Embracing the essence of inquiry: New roles for science teachers

Abstract

“This is the thing I really get excited about. There are some great ideas here, some really neat projects. Wanda and Joan are working on amphibian decline. Ann is interested in territorial behavior or some sort of feeding behavior in crawdads. That is a good one to study because crawdads are an important decomposer in the stream. We're looking at what kinds of criteria in a stream make it habitable for different kinds of organisms. And when you see those different combinations of organisms, what do they mean? How do you interpret them? I mean we're really getting into higher levels of thinking, because we're looking at different kinds of organisms and interpreting them in terms of stream health.” Jake, biology teacher, Northwestern High School. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 916–937, 2000