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Manitoba Education and Training - Independent Together Document

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Learning through Integrated Inquiry

Inquiry means more than research. It encompasses the habits of mind that promote learning and the processes that can be woven through all classroom learning experiences. It enables students to broaden and deepen their understanding of the world. (1.4 MB)

Inquiry

grows out of students' natural inclination to question the world

is fuelled by student curiosity and shaped by student planning

is often reshaped as the process forges ahead with new understandings and questions

is a shared responsibility

Roles in the Inquiry Process

While inquiry is often student led, it is also teacher facilitated. Teachers ensure that

curriculum outcomes are met

the learning needs of individual students are identified and addressed

adequate resources are available

students' learning processes and products meet criteria for quality work

The following table illustrates the roles of the teacher and learners in guided inquiry, and the dynamic process that forges its own course as students' understanding and interests develop and as new resources emerge or challenges are encountered. (49 KB)

The Teacher as Reflective Practitioner and Keen Observer

Inquiry Process

The Student as Reflective and Active Learner

Formative Assessment

Target learning outcomes.

Focus observation.

Develop criteria.

Confer with students.

Plan and revise instruction.

Reflect.

Celebrate learning.

Activating

Choose a theme or topic.

Identify and record prior knowledge.

Ask initial questions.

Explore and select primary and secondary sources.

Plan for inquiry.

Acquiring

Gather, process, and record information.

Focus the inquiry.

Applying

Plan to express learning.

Create performance(s) / demonstration(s) / product(s).

Celebrate and reflect.

Formative Assessment

Set learning goals.

Focus inquiry.

Develop criteria.

Participate in conferences.

Revise inquiry plan.

Reflect.

Celebrate learning.

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Independent Together: Supporting the Multilevel Learning Community

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Inquiry means more than research. It encompasses the habits of mind that promote learning and the processes that can be woven through all classroom learning experiences. It enables students to broaden and deepen their understanding of the world.

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Manitoba Implementation Overview: Grades 5 to 8
Planning for Instruction and Classroom Assessment Using Learning Outcomes - Part 3

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Grades 5 to 8 English Language Arts: A Foundation for Implementation

Implementation Overview: Grades 5 to 8
Planning for Instruction and Classroom AssessmentUsing Learning Outcomes - Part 3

Sample: An Inquiry Planning Model

"Students will listen, speak, read, write, view, and represent to manage ideas and information."

The following planning example traces one method for addressing a cluster of learning outcomes in General Outcome 3 at the Grade 8 level (see General Outcome 3.1, p. 30, Grades 5 to 8 English Language Arts: Manitoba Curriculum Framework of Outcomes and Grade 6 Standards, 1996). The preliminary stage in an inquiry -- the Plan and Focus stage -- is provided on page 33. The learning sequence would continue through selecting and processing, organizing, recording, and assessing stages, and culminate in composing and presenting.

What do we want students to know and be able to do?

A summary sheet at the beginning of each cluster of learning outcomes in the four-column section identifies the knowledge, skills and strategies, or attitudes and habits of mind targeted by that cluster of learning outcomes.

Specific Learning Outcomes (Grade 8)

Plan and Focus
Knowledge, Skills and Strategies, and Attitudes

3.1.1 Use personal knowledge

exploring, reflecting, and accessing personal knowledge of a topic (map, list, do K phase of KWL Plus)

3.1.2. Ask Questions

develop inquiry questions

categorize and organize main and subordinate ideas

maintain topic

3.1.3 Contribute to Group Inquiry

listen, maintain topic

use group participation skills

demonstrate knowledge of sources and their uses

3.1.4 Create and Follow a Plan

focus topic

plan for identifying and accessing resources

choose formats for recording and presenting information

develop time lines for inquiry

write an inquiry proposal

What instructional methods, materials, and strategies will help students develop the competencies to achieve the learning outcomes in 3.1?
Steps in Plan and Focus 3.1 (Grade 8)

1. Students and teacher choose topic for inquiry

2. Students and teacher discuss prior knowledge of the topic and generate general questions [3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, and 5.1.2]

Teaching opportunities:

question development

group processes

discussion skills

connecting prior knowledge

Students complete preliminary searches of the topic by viewing videos, checking newspapers, researching electronic web sites, general information, and microfilm sources in the library [3.1.1, 3.1.2, and 3.1.3]

Teaching opportunities:

critical viewing

newspaper search

library skills

notemaking (including use of graphic organizers)

Students revisit their original question and choose an area of interest for further study [3.1.2]

Teaching opportunities:

question development

focussing a topic

Students write inquiry proposal including formats they have chosen, ways they will represent information, additional resources they will access, and time lines for completion (3.1.4)

Teaching opportunities:

framing inquiry proposals

time management

resource use

celebrating successes

What is our purpose for assessment? How will the assessment be used?
Assessment information is used by teachers to shape instruction as the inquiry proceeds. Some of the specific purposes of assessment in the Plan and Focus stage are:
What assessment tasks will allow students to demonstrate their understanding in authentic ways?
Assessment information can be collected as students are engaged in various tasks of planning, focussing, and inquiry. For example:

Students complete the K column of a KWL Plus chart to activate prior knowledge. By looking these charts over, the teacher identifies individuals for a follow-up conference to assess gaps in prior knowledge.

Students work in co-operative groups to develop an inquiry plan. The teacher assesses co-operative skills (staying on tasks, building on the contributions of others, questioning others) using an observation checklist.

Groups post and share their inquiry plans. The teacher and students assess the plans according to the criteria established with the class.

Summary of Key Steps in Results-Based Planning

When teachers determine that students require instruction in a particular area to ensure balanced language arts programming, or to achieve a specific learning outcome, a number of steps may be of value in planning. See the chart that follows, Summary of Key Steps in Results-Based Planning, for an outline.

Summary of Key Steps in Results-Based Planning
Plan with the end in mind.

1. Read the learning outcome carefully to identify the key aspects of instruction and assessment. (What do we want students to know and be able to do?)

2. Determine the knowledge, skills and strategies, and attitudes that students need in order to achieve (or move toward achieving) the learning outcome.

3. Choose the Standards of Student Performance that will be used as indicators to demonstrate that students have learned this knowledge, gained these skills and strategies, or acquired these attitudes.

4. Design or select authentic assessment strategies and tools (observations, conferences, checklists, logs, journals, rubrics, performance tasks) to gather information about student learning in a variety of contexts.

5. Ask: How would this outcome be assessed and taught in a topic or theme I wish to use?

6. Choose activating, acquiring, and applying teaching and learning strategies, materials, learning resources, and learning experiences that will help engage students to achieve the learning outcome

Back to Implementation Overview: 5 to 8

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Sample: An Inquiry Planning Model "Students will listen, speak, read, write, view, and represent to manage ideas and information." The following planning example traces one method for addressing a cluster of learning outcomes in General Outcome 3 at the Grade 8 level (see General Outcome 3.1, p.

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Book: Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry - Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

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Book: Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry - Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

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Engaging Readers Writers with Inquiry has 162 ratings and 21 reviews. Ken said: It's books like this which remind me why I got into teaching. Reading it ...

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FILLING THE TOOL BOX: Classroom Strategies to Engender Student Questioning., by Jamie McKenzie and Hilarie Bryce Davis. From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal. 1986.

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FILLING THE TOOL BOX: Classroom Strategies to Engender Student Questioning., by Jamie McKenzie and Hilarie Bryce Davis. From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal. 1986.

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Questioning Toolkit, by Jamie McKenzie. in: From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal 7. 3 (Nov./Dec. 1997).

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Questioning Toolkit, by Jamie McKenzie. in: From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal 7. 3 (Nov./Dec. 1997).

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What Would Socrates Say? Teaching for the 21st Century, by Peter W. Cookson. in:Educational Leadership. Vol 67, #1. Sept 2009.

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What Would Socrates Say? Teaching for the 21st Century, by Peter W. Cookson. in:Educational Leadership. Vol 67, #1. Sept 2009.

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September 2009 | Volume 67 | Number 1
Teaching for the 21st Century Pages 8-14

Peter W. Cookson Jr.

Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate. We need to approach the contemporary knowledge explosion and the technologies propelling this new enlightenment in just that manner. Otherwise, the great knowledge and communication tsunami of the 21st century may drown us in a sea of trivia instead of lifting us up on a rising tide of possibility and promise.

Two Opposing Camps

Some advocates believe we can Google, blog, Skype, and Twitter our way to enlightenment. They assume that disorganized, radically democratized data lead to useful information and thus to real knowledge through some process of collective, randomized, constant connectivity. This argument rests on the premise that we learn best through data collection without the burdens of judgment and discernment. From an epistemological point of view, this is a highly questionable hypothesis. Learning requires stable, flexible cognitive frameworks and consistent forms of adaptive assessment.

In opposition are the skeptics, such as Mark Bauerlein, who argues in his book The Dumbest Generation (Penguin, 2008) that this incessant communication is really a complex manifestation of miscommunication that does not lead to intellectual growth, but rather to a stunting of genuine intellectual development. The Internet culture facilitates a kind of solipsistic, permanent adolescence that is profoundly anti-intellectual. A quick walk through the cultural landscape of the Internet suggests that "being online" can contribute to hyper-individualism and a sense of unearned celebrity, not to mention occasional weirdness.

The inventive curve of new technologies is so steep that the Internet culture will undoubtedly become more ubiquitous and communicatively dense as it continues to challenge the intellectual and academic culture that has come down to us from the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which convinced us that we can make a better world through creating knowledge and applying it to human needs. This process requires literacy, a personal and communal discipline that appears to be in decline. As fewer of us are reading books, more of us are surfing the Web for fragments of thought. The collapse of the conventional newspaper business is perhaps an early warning sign of what is to come in the next 5 to 10 years.

Human society has experienced three profound social, economic, and cultural transformations-the agrarian revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and now the electronic revolution. We need to be on the right side of history if we are to survive and thrive. If we harness them correctly, we can blend the best of our traditional intellectual linear culture-Socrates' wisdom of the 5th century BCE-with the current digital culture, creating a new learning and intellectual environment consistent with the cognitive and expressive demands of the 21st century.

The 21st Century Mind

A child born today could live into the 22nd century. It's difficult to imagine all that could transpire between now and then. One thing does seem apparent: Technical fixes to our outdated educational system are likely to be inadequate. We need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

The 21st century mind will need to successfully manage the complexity and diversity of our world by becoming more fluid, more flexible, more focused on reality, and radically more innovative. Four elements of the 21st century mind could be the basis of a new approach to education.

Critical Reflection

Every day we are exposed to huge amounts of information, disinformation, and just plain nonsense. The ability to distinguish fact from factoid, reality from fiction, and truth from lies is not a "nice to have" but a "must have" in a world flooded with so much propaganda and spin.

Human beings already are prone to think in magical terms; our media-driven social environment has intensified this tendency to live in imaginary worlds. The celebrity cult replaces real heroes with made-up ones, much to the detriment of children's mental health. Tragically, far too many young people experience this manufactured culture as though it were real.

Critical reflection enables us to see the world from multiple points of view and imagine alternate outcomes. For example, for many years, the dominant U.S. culture described the settling of the American West as a natural extension of manifest destiny, in which people of European descent were "destined" to occupy the lands of the indigenous people. This idea was, and for some still is, one of our most enduring and dangerous collective fabrications because it glosses over human rights and skirts the issue of responsibility. Without critical reflection, we will continually fall victim to such notions.

Empirical Reasoning

A second element of the 21st century mind that we must cultivate is the willingness to abandon supernatural explanations for naturally occurring events. Floods, famines, and human misfortune have often been attributed to angry gods, fate, and fantastic cosmologies that externalize our locus of control, making us perpetual victims who must please the gods or fate to survive. These non-empirical "theories of everything" require us to suspend reason, fact, and logic. Although we can appreciate these worldviews for their aesthetic and poetic beauty, they are a poor foundation for problem solving. We can overcome our ignorance not with wishful thinking, but with testable hypotheses using observable data.

Thinking empirically is a form of social responsibility. The methods of science offer us a way of thinking that is a strong framework for a healthy and viable approach to problem solving and living together peacefully.

Collective Intelligence

The third element of the 21st century mind must be the recognition and acceptance of our shared evolutionary collective intelligence. Many people believe that education is a personal rather than a collective possession. Echoing our culture of possessive individualism, education has taken on the role of dispensing "cultural capital" to individuals on the basis of a merit system that is a camouflaged proxy for social class and social position.

Yet even a moment's reflection tells us that all knowledge is social. None of us are educational islands unto ourselves. There is a great deal of talk about teamwork today; the real basis of teamwork is the willingness to think collectively to solve common problems. Think of a team of astronauts in a space shuttle: No one astronaut, no matter how highly trained, can master the complexities of maneuvering a spacecraft alone. It requires a team on the ground and a team in space to overcome the technical and scientific complexities of exploring space, thus enlarging our understanding of the universe.

Metacognition

To solve the 21st century's challenges, we will need an education system that doesn't focus on memorization, but rather on promoting those metacognitive skills that enable us to monitor our own learning and make changes in our approach if we perceive that our learning is not going well.

Metacognition is a fancy word for a higher-order learning process that most of us use every day to solve thousands of problems and challenges. When we think about thinking, we turn our mental pictures around ever so slowly to view them from different angles. Imagine yourself as a landscape painter. How do you decide on your angle of vision, on your perspective, or on your color palette? We do this type of decision making in a seamless cycle of rethinking and reshaping our internal imagery.

As the challenges facing the globe become increasingly complex, our frames of reference must be flexible, expansive, and adaptive. Consider the world water crisis: Thousands of people-mostly children-die every day from diseases caused by a lack of clean fresh water. Today, roughly 30 countries experience water stress or scarcity. By the year 2025, that number will be 56, meaning that 817 million people will be without adequate fresh water. Solving this crisis requires using multiple frames of reference and diverse methods of analysis that include geology, hydrology, economics, sociology, cultural history, politics, and law. By looking at a challenge from multiple points of view, we are more likely to arrive at a realistic, effective solution.

Learning in the Electronic Age

We are at the threshold of a worldwide revolution in learning. Just as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the wall of conventional schooling is collapsing before our eyes. A new electronic learning environment is replacing the linear, text-bound culture of conventional schools. This will be the proving ground of the 21st century mind.

In the age of print, people thought of knowledge as fixed and hierarchical, something that only great minds could change in a slow process of discovery. Not so in the age of electronic learning, where knowledge creation is fluid, fast, and far more democratic. The linear literacy of the age of print gave birth to the concept of accumulating knowledge systematically in archives, libraries, and databases. The age of electronic learning calls out for an updated approach. We need virtual libraries that host genuine knowledge and that enable learners of all ages to interact with one another in knowledge creation, as they currently do on Wikipedia.

In a 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Bala Iyer and Thomas H. Davenport published a provocative article that outlined Google's business strategy: Practice strategic patience, rule your own ecosystem, exercise architectural control, build innovation into organizational design, support inspiration with data, and create a culture "built to build." This approach of continual innovation supports Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Today, we use Google to obtain information. Imagine being able to access organized learning in the same manner. In a concept I call the LearningSphere, a free and open-source Web-based portal and platform would enable learners to access organized inquiry, demanding courses of study, and communication capacities that would join people all over the world in mutual discovery.

Evolving technologies are making this concept more plausible. In a recent article, Gerald Huff and Bror Saxberg (2009) describe what they call a "full immersion" learning experience. Instead of thinking about the new learning and communication technologies as "technology," they suggest that in the future we will incorporate a whole array of technological options into how, when, and where we learn. We will cease to think of technology as something that has its own identity, but rather as an extension of our minds, in much the same way that books extend our minds without a lot of fanfare. According to Huff and Saxberg, immersive technologies-such as multitouch displays; telepresence (an immersive meeting experience that offers high video and audio clarity); 3-D environments; collaborative filtering (which can produce recommendations by comparing the similarity between your preferences and those of other people); natural language processing; intelligent software; and simulations-will transform teaching and learning by 2025.

Technology Meets Socratic Inquiry

In addition to having free access to knowledge and using immersive technologies, we also need a method of systematically applying knowledge to real-world challenges. Here's where Socrates can help. He believed that learning came from within and that the best and most lasting way to bring latent knowledge to awareness was through the process of continual questioning and unconventional inquiry. For Socrates, answers were always steps on the way to deeper questions.

So imagine that a group of teachers and middle school students decides to tackle the question, What is justice? Young adolescents' discovery of injustice in the world is a crucial moment in their development. If adults offer only self-serving answers to this question, students can become cynical or despairing. But if adults treat the problem of injustice truthfully and openly, hope can emerge and grow strong over time.

As part of their discussion, let's say that the teachers and students have cocreated a middle school earth science curriculum titled Water for the World. This curriculum would be a blend of classroom, community, and online activities. Several nongovernmental organizations-such as Waterkeeper, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Water for People-might support the curriculum, which would meet national and state standards and include lessons, activities, games, quizzes, student-created portfolios, and learning benchmarks.

The goal of the curriculum would be to enable students from around the world to work together to address the water crisis in a concrete way. Students might help bore a freshwater well, propose a low-cost way of preventing groundwater pollution, or develop a local water treatment technique. Students and teachers would collaborate by talking with one another through Skype and posting research findings using collaborative filtering. Students would create simulations and games and use multitouch displays to demonstrate step-by-step how their projects would proceed. A student-created Web site would include a blog; a virtual reference room; a teachers' corner; a virtual living room where learners communicate with one another in all languages through natural language processing; and 3-D images of wells being bored in Africa, Mexico, and Texas.

In a classroom like this, something educationally revolutionary would happen: Students and adults would connect in a global, purposeful conversation that would make the world a better place. We would pry the Socratic dialogue from the hands of the past and lift it into the future to serve the hopes and dreams of all students everywhere.

The Future Is Here-Almost

Some of what constitutes this new approach to learning is already underway. Teachers and students already use the Web to create lessons, communicate, and share with others across the globe. Schools have Web-based curriculums, and many people already use Web 2.0 technology to reach thousands, if not millions, of learners.

But a model like the LearningSphere would add another dimension. Learning would take place both in and out of school. Teachers would no longer manage learning through the rigid enforcement of rote learning but would learn alongside their students, creatively adapting curriculum to their students' needs. Like any creative effort, this collective journey would include errors, lack of good information, and false starts-a process of which Socrates would approve. Because teachers are knowledgeable about the learning process, they could serve as capable guides for their students, all the while promoting the requisite 21st century thinking skills of critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition.

Organizing this new learning model is the work of the 21st century. Just as the industrial age developed a particular form of organizational life, the electronic age is developing models of organizational life that are more atomic in their structure than they are brick and mortar. When Einstein shocked the world by suggesting that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, he gave us a new way to think about our world.

There has never been a time in human history when the opportunity to create universally accessible knowledge has been more of a reality. And there has never been a time when education has meant more in terms of human survival and happiness.

What Would Socrates Do?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the world's population was 1.6 billion; at the beginning of the 21st century, it is roughly 6.6 billion. To meet the education needs of this rising tide of humanity, we must think outside the box of conventional schooling.

To start, we must overhaul and redesign the current school system. We face this great transition with both hands tied behind our collective backs if we continue to pour money, time, and effort into an outdated system of education. Mass education belongs in the era of massive armies, massive industrial complexes, and massive attempts at social control. We have lost much talent since the 19th century by enforcing stifling education routines in the name of efficiency. Current high school dropout rates clearly indicate that our standardized testing regime and outdated curriculums are wasting the potential of our youth.

If we stop thinking of schools as buildings and start thinking of learning as occurring in many different places, we will free ourselves from the conventional education model that still dominates our thinking. Socrates did not teach in a conventional classroom; his classroom was wherever he and his students found themselves. His was the first "personal learning network," and he taught with the most enduring teaching tool of all time-the purposeful conversation. He called himself a citizen of the world because the questions he asked were universal.

Even though Socrates was a philosopher, he did not hide in an ivory tower. He used knowledge to challenge the status quo. I think Socrates would embrace the new learning era with all the energy he had. We need that same embrace today to move beyond the false dichotomies and empty arguments of our tired education disagreements and to joyously engage with the future.

References

Huff, G., & Saxberg, B. (2009). Full immersion-How will 10-year-olds learn? Education Next, 9(3), 79-82.

Iyer, B., & Davenport, T. H. (2008, April). Reverse engineering Google's innovation machine. Harvard Business Review.

Peter W. Cookson Jr. holds the Katsuso Miho Scholarship in Peacemaking at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Sacred Trust: An Education Bill of Rights (Corwin, forthcoming) and a board member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills; peter.cookson@yale.edu.

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September 2009 | Volume 67 | Number 1 Teaching for the 21st Century Pages 8-14 Peter W. Cookson Jr. Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate.

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The Galileo Educational Network has had the privilege of serving the educational community since 1999. Over the past 21 years, we have provided professional learning to over 40,000 dedicated leaders and teachers supporting and encouraging them to improve, strengthen, and change their professional practices to become more effective and innovative. We have contributed to the research literature in areas such as design-based professional learning, school and district leadership, design orientations to leading and teaching, responsive teaching, student intellectual engagement, and effective mathematics teaching. Unfortunately, like many good ideas, our time has come to an end as a formal organization. We know that many educators use our website for resources.
As a courtesy to those individuals we will maintain our website until June 30, 2021.

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Impacts of Design-based Professional Learning for New Teachers

Teachers new to the profession require additional supports to strengthen teaching practices and launch them on a trajectory of success and career long learning. Working in collaboration with a large urban school jurisdiction, Galileo designed and engaged cohorts of probationary teachers in a year long professional learning series. The focus of this series was to support new teachers in building competency to better meet the expectations of the Teaching Quality Standard (Alberta Education, 2018). Throughout the series new teachers engaged in cycles of learning where they were invited to design authentic discipline-based tasks and assessment practices to improve the learning of their students. These learning cycles also required teachers to gather evidence of the impact of their teaching on student outcomes and review this evidence with colleagues at each subsequent session.

Over the course of the 2018-19 school year, researchers from Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, studied this professional learning intervention and found statistically significant growth of these new teachers in four competencies of the Alberta Teaching Quality Standard: (1) demonstrating professional body of knowledge (through planning and designing learning activities, using instructional strategies to engage students in meaningful learning activities, applying assessment and evaluation practices); (2) engaging in career-long learning, (3) establishing inclusive learning environments when designing learning, and (4) applying foundational knowledge about First Nations, Métis and Inuit to Learning Designs.

The video reflects the learning experiences of teachers who participated in this professional learning series.

Hear from educational professionals about how the mentors at the Galileo Educational Network have transformed their teaching

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The Galileo Educational Network has had the privilege of serving the educational community since 1999. Over the past 21 years, we have provided professional learning to over 40,000 dedicated leaders and teachers supporting and encouraging them to improve, strengthen, and change their professional practices to become more effective and innovative.

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A new resource for teachers. Inquiry is a dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlement and coming to know and understand the world.

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From “finding out” to “thinking about”: Changing research assignments into critical challenges, by Patricia Finlay. Professional Readings from TC2. 2005.

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From “finding out” to “thinking about”: Changing research assignments into critical challenges, by Patricia Finlay. Professional Readings from TC2. 2005.

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Making Critical Thinking an Integral Part of Electronic Research, by Roland Case. Professional Readings from TC2. 2003.

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Making Critical Thinking an Integral Part of Electronic Research, by Roland Case. Professional Readings from TC2. 2003.

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Canada Offers 10  Classroom Approaches to Media Literacy, by Barry Duncan. Centre for Media Literacy.

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Canada Offers 10  Classroom Approaches to Media Literacy, by Barry Duncan. Centre for Media Literacy.

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The following article is from the introduction to the Media Literacy Resource Guide published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1989 to guide the implementation of media literacy in language arts in Ontario high schools. The guide was written by members of the Association for Media Literacy / Canada.
Introduction
The teacher's attitude to the mass media and to students as avid media consumers is crucial to the success of any media literacy program. Most students bring to the classroom an enormous amount of information about and experience with the media -- in many cases, far more than do their teachers. While it is important for teachers to start where their students are, it is also necessary for them to lead their students to where they are not.

This guide stresses teaching inductively and beginning whenever possible with students' direct experiences with the media. The basic method of media studies is that of a "spiral curriculum", a concept developed by educator Jerome Bruner. The fundamental principle of this method is that the key concepts of any discipline can be taught in some form to students at any level. Thus, concepts initially introduced in simple form at the elementary level are, in successive years, explored, developed, and extended in increasingly sophisticated ways as the student matures and develops.

To take a relatively simple example, elementary school pupils might begin to explore the concept of the commercial implications of media by talking about television programs they watch and, with the guidance of the teacher, distinguishing between program material and commercials, identifying the different purposes of each. At a later stage they could look at a variety of commercials aimed at children, discussing their reactions to them and perhaps beginning to evaluate their effectiveness. They could also talk about what they would put in commercials for children if they were making them. Older children could begin to analyze the techniques and appeals of commercials, planning and storyboarding some of their own. They could also explore the relationship between commercials and programming, perhaps examining the link between children's cartoon characters and sales of related products such as dolls or clothing. As they progress through the educational system, they may move on, for example, to more detailed examinations of commercials; studies of the effects of economic considerations on programming, content, and techniques; or research into issues such as the effects of ownership and control media.

Because students are immersed in media, the role of the teacher must be that of a facilitator and a co-learner. The teacher must help students to negotiate meaning, engage in inquiry and research, identify patterns, and create their own media productions.
Stress the Positive
It is important to stress the positive features of the mass media rather than to dwell at length on the negative. It is also essential that students be encouraged to explore the values and the tastes that are relevant to their own immediate cultural context. This fundamental premise of values education implies that the teacher should not be imposing a set of elitist values on the class. (For example, the teacher should avoid holding up "Masterpiece Theater" and PBS as caviar and everything else as junk food for the masses.)

It may be difficult to find socially redeeming values in many of the programs that have high audience ratings or in rock videos, but it is these very examples that our students are eager to discuss. Using media literacy in critical discussion, the teacher can empower students to discover meaning on their own, thus giving them critical autonomy.

Because of the immense diversity in the media and the sheer quantity of information, teachers may feel overwhelmed. This resource guide offers a whole range of coping strategies. First, many avenues for media literacy are already available. For example, most subject disciplines offer approaches to the topic, and many of the activities suggested in this document are ideally suited to the development of speaking, listening, and writing skills. Second, this guide encourages a plurality of approaches, including the application of interdisciplinary perspectives and critical- and creative- thinking strategies.

By necessity, media teachers will be eclectic. As well, the constantly changing content of the media and of popular culture, along with their many new and evolving forms and technologies, will necessitate the concept of "a movable text" that is made up by the teacher, the class, or both together. Such a text will encompass current newspaper and magazine clippings, new video, audiotapes, record albums, and resource people from the community. In such an enterprise, it should be evident that media study is ideally suited to the collaborative strength that is gained from team teaching.

To avoid duplicating activities and audio-visual materials each year, teachers, department heads, and principals will have to plan a coherent and, in many cases, a sequential media-studies program. This may prompt the formation of board media-literacy committees, which can organize workshops for teachers and design media curricula especially suited to local needs.

Teachers not familiar with essential equipment such as slide projectors and the video-cassette recorder will need to develop the competency required to make media literacy worthwhile for their students. For example, effective use of the freeze frame or the scanning mechanism on a VCR can enhance the use of video considerably.

Throughout the guide there are many opportunities for practical media production, an important dimension that complements the application of the key concepts and decoding exercises. Practical activities should never become an end in themselves; otherwise, the critical inquiry that is central to media study may be ignored.
SPECIFIC APPROACHES

1. The Inquiry Model
The inquiry model is a structured framework that will help students recognize basic issues and provide strategies for developing subject content. This model helps to stimulate open questioning and encourages students to be intellectually curious about the world; it also demands that they have the proper tools for meaningful research and discussion. Since many of the topics that interest students (e.g., censorship, bias in news coverage, popular culture trends) need to be focused as soon as possible, this methodology is ideally suited to media study.
The inquiry model is especially suited to the introduction of media-literacy activities in the classroom. For example, one can easily apply the model to a provocative short film, a television documentary, or an excerpt from a feature-film video that reveals a powerful moral dilemma. Through an intense shared experience that raises a whole range of issues, students are enabled to see the value of a structured framework for facilitating focused research and critical thinking.

The inquiry model might be used, for example, to explore the following question: "Why do Canadians seem to prefer American media?" The following alternative solutions might be investigated:

Media content, from films to television, is predominantly American in origin.

American programs are generally cheaper to buy; have better production values, which reflect lavish budgets; and have a faster pace than do most Canadian programs.

Quality Canadian programs may reflect our identity, but most Canadians' indifference about or insecurity in this area compels them to avoid endeavours that hold up the mirror to our society.

Intense competition in the United States ensures that only the most salable commercial products are seen.

Students might then explore the alternatives by collecting data in the following ways:

Statistics are available in resources on the Canadian film industry, such as Cinema Canada [Editor's note: is no longer in publication] and from the reports of various commissions on broadcasting and the film industry.

Students could check with Canadian television networks on the comparative costs of buying an American show - especially those in reruns - and of producing a Canadian series. Students could watch some typical Canadian shows and compare them with the American product in order to notice differences in themes, characterization, and pace.

Students could check the ratings of one of the better Canadian television series and the box-office take for some of our critically acclaimed films. In addition, by formulating a questionnaire and having a cross section of people answer it, students could determine whether the results confirm or deny the notion that Canadians are indifferent to or insecure about seeing their identity portrayed.

Students could write or talk to Canadian media professionals regarding the allegations about the benefits of competition in the United States.

2. Critical-thinking strategies
The critical-thinking movement in the 1980s has helped to provide some important strategies for teachers of media literacy. According to Robert Ennis, critical thinking refers to a body of intellectual skills and abilities that enable one to decide rationally what to believe or do. It also includes a set of values: the pursuit of truth, fairness or open-mindedness, empathy, autonomy, and self-criticism. A "strong sense" critical thinker is one who strives to live in accordance with the values of critical thinking and who is able to think dialogically. A typical mass-media issue involves a blending of intellectual, affective, and moral responses. Many issues carried in the media demand that we move back and forth between opposing points of view. It is here that good dialogical thinking can help us out. Dialogical thinking involves a dialogue or extended exchange between points of view or frames of reference. The following checklist of typical critical- thinking skills is reproduced from Robert Ennis, "A Concept of Critical Thinking,"Harvard Educational Review, Winter 1962: 38.Critical-Thinking Checklist:

distinguishing between verifiable facts and value claims

determining the reliability of a claim or source

determining the accuracy of a statement distinguishing between warranted and unwarranted claims

detecting bias identifying stated and unstated assumptions

recognizing logical inconsistencies

determining the strength of an argument

Teachers interested in more information on these approaches should consult current books and articles on critical thinking in educational journals such as Educational Leadership and Phi Delta Kappan.

3. Values education
The mass media are an ideal resource for the discussion of moral dilemmas, the development of moral reasoning, and the use of techniques such as values clarification. Dialogical reasoning, which has been described as an important part of critical thinking, can play a significant role in discussions of topics such as the pros and cons of the mass media, government control of media, censorship, advertising, and the moral values identified in popular television and films. Consult the bibliography in the ministry's resource guidePersonal and Societal Values (Toronto: Ministry of Education, Ontario, 1983) for further information on values education.

4. Media from the perspective of subject disciplines
In relation to media-literacy analysis in a subject context, it is important to stress that teachers will need to move beyond conceiving of media simply as audio-visual aids. Ideas that teachers can use to incorporate media literacy into their classes include:

English - Film-literature comparisons, script writing and multimedia thematic units (ie. exploring how themes such as the nature of courage, the hero and comedy are expressed in various mediums).

Social Sciences

History - Presentation of historical figures, historical bias and point-of-view, the marketing of politicians, and propoganda.

Geography - Comparisons of the images of cities in films and TV to the socio-economic realities of those cities; deconstruction of travel films; bias in films made by governments or corporations; depiction of countries as portrayed by governments vs. "structured absences," images that are not included in the official portrayal.

Family Studies - The representation of the family in advertising and film; sexuality and sexual stereotyping in the media; and the culture of violence.

Science and Technology- In addition to their treatment in science fiction, there are numerous references to science and technology in newspapers, films, magazines, and novels. Television, in both news and entertainment programs, constantly packages scientific issues and information. Some of this material can be integrated into the science curriculum by pointing out connections between the scientific issues raised by the media and the scientific principles underlying them. Students can also explore the strengths and limitations of the presentation of science topics in the media.

Visual Arts - The possibilities for media literacy in the visual arts are enormous. Many of the decisions made in the media are based on aesthetic considerations. The role of art in a mass-media-dominated society is of major concern for aspiring artists. Art teachers need to assess more than just the principles of pleasing form when looking at media; they need to consider all of the aspects that have been outlined in the section on key concepts in Visual Arts, Intermediate and Senior Divisions, Curriculum Guideline (Toronto: Ministry of Education, Ontario, 1986).

Music - Students are immersed in rock music and rock videos. While some music teachers use rock as a resource, many consider it inappropriate for their music courses. However, there are many valuable connections that can be made through the comparison of traditional and popular music. The popular-music enables music teachers to help their students investigate the aesthetics, the value messages, and the commercial implications of this pervasive form.

Physical and Health Education - Representation of gender, sexuality, violence, and televised sports in the media are all avenues that can be explored in the classroom.

Mathematics - Teachers of mathmatics will find that a great deal of research in the mass media depends on statistics. Hence, the skills of compilation and graphing will be important. In the area of television, the methods of rating the most watched prime-time programs depend on the exact use of mathematical information.

Resource Centre Teachers - Today's resource centres contain not only books, but also a good cross-section of popular periodicals, phonograph records, slides, and audio - and videotapes. In the area of print, many periodicals, such as Time and Maclean's, require not only the traditional reading skills, but also media-literacy decoding skills as well. Resource centre teachers can play a valuable role by helping students and teachers to understand the strengths and limitations of each medium when they are selecting resource materials.

5. Cross-media studies and interdisciplinary strategies
The issues, trends, and special events of our time are simultaneously reflected in all or several of the mass media. Hence, whether the topic is the arms race, the promotion of a rock star, an advertising campaign, or sexuality and violence in the media, a cross-media analysis is required. The effective application of the key concepts of media depends on the integration of several media. A discussion of violence in the media, for example, might combine knowledge from history, literature, sociology, psychology, communications theory, and linguistics.

6. Creative experiences
As well as being able to "decode" the symbols that dominate their society, students should be able to "encode" them. Just as we must integrate writing with the development of reading skills, we should integrate formal media analysis with media production. Thus, creative or production activities should be an essential component of media studies in the classroom. These creative activities can range from something as short and simple as sequencing a series of photographs to a project as complex as the production of a rock video. Many students will grasp the analytic material only if they have undergone production experiences.

7. Semiotics
Semiotics is the science of signs and is concerned primarily with how meaning is generated in film, television, and other works of art. It is concerned with what signs are and the ways that information is encoded in them. Some of the decoding/deconstructing activities in this guide use strategies from semiotics. This approach, which has had considerable influence on European academics and media teachers, is now coming into its own in North America. While it may appear to be intellectually demanding and somewhat abstract, it can yield many rewards for the dedicated media teacher. The following books are useful references in this area: Roland Barthes,Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972); James Monaco, How to Read a Film; Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).

8. Reading the media environment
Each medium of communication has its own biases and ideology. When we interact with a medium of communication, we are influenced as much by the form of the medium as by its message. To explore this notion further, we should ask the following question about each communication medium: What would life be like without this medium? Finding answers to the following questions might also help us to understand better the effects of our interactions with our media of communication:

How does it work (e.g., technically, physiologically)?

When/how was it discovered/invented?

How did its use develop (e.g., socially, economically, politically)?

Who are its outstanding users? What do they communicate? How?

What are the medium's present conventions? How did they develop?

What are its present limitations? How are they best exploited?

How does the medium affect its users and how do they affect it?

How have other media affected this one?

9. Alternative points of view
As a counter to the mass media, which are generally, conservative and constitute a major industry in which the profit motive is paramount, teachers, depending on the level of the class, can show films and videos that present an alternative vision or a different kind of perception and experience to that of the mainstream media. These should be a supplement to, and not take the place of, the study of popular models. Many excellent narrative and documentary films by the National Film Board of Canada and by many experimental filmmakers and video artists, for example, will challenge students' ways of seeing the world. Of course, good literature and art will do the same. Certainly contemporary culture can be illuminated from many sources: by a small-circulation magazine with a distinctively alternative point of view; by a provocative CBC radio documentary; by a record of a contemporary fusion jazz combo, a small independent rock band, or the work of a performance artist/musician such as Laurie Anderson.

10. Full-credit courses in media literacy
These courses, offered at the secondary school level, will probably be presented as one of the optional courses in English or the visual arts and will reflect a great diversity of approaches. The following are examples of areas covered by such courses:

Pop culture: An understanding of some of the following: popular culture and trends; the coverage of royalty; the appeal of the current rock megastars; pop culture's fascination with rituals; the nature and power of celebrities; fashion TV (television programs that are concerned with the world of fashion, showcasing the latest trends and profiling fashion designers); fast-food happiness (the extensive marketing of fast-food restaurants through advertising campaigns that convey the idea that such eateries bring happiness by solving all one's problems); fads - from pet rocks to Cabbage Patch dolls; the appeal of shopping malls; pop culture in a foreign country; the culture of toys; the appeal of cult film patterns in teen films; formulas in best sellers; the appeal of Harlequin romance novels; the pop culture of the fifties and sixties.

The world of images: Media images of men and women; analysing photographs; adolescent magazines; analysing advertisements - signs and codes; dividing the world.

The information society: Current theories and research on the impact of the electronic media; the theories of Marshall McLuhan regarding the global village, the nature of perception, and the use of our senses; the dynamics of third-wave technology (electronic technology and the use of computers); the computer revolution; the role of new and emergent technology.

The study of specific media or a genre within a medium: Course units are often devoted to in-depth study of a specific medium (e.g., film, television, the newspaper). The study of a medium can be subdivided further through the study of specific genres. A unit on a genre in films might explore the nature of horror films in radio, suspense drama; in television, the evolution of sitcoms.

Television production: The nature of the television medium; the dynamics of television production; script writing and storyboards; the use of the portable video camera; the creation of a mini-documentary and a commercial; the use of special effects; applications of the mobile studio."

A Scaffolding Approach to Media Education
Scaffolding, developing a unit of study through a set sequence of steps, is well suited to Media Education. Scaffolding involves:

1. Providing students with an overall picture of what will be expected of them.

2. Breaking up and sequencing the order in which various concepts, skills, and applications of skills will be taught and assessed.

3. Checking for students' understanding of what is being taught and requiring students to complete parts of the project as we go along.

4. And finally the product -- student demonstration of their understanding and teacher and/or peer evaluation of their understanding.

If, for example, students are going to do a presentation giving an analysis of the codes and conventions of sitcoms, ideally the scaffolding would proceed this way:

1. Model what such a presentation would look like.

2. Teach them the relevant codes and conventions.

3. Practice identifying codes and conventions in various sitcoms. (Allow students repeated opportunities to apply what they are learning so they can integrate that knowledge into their presentations.)

4. Require them to research and put together their presentation.

5. Before students present their work, have them submit an outline, including notes or ideas for what they intend to use.

6. Finally, present of students' understanding and evaluation of this understanding. (See Evaluating Media Products for evaluation ideas.)

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Canada Offers Ten Classroom Approaches to Media Literacy

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The following article is from the introduction to the Media Literacy Resource Guide published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1989 to guide the implementation of media literacy in language arts in Ontario high schools. The guide was written by members of the Association for Media Literacy / Canada.

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Information Search Process - Carol Kuhlthau

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Information Search Process - Carol Kuhlthau

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"Longitudinal Evidence of the Influence of the ISP on Information Workers.", 2018. Read the full paper here.

PowerPoint presentation of the Information Search Process

The model of the Information Search Process (ISP) is one of the most highly cited works in Library and Information Science as noted in the following citation studies:

Timelines of Creativity: A Study of Intellectual Innovators in Information Science. Cronin and Meho. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 58(13) 1948-1959, 2007.

Analysis of a Decade in Library Literature: 1994-2004. Blessinger and Frasier. College and Research Libraries, 68(2) 155-169, 2007.

Using the h-Index to Rank Influential Information Scientists. Cronin and Meho. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 57(9) 1275-1278, 2006.

The Origins and Contextual use of Theory in Human Information Behavior Research. McKechnie, Pettigrew, and Joyce. New Review of Information Behavior Research, 47-63, 2001.

The Use of Theory in Information Science Research. Pettigrew and McKechnie. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 52)1) 62-73, 2001.

Scholarly Productivity of U. S. LIS Faculty: An update. Budd. Library Quarterly, 70(2) 230-245, 2000.

Abstract
The Information Search Process (ISP) is a six stage model of the users' holistic experience in the process of information seeking. The ISP model, based on two decades of empirical research, identifies three realms of experience: the affective (feelings), the cognitive (thoughts) and the physical (actions) common to each stage. Central to the ISP is the notion that uncertainty, both affective and cognitive, increases and decreases in the process of information seeking. A principle of uncertainty for information seeking is proposed that states that information commonly increases uncertainty in the early stages of the search process. Increased uncertainty indicates a zone of intervention for intermediaries and system designers.

INTRODUCTION
The Information Search Process (ISP) presents a holistic view of information seeking from the user's perspective in six stages: task initiation, selection, exploration, focus formulation, collection and presentation. The six stage model of the ISP incorporates three realms of experience: the affective (feelings) the cognitive (thoughts) and the physical (actions) common to each stage (1). The ISP reveals information seeking as a process of construction influenced by Kelly's personal construct theory (2) with information increasing uncertainty in the early stages of the ISP.

The development of the ISP as a conceptual framework is the result of more than two decades of empirical research that began with a qualitative study of secondary school students and the emergence of an initial model, that was verified and refined through quantitative and longitudinal methods of diverse library users and further developed in case studies of people in the workplace. To summarize the findings of these studies of the user's perspective of the ISP, the affective symptoms of uncertainty, confusion and frustration prevalent in the early stages are associated with vague, unclear thoughts about a topic or problem. As knowledge states shifted to clearer, more focused thoughts a corresponding shift was noted in feelings of increased confidence and certainty. Affective aspects, such as uncertainty and confusion can influence relevance judgments as much as cognitive aspects, such as personal knowledge and information content. Central in the model of the ISP is uncertainty described formally as a principle of uncertainty for information seeking. Increased uncertainty in the exploration stage of the ISP indicates a zone of intervention for intermediaries and system designers (3).

MODEL OF THE INFORMATION SEARCH PROCESS (ISP)
The model of the ISP describes users' experience in the process of information seeking as a series of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Thoughts that begin as uncertain, vague, and ambiguous become clearer, more focused, and specific as the search process progresses. Feelings of anxiety and doubt become more confident and certain. Through their actions, people seek information relevant to the general topic in the beginning stages of the search process and pertinent to the focused topic toward closure. Formulation of a focus or a personal perspective of the topic is a pivotal point in the search process. At that point, feelings shift from uncertain to confident, thoughts change from vague to more clear and interest increases. The model was verified in longitudinal case studies and large scale studies of diverse samples of library users (4) (5). Further studies have examined the implementation of a process approach in education contexts and investigated the ISP in the workplace (6).

The ISP describes common experiences in the process of information seeking for a complex task that has a discrete beginning and ending and that requires considerable construction and learning to be accomplished (7). The model reveals a search process in which a person is seeking meaning in the course of seeking information. From the user's perspective the primary objective of information seeking is to accomplish the task that initiated the search, not merely the collection of information as an end in itself. The ISP presents seeking information as a means to accomplish a goal. The model of the ISP is articulated in a holistic view of information seeking from the user's perspective in six stages:

Initiation, when a person first becomes aware of a lack of knowledge or understanding and feelings of uncertainty and apprehension are common.

Selection, when a general area, topic, or problem is identified and initial uncertainty often gives way to a brief sense of optimism and a readiness to begin the search.

Exploration, when inconsistent, incompatible information is encountered and uncertainty, confusion, and doubt frequently increase and people find themselves "in the dip" of confidence.

Formulation, when a focused perspective is formed and uncertainty diminishes as confidence begins to increase.

Collection, when information pertinent to the focused perspective is gathered and uncertainty subsides as interest and involvement deepens.

Presentation, when the search is completed with a new understanding enabling the person to explain his or her learning to others or in someway put the learning to use.

In the first stage, initiation, a person becomes aware of a gap in knowledge or a lack of understanding, where feelings of uncertainty and apprehension are common. At this point,the task is merely to recognize a need for information. Thoughts center on contemplating the problem, comprehending the task, and relating the problem to prior experience and personal knowledge. Actions frequently involve discussing possible avenues of approach or topics to pursue.

In the second stage, selection, the task is to identify and select the general topic to be investigated and the approach to be pursued. Feelings of uncertainty often give way to optimism after the selection as been made and there is a readiness to begin the search. Thoughts center on weighing prospective topics against the criteria of task requirements, time allotted, personal interest, and information available. The outcome of the possible choices is predicted, and the topic or approach judged to have the greatest potential for success is selected. Typical actions are to confer with others or to make a preliminary search of information available and then to skim and scan for an overview of alternative topics. When, for whatever reason, selection is delayed or postponed, feelings of anxiety are likely to intensify until the choice is made.

The third stage is Exploration characterized by feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt which frequently increase during this time. The task is to investigate information on the general topic in order to extend personal understanding. Thoughts center on becoming oriented and sufficiently informed about the topic to form a focus or a personal point of view. At this stage in the ISP, an inability to express precisely what information is needed can make communication between the user and the system awkward. Actions involve locating information about the general topic, reading to become informed, and relating new information to what is already known. In this stage the information encountered rarely fits smoothly with previously-held constructs, and information from different sources frequently seems inconsistent and incompatible. People may find the situation quite discouraging and even threatening, causing a sense of personal inadequacy as well as frustration with the system. Some actually may be inclined to abandon the search altogether at this stage. Exploration is considered the most difficult stage in the ISP when the information encountered can increase uncertainty prompting a dip in confidence.

The fourth stage in the ISP, Formulation, is the turning point of the ISP, when feelings of uncertainty diminish and confidence increases. The task is to form a focus from the information encountered. Thoughts involve identifying and selecting ideas in the information from which to form a focused perspective of the topic. A focus in the search process is comparable to a hypothesis in the process of construction. The topic becomes more personalized at this stage if construction is taking place. While a focus may be formed in a sudden moment of insight, it is more likely to emerge gradually as constructs become clearer. During this time, a change in feelings is commonly noted, with indications of increased confidence and a sense of clarity.People often express an awareness of being involved in finding meaning such as purposefully engaging in "focusing and narrowing," in seeking "a thread," "a story," "answers to all my questions," "a central theme" or "a guiding idea." The four criteria used to select a topic may be again employed to choose a focus: Task; What am I trying to accomplish? Time; How much time do I have? Interest; What do I find personally interesting? Availability; What information is available to me?

Collection is the fifth stage in the ISP when interaction between the user and the information system functions most effectively and efficiently. At this point, the task is to gather information related to the focused topic. Thoughts center on defining, extending, and supporting the focus. Actions involve selecting information relevant to the focused perspective of the topic and making detailed notes on that which pertains specifically to the focus. General information on the topic is no longer relevant after formulation. The person, with a clearer sense of direction, can specify the need for pertinent, focused information to intermediaries and to systems, thereby facilitating a comprehensive search of available resources. Feelings of confidence continue to increase as uncertainty subsides, with interest in the project deepening.

In presentation, the sixth stage, feelings of relief are common with a sense of satisfaction if the search has gone well or disappointment if it has not. The task is to complete the search and to prepare to present or otherwise use the findings. Thoughts concentrate on culminating the search with a personalized synthesis of the topic or problem. Actions involve a summary search in which decreasing relevance and increasing redundancy are noted in the information encountered.

ROLE OF AFFECT IN INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR
These studies were among the first to investigate the affective aspects or feelings in the process of information seeking along with the cognitive and physical aspects. Prior to the introduction of the ISP the affective dimension of information seeking had not been fully recognized in library and information services and systems. One of the important findings of this research was the discovery of a sharp increase in uncertainty and decrease in confidence after a search had been initiated. A person "in the dip" commonly experienced uncertainty, confusion and anxiety until a focus or a personal perspective had been formed.

The ISP presents information seeking as a process of construction influenced by George Kelly's personal construct theory (2). Information seeking involves construction in which the person actively pursues understanding and seeks meaning from the information encountered over a period of time. The process is commonly experienced as a series of thoughts and feelings that shift from vague and anxious to clear and confident as the search progresses.

Kelly describes the emotional experience of constructing meaning from new information. The information is assimilated in a series of phases, beginning with confusion. Confusion increases as inconsistencies and incompatibilities are confronted between the information and the constructs the person already holds. As confusion mounts, it frequently causes doubt in the ability to assimilate the new information. The disruption caused by the new ideas may become so threatening that the new information is discarded and construction abandoned. At this point, Kelly proposes another alternative to move the process of construction along. The person may form a tentative hypothesis to move toward incorporating the new construct into the existing system of personally held constructs.

The ISP is a process of seeking meaning not just finding and reproducing information. This is a process of construction involving exploration and formulation that rarely proceeds directly from selection to collection. Experience influences the decisions and choices a person makes throughout the process of information seeking. Studies of the ISP in the workplace reveal that a person's experience of the stages in the ISP is related to how much the person knows about the problem and the degree of construction that should be undertaken during information seeking. In more routine tasks, where the goal is to answer a simple question or to monitor periodic change, people do not usually experience stages in their information seeking. In more complex tasks, where the goal requires considerable construction and learning, people are likely to experience a process as described in the ISP model (6).

Focus formulation as a pivotal point in the ISP
The formulation of a focus or personal perspective is a pivotal point in the ISP. Focus formulation calls for reflective thinking about the information encountered in the exploration stage of the ISP that provides a direction for the completion of the search. A focus is a guiding idea to concentrate on to complete the search and accomplish the task. People often find the period preceding formulation of a focus the most difficult phase in the search process. Exploration is a difficult stage because uncertainty commonly increases, rather than gradually decreases, during this time. Peoples can experience anxiety and frustration as they encounter information from many different perspectives, much of which may not be compatible with their specific constructs and personal knowledge. The connection between feelings and formulating is evident from the rise in confidence that parallels increased clarity as formulation unfolds. Formulation, the central task in the ISP, is frequently misunderstood when the search process is thought of as merely a process of collection not a construction activity.

Exploration facilitates formulating a focus during the search process. However, people often attempt to move from selection directly to collection without the essential exploration for the formulation that gives direction to the search. Exploring uncovers information for formulating new constructs, whereas collecting gathers information for documenting established constructs. Tolerance for the mounting uncertainty in the exploration stage is important for formulation within the ISP. Using information involves interpreting and creating. No matter the amount or the quality of the information gathered, the problem is not solved or the topic understood until the information has been interpreted. Understanding develops through extending and defining a topic by reflecting on the information encountered to solidify personal understanding.

Acquiring more information can increase uncertainty
The axiom that information reduces uncertainty is not necessarily the user's experience in information seeking. In some situations, new information actually increases uncertainty. Prior to formulation users are likely to experience heightened uncertainty in the fact of unique, incompatible, inconsistent information that requires construction and interpretation. It seems helpful for users to expect uncertainty to increase during the exploration stage of the ISP rather than thinking that increased uncertainty is a symptom that something has gone wrong. The tolerance of uncertainty is introduced as enabling the early stages of the ISP, when the experience of uncertainty may overwhelm the person and deter progress in the process. Uncertainty from the user's perspective is a natural experience in the search process. If unexpected, the presence of uncertainty and particularly any increase in uncertainty can heighten anxiety.

Central to the ISP model is the notion that uncertainty, both cognitive and affective, increases and decreases in the process of information seeking. Uncertainty, the predominant experience in the early stages of the search process, had not been sufficiently addressed in library and information services.

PRINCIPLE OF UNCERTAINTY FOR INFORMATION SEEKING
Uncertainty is a cognitive state that commonly causes affective symptoms of anxiety and lack of confidence. Uncertainty and anxiety can be expected in the early stages of the ISP. The affective symptoms of uncertainty, confusion and frustration are associated with vague, unclear thought about a topic or question. As knowledge states shift to more clearly focused thoughts, a parallel shift occurs in feelings of increased confidence. Uncertainty due to a lack of understanding, a gap in meaning, or a limited construct initiates the process of information seeking (8).

The principle is expanded by six corollaries: process corollary, formulation corollary, redundancy corollary, mood corollary, prediction corollary, and interest corollary.

Six Corollaries of the principle of uncertainty
1. Process Corollary
The process of information seeking involves construction in which the person actively pursues understanding and meaning from the information encountered over a period of time. The process is commonly experienced in a series of thoughts and feelings that shift from vague and anxious to clear and confident, as the search progresses.

2. Formulation Corollary
Formulation is thinking, developing an understanding and extending and defining a topic from the information encountered in the early stages of a search. The formulation of a focus or a guiding idea is a critical, pivotal point in the ISP when a general topic becomes clearer and a particular perspective is formed as the person moves from uncertainty to understanding.

3. Redundancy Corollary
The interplay of seeking what is expected or redundant and encountering what is unexpected or unique results in an underlying tension of the ISP. Redundant information fits into what the user already knows and is readily recognized as being relevant or not. Unique information is new and extends knowledge and does not match the person's constructs requiring reconstruction to be recognized as useful. Too much redundant information leads to boredom, whereas too much unique information causes anxiety. The lack of redundancy in the early stages of the ISP may be an underlying cause of anxiety related to uncertainty. Uncertainty may decrease as redundancy increases.

4. Mood Corollary
Mood, a stance or attitude that the person assumes, opens or closes the range of possibilities in a search. According to Kelly, an invitational mood leads to expansive, exploratory actions, whereas an indicative mood fosters conclusive actions that lead to closure. The person's mood is likely to shift during the ISP. An invitational mood may be helpful in the early stages and an indicative mood in the later stages. A person in an invitational mood would tend to take more expansive, exploratory actions, while a user in an indicative mood prefers conclusive actions that lead to closure.

5. Prediction Corollary
The ISP is a series of personal choices based on the person's predictions of what will happen if a particular action is taken. People make predictions derived from constructs built on past experience about what sources, information and strategies will be relevant and effective. These predictions lead to the choices they make in the stages of the ISP. People develop expectations and make predictions about the sources used or not used, the sequence of source use, and the information selected from the sources as relevant or irrelevant. Relevance is not absolute or constant but varies considerably from person to person.

6. Interest Corollary
Interest increases as the exploratory inquiry leads to formulation in the ISP. Motivation and intellectual engagement intensify along with construction. Personal interest may be expected to increase as uncertainty decreases. The person's interest and motivation grows as the search progresses. Interest is higher in later stages after the person has formed a focus and has enough understanding of the topic to become intellectually engaged.

IMPLICATION OF ISP FOR INFORMATION SERVICES AND SYSTEMS
Information searching is traditionally portrayed as a systematic, orderly, and rational procedure rather than the uncertain, confusing process that users commonly experience. After the search is completed, the topic understood, and the problem solved, a person may look back and deny the chaos and confusion that was actually experienced in the process. A gap exists between users' expectations in information use and search design.

The ISP considers uncertainty as natural and essential for constructing personal knowledge in the process of information seeking rather than regarding the reduction of uncertainty as the primary objective of information seeking. Uncertainty is a concept that offers insight into the user's quest for meaning within the ISP. If uncertainty is viewed as a sign of the beginning of innovation and creativity, the goal of library and information services shifts from reducing uncertainty to supporting the user's constructive process. Increased uncertainty in the ISP indicates a need for intervention that enables the person to move on to further construction and understanding. Uncertainty in the ISP indicates a zone of intervention in the ISP for information intermediaries (9).

Zone of intervention for information services and systems
The zone of intervention is a concept modeled on Vygotsky's notion of a zone of proximal development (10). Vygotsky, the soviet psychologist whose work has had a profound influence on learning theory, developed the concept of identifying an area or zone in which intervention would be most helpful to a learner. The zone of proximal development is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined by problem solving under professional guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. This concept provides a way of understanding intervention in the constructive process of another person.

The zone of intervention in information seeking may be thought of in a similar way. The zone of intervention is that area in which an information user can do with advice and assistance what he or she cannot do alone or can do only with difficulty. Intervention within this zone enables individuals to progress in the accomplishment of their task. Intervention outside this zone is inefficient and unnecessary, experienced by users as intrusive on the one hand and overwhelming on the other.

Taken together the stages of the ISP, uncertainty principle and the concept of a zone of intervention proposes a conceptual framework for understanding information seeking as a process of construction from the user's perspective. In summary, the ISP model describes the experience and behavior of people involved in extensive research projects. People using libraries and information systems to learn about a particular subject or to investigate a problem or issue often have difficulty in the early stages of information seeking. Even when they begin with great enthusiasm and initial success, many become confused and uncertain as to how to proceed after a short period of time. This is particularly noticeable with students who have been assigned a research paper but is not limited to students. Initial hesitation, confusion, and uncertainty are reported by people in all types of libraries and in the workplace. In fact, we have no way of knowing just how many people give up after initiating a search because they become uncertain and feel incompetent to continue (11).

CONCLUSION
People engage in an information search experience holistically, with an interplay of thoughts, feelings and actions. Common patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting are characteristic in each phase. These studies were among the first to investigate the affective aspects or the feelings of a person in the process of information seeking along with the cognitive and physical aspects. Rather than a steady increase in confidence from the beginning of a search to the conclusion, as might be expected, a dip in confidence is commonly experienced once an individual has initiated a search and begins to encounter conflicting and inconsistent information. A person "in the dip" is increasingly uncertain and confused until a focus is formed to provide a path for seeking meaning and criteria for judging relevance. Advances in information technology, that open access to a vast assortment of sources, have not helped the user's dilemma and may have intensified the sense of confusion and uncertainty. Information systems may intensify the problem particularly in the early stages of the ISP by overwhelming the user with "everything" all at once. Increased uncertainty indicates a zone of intervention in the process of information seeking for information intermediaries.

References

1. Kuhlthau, C. C. Developing a model of the library search process: Investigation of cognitive and affective aspects. Reference Quarterly 1988, 28 (2), 232-242.

2. Kelly, G. A. A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Norton, New York, 1963.

3. Kuhlthau, C. C. Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user's perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 1991, 42 (5), 361-371.

4. Kuhlthau, C. C. Longitudinal case studies of the information search process of users in libraries. Library and Information Science Research 1988, 10, 257-304.

5. Kuhlthau, C. C., Turock, B. J, & George, M. W. Validating a model of the search process: A comparison of academic, public and school library users. Library and Information Science Research 1990, 12 (1). 5-13.

6. Kuhlthau, C. C. The role of experience in the information search process of an early career information worker: Perceptions of uncertainty, complexity, construction and sources. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 1999, 50 (5), 399-412.

7. Kuhlthau, C. C. Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services, 2nd edition, Libraries Unlimited, Westport, CT., 2004.

8. Kuhlthau, C. C. A principle of uncertainty for information seeking. Journal of Documentation 1993, 49 (4), 339-355.

9. Kuhlthau, C. C. The concept of a zone of intervention for identifying the role of intermediaries in the information search process. In Global Complexity; Information, Chaos and Control, Proceedings of the 59th American Society for Information Science Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD., October 21-24, 1996; Hardin, S, Eds.; Information Today, Medford NJ, 1996, 91-94.

10. Vygotsky, L. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 1978.

11. Kuhlthau, C. C. Accommodating the user's information search process: Challenges for information retrieval system designers. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 1999, 25, 12-16.

Progression and Development of
Kuhlthau's Information Search Process

Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, second edition with Maniotes and Caspari

A thorough explanation of Guided Inquiry Design including Information Literacy Curriculum.

Children's Reading in Guided Inquiry. Keynote at the International Reading Literacy Symposium, University of Tokyo, Japan.

Each stage of the ISP requires different kinds of reading.

Guided Inquiry Design with Maniotes and Caspari

A complete framework for designing learning for preK-12 students

Research Matters: The Long Reach of the Model of the ISP. Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults (JRLYA)

The triad of tradition, experience and research work together to build, sustain and develop library services for children and youth

Guided Inquiry for School Libraries in the 21st Century. School Libraries Worldwide

Guided Inquiry based on the ISP equips student for the challenges of a changing technological world.

Information Search Process. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences Taylor Francis.

A summary of research on the Information Search Process

From Information to Meaning: Confronting Challenges of the Twenty-first Century. Libri, vol. 58, 66-73.

Moving away from concentration on technology of searching to using
information for learning, problem solving and creativity.

Meeting the Challenge of Intellectual Access: Vital roles for librarians. Margaret Mann Lecture, School of Information, University of Michigan.

ISP in the context of education and the workplace that indicate new roles for librarians

Information Search Process of Lawyers: A Call For 'Just For Me' Information Services. Journal of Documentation, 57 (1), 31-46.

Evidence of ISP in the workplace and need for creating meaning
With Tama

Information Seeking for Learning: A Study of Librarians Perceptions of Learning in School Libraries. New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 2, 31-46.

ISP of students in science projects
With McNally

Validating A Model of the Search Process: A Comparison of Academic, Public, and School Library Users. Library and Information Science Research, 12 (1), 5-32.

Confirmation of the ISP in various types of libraries
With Turock, George and Belvin

Books authored by Kuhlthau on research and application of the ISP:

Teaching the Library Research Process. 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed.1994; paperback ed. 2002. Available through Scarecrow Press.

Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services. 1st ed. 1993; 2nd ed. 2004. Available through Libraries Unlimited,

Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. With Leslie K. Maniotes and Ann K. Caspari. 2007. Available through Libraries Unlimited,

"ISP Revisited: Is the ISP model still useful?" With Jannica Heinstrom and Ross Todd. Presentation at the Information Seeking in Context conference, Vilnius Lithuania, September 17, 2008. Information Research, an International Electronic Journal, 13 (4) 2008.

"Research Matters: The Long Reach of the Model of the ISP." Journal of Research on Libraries and Young adults (JRLYA) 2, 2, 17-28. Available at http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/.

"Reflections on the development of a theoretical perspective." In Theory Development in the Information Sciences. edited by Diane H. Sonnenwald, chapter 4, pp.68-86. University of Texas Press, 2016.

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"Longitudinal Evidence of the Influence of the ISP on Information Workers.", 2018. Read the full paper here. PowerPoint presentation of the Information Search Process The model of the Information Search Process (ISP) is one of the most highly cited works in Library and Information Science as noted in the following citation studies: Timelines of Creativity: A Study of Intellectual Innovators in Information Science.

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Authors: Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, Ann K. Caspari
> About the Authors
Download the Presentation: Guided Inquiry Design Framework
Guided Inquiry professional development, training workshops, residential institutes and book clubs, contact Dr Leslie Maniotes - lesliekm67@gmail.com
Guided Inquiry is an innovative team approach to teaching and learning where teachers and school librarians, with other experts and specialists, join together to design and implement inquiry learning. It engages children in constructing personal knowledge while using a wide range of sources of information and creatively sharing their learning their fellow students in an inquiry community. Guided Inquiry Design is grounded in the research of the Information Search Process (ISP) that describes students' process of learning from a variety of information sources in extensive research projects. The ISP research goes inside the inquiry process to reveal ways to guide students in deep engaging learning.
Research Foundation of Guided Inquiry Design
For many years I have been conducting research on the process of learning from a variety of sources of information (Kuhlthau 1985, 2004, 2005). The second edition of Seeking Meaning (2004) is a good summary of this work. My studies opened insights into students' perspective of their experience in research projects. I investigated students' feelings as well as their thoughts and actions while they were in the stages of learning from various sources of information described in my model of the Information Search Process (ISP). What is too often thought to be a simple report or a routine term paper assignment was found to be a complex inquiry process that requires guidance, instruction, and assistance for optimal learning for every child.

In these studies I investigated students' thoughts, feelings and actions while they were involved in extensive research projects. I found that they progress through six identifiable stages, which I named for the main task to accomplish in each stage, plus a seventh assessment stage.

Initiation: initiating a research project

Selection: selecting a topic

Exploration: exploring for focus

Formulation: formulating a focus

Collection: collecting information on focus

Presentation: preparing to present

Assessment: assessing the process (Kuhlthau, 1985)

Six Stages in the Information Search Process (ISP)
These studies showed that students' thoughts are charged with emotions that influence the actions they take. Students experience a dip in confidence and an increase in uncertainty when they least expect it, during the Exploration stage. They often expect to be able to simply collect information and complete the assignment. This simple view of the research process sets up stumbling blocks, especially in the Exploration and Formulation stages. When their expectations do not match what they are experiencing, they become confused, anxious and frustrated. The early stages of the ISP reveal the struggle they experience in learning in an extensive inquiry project. Feelings are important and indicate when they are having difficulty and when they are doing well on their own (Kuhlthau, 2004).

Let's take a closer look at each stage in the ISP and what it tells us about guiding inquiry.
Initiation: Initiating a Research Assignment
Students often feel apprehensive and uncertain about what is expected of them and overwhelmed at the amount of work ahead. Talking with classmates is a natural action to take, but some feel they should be "going it alone" and that checking with others might not be "entirely fair." It is important to make sure that students understand that it is not only fair to talk about their ideas and questions, it is necessary to have these conversations at this stage to begin to get their thinking going.
Selection: Selecting a Topic
Many students want to select a specific topic or question quickly and dive right into collecting information and completing the assignment. This is where students can go astray right at the beginning. They need lots of groundwork before they can form meaningful questions that they want to pursue and that are worth investigating. Selection is a time for introducing and expanding on the general topic to be researched.
Exploration: Exploring for a Focus
In preparation for forming important questions, students need to build background knowledge on the general topic and to discover interesting ideas. A common problem is that many students skip over the Exploration and Formulation stages and attempt to move on to the Collection stage without having formed a focus for their research. For most students, the Exploration stage is the most difficult in the research process. As they browse information about their topics, they become confused by ideas that don't fit together. They encounter inconsistencies and incompatibilities of different perspectives and differing points of view. They have difficulty determining importance from everything in a text. They need to understand that there are different kinds of reading for different stages in their learning process. At this stage they are exploring for interesting ideas rather than collecting detailed information. They need to learn to browse through a variety of texts, skimming and scanning to get a general picture. They need to recognize when to slow down and read to gain sufficient background knowledge and to pick up interesting ideas. Exploration is best achieved by jotting down interesting ideas from a variety of sources rather than taking extensive, detailed notes from one text. Students need support, structure, and strategies for learning from different sources of information to assimilate new ideas and form a focused question from the ideas that arise in their explorations.
Formulation: Formulating a Focus
Formulating a focus marks the turning point of the ISP when students identify a focus, an area of concentration, "something to center on," and clarify their research question. Once they have formulated a focus for their research, their feelings of uncertainty and confusion begin to diminish and confidence increases. It is important to note that forming a focused question comes at the midpoint of the ISP not at the beginning as often expected.
Collection: Collecting Information on Focus
A good focus is one in which ideas continue to grow and evolve based on thorough reading of information and detailed note taking in the Collection stage. Students assume a "study" frame of mind of concentrated attention. A clear focus enables students to determine importance in what they are reading. It helps them to discriminate between less significant facts and more important ideas. A good focus can be adapted and altered as they continue to learn while they read, write and collect information. Interest in the project deepens as students get further along in constructing an understanding of their focused question.
Presentation: Preparing to Present
The Presentation stage marks the beginning of the writing process that introduces another set of challenges. Students who construct their ideas as they collect information are better prepared for writing and creatively presenting what they have learned. They experience fewer writing blocks because they have been constructing their learning all the way through the research process. These students often express a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in what they have learned and created. Students that merely collect facts in a "cut and paste" fashion have difficulty preparing an original presentation and often express disappointment and boredom with their inquiry project.
Assessment: Assessing the Learning
The way students feel at the close of a research project is a good way to assess what went well and what problems they encountered in the research process. Feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment indicate that they constructed their own understanding of their topic. Feelings of disappointment and boredom indicate a "cut and paste" approach with little real learning. Self-assessment gives students a sense of how to approach future research assignments and inquiry projects. After several research projects, these students showed that they had internalized the stages in the ISP as their own "process" explaining that this is the "way I learn."
Impact of ISP Model
The ISP has become one of the standard models of information seeking behavior and one of the most highly cited in the field. Over the years the ISP research has changed the way many librarians and teachers help students with project-based learning. It has opened a window into what students are experiencing when they are constructing new understandings and learning from multiple sources in the dynamic information environment. It has revealed ways to guide students in their learning. Students need considerable guidance and intervention in learning throughout the inquiry process in order to construct personal understanding. Without guidance, they tend to expect a simple collecting and presenting assignment that leads to copying and pasting with little real learning. With guidance, they are able to construct new understanding in the stages of the ISP and gain personal knowledge and transferable skills in learning from a wide variety of information sources.

From the ISP to Guided Inquiry Design
GUIDED INQUIRY DESIGN FRAMEWORK
Kuhlthau, Maniotes, and Caspari 2012
From the ISP to Guided Inquiry Design
The ISP model describes what students' experience in the phases of the inquiry process. These studies provide solid evidence on how to guide learning in the inquiry process that prepares students for learning, living and working in the information age. The Guided Inquiry Design framework is built around the ISP with specific direction for guiding students in each phase of the inquiry process.

Guided Inquiry opens the inquiry process at Initiation, immerses students in background knowledge at Selection, guides in exploring interesting ideas at Exploration, enables identifying an inquiry question at Formulation, supports gathering to address the question at Collection, intervenes for creating and sharing at Preparation, and assesses throughout the inquiry process and evaluates at the close. Let's take a closer look the Guided Inquiry Design Framework.
Guided Inquiry Design Framework
The Guided Inquiry Design process begins with Open the inquiry to catch students' attention, get them thinking, and help them make connections with their world outside of school. Next is Immerse, which is designed to build enough background knowledge to generate some interesting ideas to investigate. Then Explore those ideas for an important, authentic engaging inquiry question. Next, pause to Identify and clearly articulate the inquiry question before moving on to Gather information. After gathering, Create and Share what students have learned and then Evaluate to reflect on content and process and assess achievement of learning. The shape of the Guided Inquiry Design Process follows the flow of confidence and interest of students in the inquiry process that will help you guide students in reading to learn. This is a general framework for designing an inquiry approach across all curriculum subjects for students of all ages. Think of inquiry as a way of learning in the information age school, not simply as an occasional research assignment.

Now let's look at each phase in the inquiry process and think about how to design student learning in each phase.

Open is the invitation to inquiry at the beginning of the inquiry process. It is a distinct and important phase of the process that sets the tone and direction of the inquiry. Once the learning team has decided on the learning goals, they need to create a powerful opener that invites the learners in and introduces the general topic to engage all of the students. The main goal is to open students' minds and stimulate curiosity and inspire them to want to pursue the inquiry. The opener is designed to spark conversations and stimulate students to think about the overall content of the inquiry and to connect with what they already know from their experience and personal knowledge. It sets the stage for learning.

In the Immerse phase, the students build background knowledge together through an immersion experience. The learning team designs engaging ways for students to immerse in the overall ideas of the curriculum area under study, for example reading a book, story, or article together; viewing a video; or visiting a museum, a field site, or an expert. The main task of Immerse is to guide students to connect with the overall content and to discover interesting ideas that they want to explore further. As they build background knowledge together, each student reflects on ideas that matter to him or her and are worth further reading and investigation.

In the Explore phase of Guided Inquiry, students browse through various sources of information exploring interesting ideas to prepare to develop their inquiry question. The learning team guides students to apply the reading strategies of browsing and scanning a variety of sources. Students dip into a few texts to read lightly in order to make sense of the information they find and to raise lots of questions. "Dipping in" is a reading strategy that enables students to go further into interesting ideas without becoming overwhelmed by a multitude of specific facts. Students can easily become overwhelmed by all the information and confused by facts that don't fit together. The learning team guides them to keep an open mind as they explore and reflect on new information they are encountering and to begin to find questions that seem particularly important to them. Guiding students through the Explore phase leads them to form a meaningful inquiry question.

In the Identify phase learners pause in the inquiry process to develop a meaningful inquiry question and form a focus. In Guided Inquiry they have had lots of preparation for this phase. Students are ready to identify an important question for their inquiry because of the time they have spent immersing and exploring to build enough background knowledge to ask meaningful questions. The main task of the Identify phase is to construct an inquiry question from the interesting ideas, pressing problems and emerging themes they have explored in various sources of information. The team introduces strategies that enable each student to think through information and ideas to clearly articulate a focused question that will frame the rest of their inquiry.

A clearly articulated question gives direction for the Gather phase. Gather sessions are designed to help students collect detailed information from a variety of sources. In this way they are learning to determine importance in what they are concentrating on in their reading, listening and observing. The learning team guides students in locating, evaluating and using information that leads to deep learning. The main task of the Gather phase is for students to choose what is personally meaningful and compelling about their inquiry question in the information sources they find and reflect upon. The learning team guides students in a structured approach for managing their search and documenting what they are learning. First students "go broad" to find a range of sources that are useful for understanding their inquiry question. Next students "go deep," by choosing a core of the most useful sources to read closely and reflect with sustained attention as they find connections and gain personal understanding.

After students have thoughtfully gathered enough information to construct their own understandings of their inquiry question, they are ready to organize their learning into a creative presentation during the Create phase. Creating a way to communicate what they have learned about their inquiry requires students to articulate what is most important about their subject and enables them to integrate their ideas more firmly into deep understanding. The learning team guides students to go beyond simple fact finding and reporting and to summarize, interpret and extend the meaning of what they have found and create a way to share what they have learned. Create sessions are designed to guide students to reflect on all they have learned about their inquiry question and decide what type of presentation will best represent their ideas for a particular audience. The learning team guides students in creating a meaningful, interesting, clearly articulated, well-documented presentation that tells the story of what they have learned.

Share is the culminating phase in the inquiry process when students share the product they have created to show what they have learned. Students have become experts on the question for their inquiry community. They now have the opportunity and responsibility to share their insights with their fellow students and communicate their learning to others. Their inquiry products may be shared with a wider audience, such as their parents or another group of students in their school or in another school, perhaps online. An important component of Guided Inquiry is the collaborative learning that takes place when students share what they have learned in the inquiry process.

The Evaluate phase, which occurs at the close of the inquiry process, is an integral part of Guided Inquiry. Although Guided Inquiry incorporates assessment for determining student progress throughout all of the phases of the inquiry process, evaluation occurs at the end when the learning team evaluates students' achievement of the learning goals. In addition, the learning team guides students in reflection for self-assessment of their content learning and their progress through the inquiry process. Students' self-reflection takes place while the entire process is fresh in their minds to reinforce content learning and establish good habits and competencies for learning and literacy.
Guided Inquiry Design for teaching and learning in the information age schools
Competency in using all kinds of information for clear, deep understanding is essential for every child in today's world. Guided Inquiry provides opportunities for children to learn strategies in locating, evaluating and using a wide range of media and a variety of texts and puts all of their strategies and skills into action throughout the inquiry process. Starting at youngest age, children are introduced to inquiry as a way to learn that prepares them for living and working in the information age. As students continue through the elementary and middle school and on to high school Guided Inquiry creates an environment that motivates them to want to learn. It engages them in determining importance and meaning by connecting the curriculum with their world for deep lasting learning. The Guided Inquiry Design framework is an innovative, dynamic approach to teaching and learning for providing information age education for children across the United States and in countries around the world.
References
Kuhlthau, Carol, Leslie Maniotes and Ann Caspari. Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, Libraries Unlimited, 2007.

Kuhlthau, Carol, Leslie Maniotes and Ann Caspari. Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in your School, Libraries Unlimited, 2012.

Kuhlthau, Carol. Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services, 2nd ed. Libraries Unlimited, 2004.

Kuhlthau, Carol. Teaching the Library Research Process, Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Todd, R., Kuhlthau, C. C., and Heinstrom, J. 2005. Impact of School Libraries on Student Learning. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Leadership Grant Project Report http://cissl.rutgers.edu.
Contact Dr. Leslie Maniotes for professional development, training workshops, residential institutes and book clubs at lesliekm67@gmail.com

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Authors: Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, Ann K. Caspari > About the Authors Download the Presentation: Guided Inquiry Design Framework Guided Inquiry professional development, training workshops, residential institutes and book clubs, contact Dr Leslie Maniotes - lesliekm67@gmail.com Guided Inquiry is an innovative team approach to teaching and learning where teachers and school librarians, with other experts and specialists, join together to design and implement inquiry learning.

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Action, talk and text: the case for dialogic inquiry. By Gordon Wells. 2004.

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Action, talk and text: the case for dialogic inquiry. By Gordon Wells. 2004.

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Inquire Within, by WhatEdSaid (Edna Sackson)

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Inquire Within, by WhatEdSaid (Edna Sackson)

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"Inquire Within is a blog dedicated to inquiry. In its purest form, inquiry is asking questions and discovering the answers to those questions. We strongly believe that learners of all ages must be given the opportunity to engage in inquiry."