I began by reviewing the steps of the scientific method in class.  As a class, we conducted an experiment together following the steps of the scientific method.  This worked more as a Structured Inquiry.  I worked with the class to develop ideas for their experiment guiding them through questions.  While I was guiding the class discussions, the group progressed through the steps of the scientific method designing their experiment, carrying out their experiment, collecting data and drawing conclusions.  This did not place any of the responsible on individual students. Following completion of the class experiment, I assigned projects in which students were responsible for completing their own science experiment from developing questions to communicating conclusions.  Some of the students began to struggle at this time in developing their own ideas for experiments.  I wanted this to be student-generated projects, so I encouraged them to observe their natural surrounding and begin asking questions about what they were observing.  We discussed that many scientific discoveries were made from individuals studying their surroundings then asking questions to find answers for why things are as they are. When I assigned students their own science projects to develop based on their own questions, the students were working with the highest level of inquiry, Open Inquiry. Having completed the process together as a class, I believed the students had the tools they needed to conduct their own inquiry.  While working on their own science projects, students were developing skills in observation, developing questions, recording data, and communicating results.  Some of the students took their projects to an area science fair and were able to practice their written and oral communication skills. Some of my students struggled in developing their own ideas for a science projects even though we had worked through this as a class together.   I encouraged many times that they take time to observe the natural world around them or consider things they had questioned in the past. This article has led me to wonder if we would have had a different experience when we arrived at individual experiments if I had spent time with the lower levels of inquiry before jumping into Open Inquiry.  Even taking more time for Guided Inquiry may have given students more confidence when they began working in Open Inquiry.  Taking all classes through introductory activities to reinforce prior learning may be important to prepare students for Open Inquiry activities.

Students are given the question, procedure. Students are asked how many birds (and species) are in their neighbourhood, how they will collect the data (bird watching). Through the procedure, they are able to collect data and then analyze it and draw a conclusion of how many birds and species live in their neighborhood. Students are able to use a question, come up with a hypothesis, collect the data and then use that data to create a conclusion. Give students a topic and allow them to create their own question/make the question more open ended. Confirmation/Structured

While we don't teach lessons in the traditional sense, a very basic informal activity we do with children during educational programs is to have them determine what an animal eats, the area where it might nest or den, how it catches it food based on the appearance of the animal (size, coat, teeth, eyes, ears and so on). The level of inquiry is structured as we provide the questions, and give them procedures (look at teeth, look at eyes) and they then give explanations/answers based on what they discover while looking at the animal. The science practices of posing questions and sharing verbal results as a group helps develop confidence and practice in learning about experiments. To modify to move toward a guided inquiry, we will still provide the questions above but encourage them create methods to test their questions, to seek out other options such as perform literature searches in reference materials and analyzing data, this would provide them other resources to answer questions and draw their conclusions.

We do a seed growing activity -- students place seeds in cotton, add water, and put seeds in sunlight and in a dark closet to see if the seeds grow. I think this is confirmation inquiry, because students are provided with the question and the procedure. Through this activity, students develop experience in conducting investigations and collecting and organizing data. To modify this lesson to make it guided inquiry, I would make the question more open ended -- what are the best conditions under which plants can grow? This would support students in designing their own procedures to test their theories.

One of the lessons I did with a Kindergarten class was a vinegar and baking soda eruption experiment. The question and the procedure were provided to the students, but the solution was not so students had the opportunity to provide their theories and hypotheses to the class. This would be the structured level of inquiry, because I did provide the students with the question and procedure instead of having students formulate their own questions and procedures. Through this experiment, students were able to learn about the scientific process and learn about formulating hypotheses and theories about what they thought the solution would be. I think that this experiment could easily be made into a guided inquiry lesson in which I could pose the question about what happens when you mix the substances, and allow the students to figure out how they want to proceed in the experiment. Although Kindergarteners are young, their natural curiousity and openness to learning allows them to figure out a lot of interesting ways of completing tasks that adults may not even have thought of! By allowing the students to figure out their own procedure, they would have developed a deeper understanding of how procedures are formulated in the scientific process.

Beautiful Birds is a 45 minute program I teach each spring with Kdg-2nd gr. students. We are a field trip destination with no prior experience with each particular group of children.  After a brief intro, students are placed in groups of 4-5 and given a paper plate with "bird food"( pasta, beans, pompoms, paper clips and pennies). They are then each given a tool that can be associated with bird beaks            ( tweezers, spoon, toothpick, tongs and fork).  Each group is asked to collaborate in order to predict what tool would be best for each type of food and construct an explanation as to why they have chosen that match up.  Subsequently, group members try to collect all the food they can with their given tool within a short 60 seconds. We wrap up the inquiry with an accounting of food collected and a discussion as to what worked, or did not work as planned, for each food type and why. I then show specimens of real birds and we discuss the correlation of their beak adaptation to their diet. Students are able to apply the finding from their experimentation and see how some beaks are very similar to the tools they used. (If time, we relate the beak/food preference to migration.) This is a structured inquiry since the question and procedure are provided but the students generate the explanation of the results supported by the evidence from their experimentation. One way to further this lesson, and lead it into a guided inquiry, would be for the teachers to use the supplemental (post-trip)materials. These materials encourage the group to set up a bird feeding station outside the classroom/at home and to observe and  record data as to birds feeding and their choice of seed type/location of feeders.

"Nesting parasitism of Molothrus bonariensis in Zonotrichia capensis" -The activity that consists of several stages, begins with the observation in the field of the nests of Zonotrichia capensis and obviously the bird species mentioned; As they are Molothrus bonariensis and Zonotrichia capensis, they are analyzed, apart from this the nests are identified and differentiated. The existing theoretical information of the two mentioned species is reviewed. In the classroom with data collection, analyze the observation examples and expose the hypotheses of the students. Collecting all the information and turning it into common information. -The scientific practices that develop with this process are observation, identification, drawing questions, investigating, drawing conclusions and developing hypotheses. -Review other research related to the topic directly to make a comparison with the conclusions drawn from the hypotheses. Make computer graphics to compare and evaluate statistics that evaluate more truthful and scientific conclusions.

1. Chemical reactions lab using four types of chemical reactions and it would be a structured inquiry lab. 2. The science practices that students engage in during this lesson would be asking questions, carrying out an investigation (they wouldn't necessarily have designed/planned it though), analyzing and interpreting data, using mathematics, constructing explanations, and communicating their information via a lab report format. 3. To make it more inquiry-based I would provide students with a list of chemicals and equipment and let them combine reactants after they've researched the chemicals. Instead of telling them the reactants, I would let them pick based on properties we would have already discussed. By doing this, it would give students the opportunity to actually plan their investigations and argue from evidence about why certain chemicals were chosen as reactants over others available.

I would like to do a demonstration in the classroom illustrating 3 things plants need to grow: sunlight, water and soil. This would be a confirmation inquiry. The control group is 4 plants in potting soil placed near a window and watered as needed. The light group would be 4 of the same kind of seedlings in potting soil placed in a dark place and watered as needed. The water group is 4 of the same kind of seedlings in potting soil placed near a window but not watered. The soil group would be 4 of the same kind of seedlings with wet paper towels around the roots placed near a window and watered to keep the paper towel wet. Regular measurements of plants height and other observations are made. The students would then make conclusions about what a plant needs to grow. Following this inquiry, students could then do a structured inquiry where a similar process with seedlings is done with more specific plant needs tested such as comparing how plants respond to natural sunlight versus different types of artificial light, or several different soil mixtures. Next students could do a guided inquiry with the research question about plant needs that the students would have to create, test and explain.

I teach environmental education at an elementary school through an afterschool program though I do work with teachers to begin incorporating outdoor education into the classroom. We've achieved numberous certifciations through our schoolyard habitat program and sustainability initiatives. My approach has been traditional teaching of inforamtion with "hands-on" work. This re-thinking to the way of inquiry is a new adventure for me. We have an upcoming project of growing plants in hydroponic bays. We will record data on growth and will monitoring nutrient and pH levels and record how that affects growth. I can see how using a confirmation inquiry level would best benefit our students invovled as they would new to data collection and we would be teaching them this skill. Hopefully, as this is a several month project, we would be able to transition to a more structured level, allowing students to make thier own predictions in the outcome of adjusting pH levels and how varying water quality affects plant growth.

I work at an outdoor science camp. Our site is COSA certified and teachers select the 2.5 hour activities that they would like their students receive. One of the options teachers can request is our "Wonders of Water" program. Each session of the program consists of approximately 21 students, 3 chaperones and the naturalist instructor/guide. The concepts reinforced and/or introduced to the students during this program are the water cycle & watershed, wetland and creek and pond macro-invertebrate collection and water testing (which includes pH testing, temperature, plankton netting, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and bottom dreging to understand how natural and human processes can affect the water quality of our pond and creek. Ultimately trying to answer the question "Are the pond and creek healthy habitats?" The water cycle portion is mostly review and having students discuss how human activities can affect water quality.  Students participate in a watershed model demonstration where different objects are placed on the model and then discuss what happens when it rains. Discussion includes the "what happens if" scenarios of farming with pesticide use, animal waste in creeks, and human activity along different areas of the watershed. This portion is basically 1st level or confirmation inquiry.  Students experience conducting an investigation. Approximate time is about 20 minutes. In the wetland portion students participate in discussion on what is a wetland, how is it important and how does it factor in water quality. In this portion of the program students hike through different features of our campus that help with water quality of our creek and pond. We have bioswales in the parking lot, water retention basin, grey water recovery and reuse and storm rain collection tanks. Students discuss how these features help the creek and pond. After this short hike and reading about and taking notes about the adventures of  "Drip" the raindrop through these different pathways on our educational signage students play the Wetland Mystery Game. Students work in groups of 3 or 4 students and reach into a bag where they pull out an object (picture of a bed, a coffee filter, a sponge etc) They are given 5 minutes to brainstorm and discuss how that object relates to the function of a wetland. Groups then present their ideas to the entire group and other can agree, disagree or ask for more information and evidence from the notes taken during the hike. This stage of the program is mostly structured inquiry with some open inquiry for scientific reasoning and cognitive demand from students. Approximate time 40 minutes. In the next phase we introduce macro-invertebrates and how some organisms are more sensitive to environmental factors (dissolved oxygen, pesticide runoff ect) through playing a tagging game. Three to 4 rounds are played and students are asked to make observations of outcome of each introduced factor and what does that mean in a real habitat. This stage is mostly 2nd level with some communication of scientific reasoning. Aproximate time 20 minutes. In the collection and testing portion students are given nets and trays to collect macro-invertebrates they work as team in their cabin groups with their chaperones assisting with reading instructions for equipment use as they rotate through different sites around the pond. The naturalist rotates as well answering any question about equipment use and demonstrating if needed. Students record observations and record ideas. This stage is also mostly structured inquiry but with elements of the 4th stage open inquiry. The students carry out investigations and record results. Approximately 60 minutes. There is a 10 minute discussion of what the recorded results tell us about the health of the pond and compare to the tests performed at the creek . Discussion is not ended with an answer but with another question Could it be healthier and what other things could we measure that might give us more information? This is guided inquiry but without the ability to actually perform more investigation due time constraints. Possibles changes would be to layout the equipment and allow students to choose which tests they think are most relevant to their definition of "what is a healthy pond /creek? This would allow students to design their own investigations  but we have found that most of our students are still in the 2nd and 3rd level upon arrival to camp. Our students come with diverse range of skills and our goal is to have as many students as possible learn to observe, record observations and explain what they think that data means. Our camp is only one week out of their school year and the biggest concept that I like to see our students realize is that science is not hard we are scientists from the moment we are born we just need the tools to practice being effective scientists and open to changes in our thinking.