of dynamic inquiry performances within an open inquiry setting: A comparison to guided inquiry setting
  Irit Sadeh, Michal Zion

I’ll be writing more about inquiry and science teaching on this weblog. In the meantime, I invite you to visit the science-as-inquiry website.