Skip to content

Personal Inquiry

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 design), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Personal inquiry treats science learning as an investigation of a topic of genuine personal significance to the student (a nearby noise source, a family food-shopping habit), scaffolded through an explicit 8-phase inquiry cycle — Find My Topic, Form My Question, Plan My Investigation, Collect My Evidence, Analyze My Evidence, Respond to Evidence, Share My Results, Reflect on My Experience — represented visually to students throughout so they always know where they are in the process and can move non-linearly (e.g., revisiting a hypothesis after new evidence). The theory's central pedagogical move is scripted orchestration: rather than relying on a teacher's contingent, moment-to-moment support (see Scaffolding), a pre-authored inquiry script — implemented in software — pre-specifies which phases are visible, which activities happen individually versus in groups, and how data collected outside the classroom (at home, in a park, at a nature reserve) flows back into classroom analysis. This is explicitly framed as a distinct mechanism from scaffolding: it does not require a person calibrating support in real time to an individual student's understanding, but instead structures the activity in advance so that transitions between settings, individual and group work, and inquiry phases happen predictably.

Implications

Context

  • Requires a mobile or otherwise portable technology toolkit that can collect data outside the classroom and later surface it for classroom-based collective analysis
  • Best suited to inquiry topics with a plausible personal or local angle (a nearby noise source, a family purchasing habit, backyard weather) rather than topics that only make sense as abstract classroom exercises
  • Compatible with the topic yielding an unexpected or inconclusive result — the design explicitly treats this as an opportunity to prompt re-observation and explanation, not as a failure of the investigation

Target Learners

  • Secondary-age students (studied here in ages 11-16) across formal classroom settings and informal out-of-school settings (home, afterschool clubs, field trips)

Target Learning Objectives

  • Practicing authentic scientific reasoning (forming testable questions, collecting and interpreting evidence, explaining unexpected results) on personally meaningful topics
  • Sustaining a single inquiry across multiple physical settings and time periods without losing coherence

Claims

  • (none yet linked)

Examples

Key Sources

  • Sharples, M., Scanlon, E., Ainsworth, S., Anastopoulou, S., Collins, T., Crook, C., Jones, A., Kerawalla, L., Littleton, K., Mulholland, P., & O'Malley, C. (2015). Personal Inquiry: Orchestrating Science Investigations Within and Beyond the Classroom. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 24(2), 308-341. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.944642
  • Dillenbourg, P., & Jermann, P. (2010). Technology for classroom orchestration. In M. S. Khine & I. M. Saleh (Eds.), New Science of Learning (pp. 525-552). Springer.
  • White, B. Y., & Frederiksen, J. R. (1998). Inquiry, modeling, and metacognition: Making science accessible to all students. Cognition and Instruction, 16(1), 3-118.
Page metadata
Field Value
type theory
title Personal Inquiry
description A model of technology-supported science inquiry organized as an 8-phase cycle (Find My Topic through Reflect on My Experience) that is deliberately designed to move seamlessly between classroom, home, and field settings, guided by "scripted orchestration" rather than moment-to-moment teacher scaffolding.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — sharples-et-al-2015

Frontmatter is the page's machine-readable record — see the Schema & Guide.