Progressive inquiry

Progressive inquiry is a pedagogical model which aims at facilitating the same kind of productive knowledge practices of working with knowledge in education that characterize scientific research communities. It is developed by Kai Hakkarainen and his colleagues in the University of Helsinki (Hakkarainen, 2003; Muukkonen, Hakkarainen & Lakkala, 2004) as a pedagogical and epistemological framework to support teachers and students in organizing their activities for facilitating expert-like working with knowledge. It emphasizes shared expertise and collaborative work for knowledge building and inquiry by setting up the context, using questions, explanations, theories, and scientific information in the cycle of deepening inquiry. It is often used with computer-supported collaborative learning. The model has evolved from the initial cognitively oriented one toward versions that highlight pragmatic and socio-cultural aspects of inquiry.

The model describes the elements of expert-like knowledge practices in a form of a cyclic inquiry process (Hakkarainen, 1998; Muukkonen, Lakkala & Hakkarainen, 2005). It relies on cognitive research on education and is closely associated with the knowledge building approach of Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994; 2003) and the Interrogative Model of Inquiry introduced by Hintikka (1999). In a progressive inquiry process, the teacher creates a context for inquiry by presenting a multidisciplinary approach to a theoretical or real-life phenomenon, after which the students start defining their own questions and intuitive working theories about it. Students’ questions and explanations are shared and evaluated together, which directs the utilization of authoritative information sources and iterative elaboration of subordinate study questions and more advanced theories, explanations and writings. The model is not meant prescriptively, as an ideal path to be followed rigidly; rather it offers conceptual tools to describe, understand and take into account the critical elements in collaborative knowledge-advancing inquiry.

References

*Hakkarainen, K. (1998). Epistemology of inquiry and computer-supported collaborative learning. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
*Hakkarainen, K. (2003). Emergence of progressive inquiry culture in computer-supported collaborative learning. Learning Environments Research, 6(2), 199-220.
*Hintikka, J. (1999). Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery. Selected Papers of Jaakko Hintikka, Volume 5. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
*Muukkonen, H., Hakkarainen, K., & Lakkala, M. (2004). Computer-mediated progressive inquiry in higher education. In T. S. Roberts (Ed.), Online Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice (pp. 28-53). Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.
*Muukkonen, H., Lakkala, M. and Hakkarainen, K. (2005). Technology-mediation and tutoring: how do they shape progressive inquiry discourse? The Journal of the Learning Sciences 14(4): 527-565. [Available online|http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1207/s15327809jls1404_3] .
*Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In Encyclopedia of Education (2nd ed., pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference, USA. [Available online|http://ikit.org/fulltext/2003_knowledge_building.pdf ] .