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“Inquiry-based learning” is a hot topic in education these days, both in Canada and around the world.

In Canada, Ontario’s incoming premier Doug Ford recently declared to

“Kids used to learn math by doing things like memorizing a multiplication table, and it worked,” Ford said during the recent provincial election. “Instead, our kids are left with experimental discovery math. That hardly teaches math at all. Instead, everyone gets a participation ribbon and our kids are left to fend for themselves.”

Ford is not the only Canadian critic of a vision for education organized around discovery, exploration and inquiry.

Promoted in and , this vision has been criticized by media columnists such as and — who have argued that “inquiry” has left parents and students confused, and is jeopardising Canada’s position as a global leader in education.

They have called for a return to traditional forms of education focused on, as Staples put it, “.”

Criticism like this has created significant uncertainty around the value and efficacy of inquiry, not just in Canada, but in other high performing jurisdictions of education including and .

Beyond ‘discovery learning’

In a recent , together with colleagues at the ����ɫ�� including graduate student , I examined the evidence for various arguments made against inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning.

Our research shows the critics do get one thing right: There is a lot of evidence that .

The problem with using this research to dismiss inquiry altogether, however, is that it does not distinguish discovery learning from .

These include guided approaches to inquiry such as and learning. They also include approaches to inquiry aligned with the authentic education movement involving and .

Within these approaches to inquiry, students are given opportunities to engage in meaningful work .

They also move beyond memorizing information and algorithms — towards demonstrating by applying them within unfamiliar contexts.

Success on standardised tests

Examples of this kind of inquiry include a .

They include a .

In contrast to what the critics of inquiry claim, these investigations all required direct instruction and the need to recall basic facts. However, they also extended these traditional approaches to education in ways “.”

To promote deeper learning, teachers introduced ongoing feedback loops and had students explain and justify their reasoning.

in the and in have demonstrated that students who engage in this kind of inquiry perform better on standardised tests than students in more traditional learning environments.

The ‘Hattie effect’

So why have a number of studies found inquiry-based approaches to possess limited educational value? Education researcher John Hattie, for example, reviewed more than 800 research studies and found that .

Hattie’s oft-referenced study is limited in a number of respects. “Piagetian” programs, which emphasize , were ranked as the second most impactful of all the approaches examined in Hattie’s study. But these approaches were presented as distinct from inquiry, despite shared affinities with both guided and authentic approaches. Further, the majority of studies used in Hattie’s analysis were conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In contrast, a recent synthesis of contemporary research in found that both guided approaches to inquiry and approaches growing out of the authentic education movement promote deeper understanding and more intellectually engaging learning experiences for students.

Inquiry is not unguided discovery

The research clearly shows that ministries of education — in Canada and globally — should maintain their commitment to curricular shifts towards inquiry.

However, there is a need to help the public better understand the research basis that has informed this change in direction.

As part of this work, we must engage more vigorously with politicians and popular commentators who have misrepresented inquiry as a process of unguided discovery devoid of instructional supports.

, Director, Student Experiences Community-Based Pathway,

This article was originally published on . Read the .