Five Kinds of Learning 9 listening, viewing, and presenting for learning in a variety of different formats. Social skills involve the ability to interact, cooperate, and collaborate in successful sustained group work and within a wide variety of contexts. These five kinds of learning are essential for developing academic competency, career readiness, and life skills. Curriculum Content All inquiry has subject content: something for students to think about, something interest- ing and worthwhile to investigate, something new to learn. Guided Inquiry is bound to subject area curriculum such as defined by the Common Core Standards. Student interest and engage- ment are critical components, but the curriculum is the starting point for defining the subject of inquiry. Inquiry broadens and deepens student understanding of a subject by going beyond fact finding into synthesizing and interpreting information, facts, and ideas. Certain subject content is better learned through inquiry than by any other method. Those areas that require open-ended questions, different perspectives and points of view, and emerging ideas and concepts are the best candidates for inquiry learning. A limited number of curriculum goals require rote memo- rization, but even those may be expanded and deepened by being combined with inquiry. Cur- riculum goals that require surveying a wide range of factual material, such as study of a period of history, are greatly enhanced when combined with inquiry that takes students deeper into a particular aspect or concept. Longitudinal studies found that the insights gained through inquiry were what students remembered long after the course of study was completed (Kuhlthau 2004). As a result of Guided Inquiry, students transfer their understanding into new contexts as they create and share learning with others. Five Kinds of Learning through Guided Inquiry Information Literacy Concepts for locating, evaluating, and using information Learning How to Learn Self-directed learning and personal interaction within the inquiry process Curriculum Content Constructing new knowledge, interpreting, synthesizing, and applying facts and ideas Literacy Competence Reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and presenting Social Skills Interacting, cooperating, collaborating, habits of mind, dispositions in action Figure 1.3 Five Kinds of Learning through Guided Inquiry
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