In the Netherlands, a big curriculum reform in upper secondary education introduced an interdisciplinary inquiry assignment as a part of the final examination. In teachers, this has brought about a need for learning how to teach inquiry skills as well as a need for cooperation between the science subjects, including mathematics. To meet these needs, teacher educators from Utrecht University developed and evaluated a guidance trajectory for the science and mathematics departments of some schools. Participating teams were asked to include a minor inquiry assignment into the curriculum, as a means to prepare students to the final inquiry assignment. For Physics and Mathematics, a ‘falling paper cones’ inquiry assignment was developed. School teams adopted the assignment, carried it out in the classroom by team teaching and reported about the results. The discussions among teachers, during preparing as well as coaching the assignment, were recorded on audiotape and analysed. Evaluation results on the levels of Kirkparick (1996) show that teachers learnt a lot about how to guide students during an inquiry process. However, the complexity of the falling paper cone issue and the amount of theory neeeded for doing the assignment, teachers tended to focus upon ‘the right physics/ mathematics’ instead of on guiding the process of investigating. That was contrary to their biology and chemistry colleagues’ approach who coached students doing an assignment about the issue of water quality that, however, was hardly theory-laden. An inquiry task should be theory-laden (Chinn e.a. 2002), but not to a great extent as then it hinders learning inquiry skills. Consequences for the falling cone assignment are discussed.

References:
Kirkpatrick, D.L. (1996) Evaluation. In: Craig, R.L. (ed.) Training and development handbook. New York: MacGraw-Hill.
Chinn, C.A., Malhotra, B.A. (2002). Epistomologically authentic inquiry in schools: a theoretical framework for evaluating inquiry tasks. Science Education 86, 175 – 218