Guiding Elementary Students to Pose Relevant Questions in Science Class

I’d been hearing about inquiry-based learning for a while and knew I needed to get my students asking their own questions. But like many other teachers, I really struggled with it: When I asked my students to come up with their own questions, most questions were off-topic, way too general, or completely unrelated to the science concepts that I was currently teaching.

Last year, after introducing forces in my elementary science class, my students started asking off-topic questions like “Why is the car red?” or silly questions like or “What if the car just blew up?” These questions were not scientifically useful for what they needed to learn. I had to guide my students to ask the right questions, and I found myself doubting if what they were doing was actually inquiry or whether I was just steering students toward my own intended outcomes while still calling it student-driven learning.

UNDERSTANDING INQUIRY

As I reflected, I realized I needed to understand what true inquiry actually looks like in an elementary classroom. That pushed me to research and really rethink my approach.

I learned that inquiry is not a single method, but more of a continuum that includes the following:

• Confirmation Inquiry—Students verify a concept already taught.
• Structured Inquiry—The teacher provides the question and students follow set procedures.
• Guided Inquiry—The teacher provides the question, but students design parts of the investigation.
• Open Inquiry—Students generate the question and design the investigation.

In my elementary classroom, where students don’t have much background knowledge, most science instruction will realistically fall into structured or guided inquiry. This means that I can still provide structure and guide my students while engaging them in meaningful inquiry.

Learning that this kind of instruction was still inquiry allowed me to rethink how I designed learning experiences for my students. I changed how I structured my lessons to provide opportunities for students to think, investigate, and make sense of science in developmentally appropriate ways.

STRUCTURING STUDENT INQUIRY

To engage my students in meaningful inquiry, I no longer just introduce a topic and ask, “What questions do you have?” Instead, I introduce a scientific phenomenon that grounds our lesson and then ask my students to slow down, observe closely, and generate written questions based on what they see.

After introducing the phenomenon, I have each student create an individual T-chart with a column for “Observations” and another column for “Questions.” In the first column, my students are expected to describe what they see without explaining it. I guide them to use sentence stems like “I notice...,” “I see...,” or “I observe...” Next, they come up with their own questions based on those exact observations.

For example, if the observation is “I notice that when you look in a magnifying glass, stuff gets bigger,” then a good question might be, “How does a magnifying glass change how you see things?”

Because the students are directly connecting their questions to their observations, their questions become more focused and scientifically relevant for the topic at hand. I have students share out their observations and questions and include them on a larger anchor chart for the whole class to see. From there, I can guide instruction toward what my students want to learn about, and when they are given that ownership, they are more engaged and more excited to learn.

When introducing magnets to students, I began with a simple phenomenon: I asked students to tape a string to the table and attach a paper clip to the other end. They then waved a magnet wand over the paper clip to make it move. If they held the wand just right, the paper clip could look like it was floating, suspended in space without touching the magnet.

Students then turned to their T-charts to record observations and questions, all before I provided any explanations. Their recorded observations included the following:

1. I notice there is space between the magnet and the paper clip.
2. I observe that the paper clip moves even when it is not touching the magnet.
3. I see that one end of the magnet pushes the paper clip away.

And their questions included these:

1. What things are affected by magnets?
2. Why doesn’t it have to touch to move?
3. How does the force work when it’s not touching?

Because their thinking started with scientific observations, their questions naturally stayed aligned to the science I needed them to explore.

MOVING FROM QUESTIONS TO INVESTIGATIONS

After students generated their own questions, we moved into structured investigations. For example, during the magnets lesson, students tested a variety of materials to determine which were magnetic and which were not. This answered their own question, “What things are affected by magnets?” They were able to explore and have scientific discussions using their own data to figure out which types of materials were magnetic.

Students were leading the learning and making discoveries on their own. After their investigation, I was able to lead a more engaging whole class discussion in which I shared specific scientific principles that validated what my students had learned. We then returned to their original questions: Some could now be answered using evidence from the investigation, while others led to new questions, new labs, and new extensions. In those cases, we designed additional experiments to continue the learning cycle.

Because I empower my students to generate questions based on observations that guide our instruction, they are more engaged, and their thinking is more aligned to the science we are learning. More important, they have a deeper understanding of what we are learning because they are constructing their own thinking through their own experiences instead of hearing it from me first.