Inquiry as a Pivotal Element of Knowledge Acquisition within the Vygotskian Paradigm: Building a Science Curriculum for the Elementary School

A Vygotskian approach to the development of students' ability to engage in persistent and systematic inquiry is exemplified by a science curriculum for elementary school children. Three factors are singled out as crucial for evoking and amplifying this ability: (a) Instruction starts by introdu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and instruction 1998-01, Vol.16 (2), p.201-233
Main Authors: Zuckerman, Galina A., Chudinova, Elena V., Khavkin, Emil E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child development
Child growth
Children
Cooperative Learning
Curiosity
Curriculum Design
Curriculum Development
Educational Philosophy
Elementary Education
Growth and development
Mathematics education
Pictographs
Science curricula
Science Curriculum
Science Education
Science Process Skills
Teachers
Teaching Methods
Vygotsky (Lev S)
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Summary:A Vygotskian approach to the development of students' ability to engage in persistent and systematic inquiry is exemplified by a science curriculum for elementary school children. Three factors are singled out as crucial for evoking and amplifying this ability: (a) Instruction starts by introducing ideas that are central and general to the discipline (in our example, these are the concepts of growth and development); (b) students invent and adapt cultural tools for thinking about these ideas (models, schemes, and symbols designed by students under the teacher's guidance); and (c) problems are solved in cooperation with peers, helping students to present explicitly their own naive theories of growth and development and to see the phenomena being studied from the other's point of view. Illustrations are presented from lessons that occurred during our experiments in 2 Moscow schools from 1993 to 1996.
ISSN:0737-0008
1532-690X
DOI:10.1207/s1532690xci1602_3