PLANNING, ENACTMENT, AND REFLECTION IN INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING: VALIDATING THE MCGILL STRATEGIC DEMANDS OF INQUIRY QUESTIONNAIRE

Tools are needed to track the elements of students’ successful engagement in inquiry. The McGill Strategic Demands of Inquiry Questionnaire (MSDIQ) is a 79-item, criterion-referenced, learner-focused questionnaire anchored in Sch?n’s model and related models of self-regulated learning. The MSDIQ addresses three phases of inquiry engagement—planning, enactment, reflection—perceived as important by teachers, parents, and students before or after inquiry participation. Internal consistency and validity evidence was obtained from 205 university students with different inquiry backgrounds: teacher education years 1 and 4, continuing teacher education, and honors psychology. Separate confirmatory factor analyses of planning, enactment, and reflection generated 14 intercorrelated factors congruent with definitions of inquiry instruction and supported the hypothesized structure underlying the MSDIQ as a reliable and valid instrument for measuring inquiry engagement and valuing its building blocks.     

Teachers’ Roles,Students’ Personalities,Inquiry Learning Outcomes,and Practices of Science and Engineering:The Development and Validation of the McGill Attainment Value for Inquiry Engagement Survey in STEM Disciplines

Inquiry engagement is a newly defined construct that represents the participation in carrying out practices of science and engineering to achieve learning outcomes and is influenced by learners’ personalities and teachers’ roles. Expectancy value theory posits that attainment values are important components of task values that, in turn, directly influence students’ achievement-related choices and performance. The current paper developed and validated the McGill Attainment Value for Inquiry Engagement Survey (MAVIES) with undergraduate students in STEM disciplines. The MAVIES is a 67-item, learner-focused survey that addresses four components that are theoretically important for engaging in scientific inquiry: (a) teachers’ roles, (b) students’ personalities, (c) inquiry learning outcomes, and (d) practices of science and engineering. Evidence for internal consistency and construct, content, and criterion validity was obtained from 85 undergraduates who had experience with scientific inquiry in diverse STEM fields. Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed factors that were consistent with role theory, Big Five personality traits, revised Bloom’s learning outcomes, and the Next Generation Science Standards. The MAVIES instrument is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring undergraduate students’ attainment values for scientific inquiry engagement in STEM disciplines.     

PUSHING THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM: QUEERNESS, CHILDREN, AND THE FUTURE

A bstract .  In this essay, Cris Mayo describes a tension between recognizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people by law and giving (or denying) them certain legal rights on the basis of identity, on the one hand, and enabling queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, to live their potentials, on the other. Laws and rights regulate particular kinds of people, and while lgbt people have pursued civil rights energetically for the last sixty years or so, their queerness continues to complicate their attempts to gain legitimacy. Beyond civil rights claims, queer liberationist claims push the limits of the understanding of identity, sexual practices, and political life, because they prompt us to consider not just abstract possibilities and freedoms but the freedoms and possibilities of people barely recognizable. Mayo shows how these queer claims are often hard to frame in terms of liberal theory and actual law.