This document discusses enquiry-based learning (EBL), which involves students taking responsibility for driving their own learning through a process of enquiry. It outlines different approaches to EBL, including problem-based learning, small-scale investigations, and projects/dissertations. The document provides examples of how to structure EBL experiences and design EBL curriculum. It also discusses benefits of EBL such as increased student engagement and the development of important skills. Overall, the document serves as an introduction to EBL and provides guidance on implementing EBL approaches in the classroom.

1. Enquiry-Based Learning
Dr Peter Kahn
University of Liverpool

2. Outline
• Introduction to enquiry-based learning (EBL)
• Opportunity to experience engaging in EBL
Practical ways forward
• Planning to use EBL with your own students
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3. Why use EBL?
• What challenges do you currently face in your
teaching?
• Are there abilities, qualities or dispositions that
you have always wanted your students to develop
more fully?
• Are there any gaps between your aspirations for
student learning, and what actually happens?
• How satisfied are your students or other
stakeholders with existing patterns of student
learning?
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4. What is Enquiry-Based Learning?
• EBL is learning that is driven by a process of
enquiry
– Engagement with a complex issue that allows for a
variety of responses.
– Students take responsibility for selecting the lines
of enquiry and the methods employed.
– Requires students to draw on existing knowledge
and identify their required learning needs.
– Students actively explore and seek out new
evidence.
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5. Approaches covered
by the term ‘EBL’
Small scale
investigations
Problembased
Learning
Projects, diss
ertations
and research
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6. Problem-based learning
• PBL - a structured process of enquiry based
around a series of scenarios, in each of which:
– students in small groups define the issues
emerging from the problem;
– decide for themselves what further knowledge
they require in order to address these issues;
– allocate and undertake research to acquire the
required knowledge
– integrate findings in order to present outcomes.
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7. Projects, dissertations and research
• Traditional use of projects
– Extended enquiries with an established record of usage within
higher education
– Employed towards the end of a degree programme
– Students make connections within a body of knowledge that
they have already mastered.
• Projects within an EBL context
– Early use of project-work to master a given body of knowledge
itself.
– Strategies required to ensure that the students direct the
project
– Earlier use suggests greater emphasis on smaller scale activity
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8. Small-scale investigations
• Students are asked to complete a set task following a specified
process, and starting from a given stimulus, and within a limited
time-frame:
– Field-work
– Case-studies as the trigger for a focussed task (e.g. detailed business
scenario with the requirement to write a consultancy report).
– Workshops to master specific competencies
– Simulations
For some examples see:
https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/claddivision/ebl/casestudies/index.aspx
http://www.ceebl.manchester.ac.uk/resources/
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9. The underlying basis for EBL
• Learning framed as the active construction of
knowledge rather than its passive reception
• Learning that allows scope for dialogue, and
understanding:
– Places relationships and exchanges between those
involved at the centre of learning
• Higher education tends to focus on knowledge
at the expense of commitment and identity.
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10. Agency and identity
Concerns
Projects
Practices
Identity
after Archer (2000)
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11. Major issues
•
•
•
•
•
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Student engagement and motivation
Development of a range of skills and personal qualities
Addressing gaps in students’ knowledge or capacities
Gaps between theory and practice
Fragmented learning on modular programmes
Passive/transmission approaches foster surface
learning
• Divergence between research and teaching for staff
• Mass higher education leading to a sense of anonymity
and social isolation
• Diversity of learner needs and interests
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12. Supporting an enquiry
1. What will engage the students?
– An enquiry in which genuine scope is present for students
to select their own lines of attack or focus.
2. How accessible is the enquiry relative to:
– Students’ existing capacities to understand the area and to
manage an enquiry;
– the ease with which relevant resources can be identified?
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13. 3.
How will the students support each other?
– Timetabled group discussion to agree ways forward, division of
responsibilities, allocation of roles to fit existing
expertise/characteristics of the students.
4.
How will tutors facilitate the enquiry?
– Ask open-ended questions that challenge and extend, provide
encouragement, assist them in following the process; but don’t tell
them what to do or explain subject content.
5.
How will you initially introduce the approach?
– Introductory session(s); written guidance; seeing it in practice.
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14. EBL experience
• Short EBL taster, based on a scenario as a starting
point. Agree a Chair and Scribe (who will report to the
entire group)
• Begin the initial phase of the enquiry:
– Issues: What are the key issues at stake in this enquiry?
– Lines: What initial lines of enquiry would you pursue?
– Staging: How would you stage the enquiry as it
progressed?
– Resources: What resources would support the progress of
the enquiry? Where could you locate these resources?
– Roles: What roles would you each take on in carrying out
the enquiry? How would these roles match your existing
expertise or experience?
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15. Ideas for enquiries
• Starting points – detailed scenario that incorporates issues that
need following up; authentic situation within which the students
can directly engage in completing a task, choice of a topic to which
the process is applied.
• Process – social interactions (group or pair based - with roles,
discussion and division of labour all planned out); staging of the
enquiry (e.g. agreeing lines of enquiry, carrying out research,
pooling findings, preparing presentation).
• Outputs – report, presentation, portfolio, reflective account,
product, anthology, reader, conference, event, design, or single
article within, issue of or regular publication of a journal, magazine
or newspaper, script, commission, book, sermon, poster, proposal,
application, website, action plan, project plan, educational course.
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16. Brainstorming
• What issues, tasks, activities, needs, authentic
situations, practice settings, interests might
provide a basis for student enquiry in your
own context?
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17. A process for designing EBL
• Decide on which curriculum areas it is appropriate to employ EBL
– Students may react against a sporadic or ill-thought out use of a method that
requires them to take significant levels of initiative.
• Frame the process that the students should follow
– Initial starting point, Group process, roles within the group, staging of the
enquiry
• Specify the outputs that should result.
– Learning outcomes, required outputs (i.e. presentation, report, product,
publication)
• Outline the support that is available to them
– Facilitation from tutor, resources that should be accessed, setting of initial
expectations, assistance in monitoring the progress of the enquiry
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18. References
• Archer M (2000) Being Human: The Problem of
Agency, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
• Kahn P E and O’Rourke K (2004) Guide to
Curriculum Design: Enquiry-Based Learning,
Higher Education Academy, York
• Morley J and Truscott S (2003) ‘The integration of
research-oriented learning into a Tandem
learning programme’, Language Learning Journal,
27, 52-58
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