What is Guided Inquiry

This chapter presents an overview of the development and implementation of a student-centered teaching approach, namely the Student-Led Instructor Facilitated Guided-Inquiry Learning (SLIFGIL), in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory course. SLIFGIL is a hybrid approach to teaching and is based on the science writing heuristic (SWH) approach used in the laboratory settings. The SWH approach has been used for two decades in school and college science classrooms. Prior studies have reported the effectiveness of the SWH approach in improving student academic performance and conceptual understanding. Though the SWH approach has its strengths, student participation in collaborative group work and continued reliance on the instructor to step in to guide the flow of laboratory activities and facilitate student learning was observed to be a challenge by the first author. To address these challenges, SLIFGIL approach was developed to shift the ownership of learning to the students. In this chapter, an overview of the SLIFGIL approach and results on its effectiveness are presented.