Exploring Deviation in Inquiry Learning: Degrees of Freedom or Source of Problems?

Abstract

The European Go-Lab project aims to promote Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) with online laboratories. To support teachers and students, the project provides an IBL model (a sequence of inquiry phases) as well as the technological infrastructure to implement it: the Graasp platform and the Golabz repository. Using these technologies, teachers create Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) where they adapt the proposed IBL model to their needs, and enrich the phases with online resources, apps or labs to build open educational resources that will be distributed to the students. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the deviations from suggested standard models of learning phases that we found in practice. For that purpose, we analyzed the 102 most frequently used ILSs with respect to the perspectives taken by teachers and students. The results show deviations of the authored spaces from the pedagogical model of inquiry learning as well as deviations in the actual learning process models from the teachers’ specifications. Additionally, the analysis points out practices for the learning design, particularly the inclusion of resources and apps into the spaces.