What Exactly Is Inquiry-Based Learning? Types, Advantages, and Examples

The primary aim of any educator is to engage the students in the class for effective learning. They want their students to participate in every activity performed in the classroom to make the learning process utterly engaging and result-oriented. Inquiry-based learning can help achieve this efficiently. When primary school students get an environment where they can ask queries and be curious about real-world scenarios, their growth knows no bounds. 

Teachers should encourage students to ask queries for effective implementation of inquiry-based learning. This learning mechanism has a lot to offer. Parents also prefer a school that opts for inquiry-based learning when it’s time to fill out the school admission form. Let us dig deeper and understand the concept better.

Types of Inquiry-based Learning

There are four types of inquiry-based learning, namely:

Structured inquiry Approach: Under this approach, students learn the best way to ask questions. This method is mostly used in science class when students get a scientific process to find a solution to a particular problem.

Open-Ended Inquiry Approach: Under this, students can freely explore their interests and ask related queries. You will see this practice more in the humanities class, where students get a topic to study deeply and ask questions based on their learning. 

Problem-Based Inquiry Approach: In the problem-based inquiry approach, students get assigned a real-world problem to solve. It gets aptly used in mathematics and engineering subjects. 

Guided Inquiry Approach: As the name suggests, in this approach, the teacher guides their students to ask questions and find solutions to real-world problems. 

These are the four fundamental types, and the entire inquiry-based learning process is based on this only. 

Advantages of Inquiry-Based learning process

This learning approach has countless benefits for students at the primary school level. Some of the benefits are:

• It encourages critical thinking in students as they analyze everything deeply before asking any query. Moreover, they will compare and criticize their perspectives finding an apt solution that further boosts their critical thinking skill.
• This learning approach makes the concept understanding better. Students will dig deeper into a topic to be capable of asking queries, and as they keep getting apt answers for their problems, their hold on a particular concept gets better.
• The approach to reaching an apt solution for a particular problem makes students more creative. They devise different solutions for the same problem, unveiling the otherwise unexplored aspects.
• Inquiry-based learning makes the entire schooling journey fruitful. The emphasis is not only on mugging everything to get good grades. Students have to focus on finding apt solutions to problems, and the techniques they use in the process make everything utterly interesting.
• Another advantage of this learning practice is that it simplifies learning. When students explore their interests and ask as many queries as they want, they learn and understand complex topics effortlessly. 

The list of benefits that this learning process offers is never-ending. If you are wondering how to implement it in your classroom, the examples below can help you figure it out.

Examples of Inquiry-based Learning

• One way to encourage inquiry-based learning is to organize field trips. Allow children to explore the outdoors and learn from outside the closed classrooms.
• Conduct debates in class where students get forced to think critically to prove their point in the argument.
• Use group activities as a mode of teaching. When children perform a task in a group, they actually get to know different perspectives and learn to respect all of them.

In a nutshell, inquiry-based learning is one of the effective methodologies for school students. It helps improve their understanding of the concepts, which shows positive results in their academic performance. Furthermore, it helps boost skills like critical thinking, which can secure a child’s personal and professional future.