Inital thoughts on guided inquiry and information literacy

When addressing the issue of Guided Inquiry (GI), Kuhlthau (2007) talks about the various phases students go through to reach their desired goals in inquiry based learning. The study by Bruce and Candy (2000), however, confirms what I have seen in my own classroom. Their study shows that some students don’t go through all the phases and ultimately never move past simply trying to find correct factual information and presenting it. They do not have the skills (either technical, motivational, literacy etc) to reach a higher level of understanding through self-directed, research based units of work. Certainly the kids that I have taught, in an underprivileged school, are coming into year five with grade one literacy and reading skills. These students cannot read most of the research material and simply stay trapped in Kuhlthau’s phase that has students feeling depressed, bogged down and overwhelmed. With assistance they can create a final product, but it does not approach the higher order outcomes desired in GI.

Bruce and Candy, however, claim that information literacy skills do not exist separate from unit content and that there is too much emphasis on teaching these skills. I really don’t agree with this viewpoint. I understand that they IL and GI are linked, but having taught kids with little or no IL skills there is really no way they can undertake GI without at least some intensive instruction on how to find, assess and record info.

One reading I found interesting was that of McKenzie (2005). I think they got a bit carried away with their thesis but the general idea that the students need to be taught and to have daily practice in questioning seemed valid to me. McKenzie claims that the only way to move students past the pure information seeking stage is to get them to question everything and to formulate real questions e.g. Not “How many eggs are in the nest?” but “Why did the bird choose that branch of the tree?, What would happen to the eggs if the nest where further up or lower down the tree?” etc. McKenzie contends that to engrain such questioning helps prevent students being swamped by too much information because they instinctively disregard the useless stuff as they go along. By developing smart questioning skills McKenzie believes students acquire the ability to make sense of and evaluate information automatically and therefore have the high level information literacy skills that enable successful inquiry learning outcomes.

However I still have to ask “How do we teach kids higher order thinking, evaluative research skills and the synthesis and application of research material when they don’t have basic literacy or information literacy skills?”