What if learning was question-driven? This is exactly what inquiry -based learning is about: it engages students by making real-world connections through exploration and high-level questioning.
Advantages:
1. Teachers guide students to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. To learn these skills, the teacher helps students think through their processes, teaches them possible approaches, and encourages them to try various methods.
2. Students are encouraged to fail as a part of the process and then improve their performance in subsequent activities.
3. Instead of repeating answers students have been taught, students learn to seek their own answers to questions. So, students develop strong research skills.
Disadvantages:
1. Because students are always encouraged to speak up, participate, and not be afraid to fail, there is always a risk of embarrassing students who may not be quick thinkers (or who suffer from learning disabilities and processing issues). This leads to a higher level of anxiety and loss of motivation.
2. It may result in poorer standardized testing performance. When too much time is dedicated to student inquiries, there’s always the risk that important “core” topics could be left out. Naturally, this hurts standardized testing performance.
Still, one may find some useful techniques and ideas of inquiry-based learning for carefully implementing them into the lesson and benefiting from them, as the approach gives a lot of opportunities to promote students’ problem solving abilities
