International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning

International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning is an overview of scholarship related to learning through and engagement in inquiry. Education takes on complex dimensions when learners solve problems, draw conclusions, and create meaning not through memorization or recall but instead through active cognitive, affective, and experiential processes. Drawing from educational psychology and the learning sciences while encompassing key subdisciplines, this rigorous, globally attentive collection offers new insights into what makes learning through inquiry both possible in context and beneficial to outcomes. Supported by foundational theories, key definitions, and empirical evidence, the book?s special focus on effective environments and motivational goals, equity and epistemic agency among learners, and support of teachers sets powerful, multifaceted new research directions in this rich area of study. 

"Inquiry learning has been promoted in education research and policy as having a multitude of benefits for learning across disciplines. Yet getting inquiry to take hold in formal and informal learning environments has been a pernicious problem in the field, in part because the core characteristics of inquiry learning are rarely articulated.

However, over the past several decades, we have amassed theoretical and practical knowledge about the nature of inquiry learning broadly construed and in different disciplines as well as how to support such learning. Reaping the benefits of this work, this handbook takes on the challenge of defining key features of inquiry learning and distinguishing it from other forms of learning.

Calling on leading experts in the field, the editors compiled an impressive and must-read volume for anyone interested in the design and study of inquiry learning environments, including the identification of key components of such environments, issues of equity in inquiry learning, and how to support such learning in different disciplines and in both formal and informal settings. The International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning is timely and highly informative for understanding and tackling the challenging global political, economic, and social dilemmas with which the world is faced."

?Susan Goldman, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Psychology, and Education and Founding Co-Director of Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA