Although this challenge may not seem common to most, I often struggle as a teacher to guide first-graders in demonstrating proper behavior and listening skills when leading inquiry-based activities. As young students, they are eager to use materials and share their thoughts out-loud with others. They are still learning the importance of being patient and stopping to reflect on their learning. After some of my own reflection, I have developed different strategies to tackle student behavior during these activities. First, I set clear expectations for the students. Next, I make sure to model proper scientist behavior and I explain the importance of doing so. Lastly, I reiterate with the students the importance of what we are investigating and why. First Graders Learning All About Hawks!

The biggest challenge I have faced is time. Inquiry projects take a lot of time and when I only see each of my classes twice a week for 1 hour, it is often hard to have students produce quality work. I have to make sure that my students are very focused and know what the goal is that they are trying to accomplish during that class period.

The biggest challenge I faced in the past when doing inquiry based activities was the time it required to go through all of the steps in a meaningful way. It was also a challenge with teaching students how to write and format their reports. What I found was particularly helpful was to go through the writing process together for a simple shared project so they were able to see and participate in building a good quality report together. Then they were able to do this more effectively on their own.

Some challenges that I have faced with leading and assessing inquiry-based activities is determining how to grade them. I have tackled this challenge by creating a rubric that specifies exactly what I am looking for with their work. It was challenging to realize that this rubric was not grading the students on what they know but rather what they are able to do. I put it together by grading their ability to come up with a testable, open-ended question, a thorough hypothesis, and a plan to test their hypothesis. The rubric doesn't include whether they were able to answer their question or not, but rather their ability to collect data and infer what the results mean and whether their hypothesis was correct or not.

The biggest challenge we have faced is the time required to allow individual student-directed inquiry questions and projects related to all of the UN SDGs.  Several years ago we allowed our students to identify their own individual inquiry project.  It was challenging to support every students' project with timely feedback, etc. We adjusted by narrowing the focus of student inquiry (to climate change) and by grouping like-minded students.  This was much easier to support.

When my students conducted their own research projects for a STEM fair, it was very time-consuming.  Unfortunately, since our school is mainly focused on how the students perform on their end-of-course state tests, most teachers do not have the time to dedicate to inquiry-based research projects that take a significant amount of time to complete. There are many biology concepts to cover in a limited amount of time to ensure that the students can perform to the best of their abilities on the state tests. Even though our students perform above the state average, we are constantly being told that it is not good enough and we are made to feel ineffective.  This inhibits our ability to deviate from our rigorous path to cover all of the required topics before the spring testing schedule.  One way that I tried to address the time constraints was to break the projects up into smaller tasks that had specific due dates.  Even though my students worked with a partner, I still had 25 research projects to manage. After discussing the topics that they chose, they had to be guided to ensure that they could design an experiment to test their hypothesis. I had to teach them how to gather quality reference material since most of them were used to using Wikipedia.  Teaching them how to access full-text scientific journal articles was an important step to getting them started.  I required that each research group had a minimum of 10 journal articles about their topic. Next, the students had to design their experiments.  The amount of time to conduct the experiments depended on the research topic. For example, some students were growing plants in our greenhouse, some were swabbing desks to grow bacteria, some were conducting macroinvertebrate stream surveys of Little Beaver Creek after school, and many other diverse topics. This was definitely the best part for the students.  They enjoyed gathering data that was unique to their study. After their experiments were completed, they created graphs, formed conclusions, and learned how to write in APA format (which took a lot of time since they had no experience with APA format.) Finally, they had to create posters for their STEM fair that were presented to a panel of judges.  The judges consisted of two college professors and two retired high school science teachers. Overall, I was incredibly proud of the performance of all of my students!  Some of them even advanced to the next level of competition at Youngstown State University.  Although the student-led research projects took a lot of time to complete, I still managed to cover most of the topics for the state test. Honestly, I think the groups that completed the projects performed better on the tests because they understood the process of science better.

The most common challenges I have found when working on inquiry based research is keeping students motivated to keep good detailed records and then when finished with data collection students are very shallow or limited in their conclusions. Typically, we remind them how important data points are, for instance when looking for aquatic insects in our stream, I encourage them to look very closely in each sample for every type of insect.  Finding just one pollution intolerant species can tell us and our audience a lot about the stream.  I always remind the students the audience viewing their reports weren’t necessarily at the location to help collect data, so be sure to explain things as if the person you are talking to has no idea what you were doing. I typically have students share their work online, here I will ask questions to try to encourage them to be very detailed in their descriptions of the work they have done.

students are typically stumped and need their hands held when trying to figure out inquiry based activities. They are not used to this and where not introduced to it at a young age like citizen science programs advocate. I would usually ended meeting with students one by one and helping them with the process.

The scientific process can be overwhelming for many students, so it's best to break it down into smaller chunks of information and then step back and see how all that information fits together. It's also challenging to fit all that we want to do in a short period of time. In my job, I visit schools once or maybe twice a year, and I will only have between 45 minutes to an hour with the students each day. This means I have to work closely with their teachers ahead of time to assess what the students already know and what they need to work on so that during the short class time we can accomplish as much as possible.

I have struggled with guiding students through complicated processes without the students getting bored or frustrated. For example, leading summer camp kids with water quality testing and why its important. Many kids grew confused and frustrated at all the steps. I've helped with this by breaking the project into smaller steps and giving breaks in between.

One of the biggest issues I have is letting the students lead the work.  Trained in secondary education, I feel like I always need to know the answers to all of the questions students are asking or know how just how to investigate them.  I have to remind myself that it is ok for us to learn together.  I don't have to be the resident expert on everything!  Time is always an issue--making sure that students really have the time needed to collect enough data to answer their questions can be an issue too.  As the teacher said--he has his kids get at least 12 days of data before doing any analysis.

As an informal educator, we are trying to figure out ways to do this with homeschool families. As with working with other educators, it is more about teaching others how to do this. So actually seeing what others have written is extremely helpful for other trainings. I like Vanessa's idea of creating a Kit for teachers to purchase to help them with supplies and time.

I am a new educator and haven't had a lot of experience with inquiry-based activities but I have come up with a list of challenges I could expect. The first challenge facing me is time. I'm an informal educator and I only get to see my students once a week for an hour. This makes it really hard to plan long projects or projects with multiple- time consuming portions. Another challenge is technology. All of my classes meet outside and are usually titled "nature club" or "outdoor club" the students don't want to go into the library or use computers during this limited time. This makes things like doing research or creating graphs challenging. Another challenge I face with my students is age and ability range. My students meet in a group and usually contain different grade levels, abilities, and experience. This could be a challenge for requiring in-depth inquiry projects.

As being new educator, I am still framing out activites but the comments posted is a big help! Thank you!

Time pressures make allowing students the space and freedom to conduct the investigations a challenge. These rich experiences take a longer period of time than we often have in a term or learning period. Accessing the required materials is also a challenge due to limited budgets, and also due to timing - when students are allowed to follow the inquiry process often you don't know what they will need with enough time to source materials or experiences. Access to natural spaces is also challenging in city areas and more oganisation and funding is required to go off-site for these places. Setting boundaries with the students around what investigations we have the capacity to achieve can help to tackle most of these challenges.

When I have done inquiry activities in the past, it has sometimes been hard to help a group ask a question they can answer with the supplies we have or within the time frame we have to work with. Generally, I offer suggestions and we brainstorm ways to get the materials and I recommend ways to complete the experiment in a shorter window. Overall, the biggest issue I have with inquiry activities has been the amount of time they take in class. I know the process is important, but there are also big biology concepts that are critical. I like the idea of doing several larger inquiry activities throughout the year where students work on them a little bit at a time instead of devoting entire class periods to the activity. The inquiry/research activity could be worked on once a week or every few days for just a few minutes during class time.  My inquiry activities have been more isolated as just part of one or two units of study. If the project was something that was worked on throughout the year, students would be practicing this important science process and there would be time for curriculum as well.

Certainly it is a challenge to provide students with enough time to engage in the entire process of an investigation.  However, I find that by taking time to provide them with plenty of class time to work and meet with me twice or three times as "check-ins," the process truly takes shape.  Students are able to make mistakes and learn from them, and as they make changes in the middle of things, their final work is generally much better and more comprehensive.  Of course, taking more class time to generate these projects may mean less time for something else, but the entire process is so valuable that it is worth it.

I typically narrow the focus of the students' scientific experiments by limiting the options for the experimental variables. I do so often because of supplies concerns, money concerns, or time constraints the class is under. Some other challenges I have faced are students unable to write well enough and clearly enough for classmates or myself to be able to read. More time does help as well as laptops for students to type out their experiments. The conclusion of a students experiment can be written using a writing scaffold so all the students need to do is copy the sentences and fill in the blanks with their own information.

It is a challenge having 30 students in a class who all want to do different inquiry activities, literally a nightmare to plan for.  Some activities may take one day to look at (analyzing data in eBird), while others might take months (determining when hummingbirds migrate to and from northern Indiana).  In the past, I have narrowed down investigations to 2 or 3 and let students chose which ones to investigate (trying to pick ones that take around the same amount of time).

The two most pressing challenges I face in leading or accessing inquiry-based activities occur as a result of my position.  I spend half of my day as a reading specialist, the other have as a teacher of gifted and talented students.  For both areas I use science as the vehicle for teaching the students - as much as is reasonable.  However, time becomes a significant issue as I only meet with students for 30 minutes per day.   For the gifted learners, the struggle becomes that they want more time on the projects and associated activities, time I cannot give them inclass.  Thus I have to work to develop aspects that are more independent, as well as try to include the classroom teachers.  For the reading students, we spend 4 days on traditional interventions and 1 day per week on our inquiries.  I am of the firm belief that science and social studies are two areas where students apply their language arts and math skills.  That they need to have application time as part of their curriculum.

A challenge I have faced personally in leading and assessing inquiry-based activities is time. As an informal teacher, I have limited time (approximately 1-2 hours) with a group of students. As a result, it is hard to fit in inquiry learning, curriculum and have clear outcomes. Currently, I am working on developing a rentable Citizen Science Inquiry Collection kit that will provide educators with the material resources and lesson plans they will need to facilitate inquiry-learning in their classrooms without spending lots of money on equipment and time creating plans. Hopefully, providing teachers a 2-week rental kit for $250 CAN will provide them with the tool they need to overcome the challenges they experience facilitating inquiry-based education and citizen science in class. This will also help to overcome my obstacle of time!

Sometimes students make conclusions that are not substantiated by their evidence. Having them slow down and review what their finding really are, often gets them back on track. Leading questions that often work are, "Can you prove this?" and "I'm not convinced. Tell me more." Once they talk through their argument, most students catch their flaws.

I recently co-taught our 6th grade science fair unit, and what I struggled with most was figuring out how to get students to go beyond the ready-made science projects they saw online and get them to think at a higher level inquiring. After taking this class, I know I will have better questions to ask next year and will provide some additional opportunities for inquiry through citizen science, the I Wonder board, and more resources this class has shared. The students struggled the most with coming up with their own ideas or even knowing where to start. Much of their lives are dictated to them, which is why I love the open-endedness of this curriculum and think it will make a great addition to our science fair resources.

As a teacher, I have struggled with knowing exactly what to assess. How do I know that my students are doing what they are supposed to? That stems from ME not knowing exactly what I am supposed to do or should ask of my students during inquiry-based activities. As I learn more about them. I am better able to tell my students what is expected fo them.