On Inquiry Learning

Traditional teaching over-emphasizes students' accepting and mastering knowledge and ignores their discovering and inquiring. Thus students' learning is merely to receive and recall the knowledge taught by teachers passively. This learning style suffocates students' thought and intelligence, and ruins their interests and enthusiasm; therefore it baffles the development of students rather than promote it. On this basis, the new curriculum advocates and gives prominence to inquiry learning. Inquiry learning is now a hypo-subject of experimental research on new curriculum and the transformation of students' learning style. Foreign researches on inquiry learning began long time ago and abundant results have been achieved, but research in our country still stays in the exploring stage. There are a series of theoretical and practical problems to be solved. From the perspectives of philosophy, theory of science, psychology and pedagogy, this dissertation redefines the connotation and characteristics of inquiry learning, and introduces several representative teaching models of inquiry learning, discusses the problems of evaluation and the transformation of teachers' role in inquiry learning. Hopefully, this dissertation will serve as some reference for theoretical pursuers and teaching staff.