INQUIRY BASED LEARNING: WHY BUYING A CAR WITH A TREE INCLUDED? A PROPOSAL FOR ENHANCING SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS LEARNING

International reports reveal a deficient situation in relation to science and mathematic learning. The low students’ interest in science and mathematics and the declining numbers of young people choosing scientific studies and careers may be interpreted as a serious threat to our societies’ capacity for innovation and development. Additionally, there is a big concern about the negative impact of this situation on individuals’ preparation for taking an active and informed role in modern, knowledge-based societies.

The specialised literature shows that the lack of students’ interest in science and mathematics is strongly linked to the way they are taught. Therefore, current educational policies all over the world are trying to promote those teaching approaches, which foster students’ motivation for science and mathematics and which engage them in an active and efficient learning.
Research on effective learning and learning environments shows that a classroom in which students identify problems, pose questions, formulate hypothesis, look for information, design experiments, analyse data and results and formulate explanations on the basis of the available evidence is the one that best promotes engagement, development of skills and conceptual understanding. The learning which takes place through all the previously mentioned processes is known as Inquiry Based Learning (IBL). In this kind of educational approaches, teachers act as a trigger for students’ activity, letting them to take decisions and trying to provide just the minimum level of guidance or orientation to avoid students’ frustration. This is also referred to as student led inquiry.

The present work describes the design and implementation of an instructional approach for enhancing science and mathematic learning through IBL. It starts from the analysis of an advertisement by a famous car manufacturer company and engages students in an inquiry process aimed at providing an answer to the overarching question: Would you buy a car with a tree included?

In order to be able to offer a well grounded response they will have to look into how and why trees can remove CO2 from the atmosphere and make calculations and estimations to decide whether the advertisement is reliable or not. A specific virtual environment for experimenting with variables and data has been designed to support some of the stages of the inquiry process.