Cultivating a Culture of Inquiry-Based Learning at McMaster University - Understanding Instructor Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Boyer Commission report (1998) argued that normative educational approaches to higher education deprive undergraduates of opportunities for substantial intellectual engagement and rely too heavily on ‘knowledge transfer’ as the principal mode of teaching. In response, they advocated for the use of inquiry-based methods to foster intellectual stimulation and excitement for learning and discovery, and remove barriers to interdisciplinarity (1998). A central challenge in the development of interdisciplinary educational enterprises, such as the adoption of an inquiry-based approach, is the cultivation of a shared vision across disciplines with different norms of discourse, epistemology, and pedagogy (Mahony, 2003). Using semi-structured interviews and qualitative thematic analysis, we examined how inquiry-based pedagogy is understood by faculty members from established undergraduate programs at McMaster University as well as those involved in the development of a new interdisciplinary program employing inquiry-based approaches. The key questions addressed in this study are: How do faculty members from different disciplines understand inquiry-based pedagogy, and what factors are associated with long-term sustainability of inquiry-based curricula in higher education? Four key themes were identified in this analysis including 1) guiding tenets of inquiry-based learning, 2) inquiry environment, 3) inquiry as a programmatic ethos, and 4) inquiry as subversion/resistance. From this analysis, this research was able to articulate instructors’ understanding of inquiry-based pedagogy, discussing common themes and challenges, highlighting the connections to critical pedagogy, and identifying factors such as curricular design, collaboration among staff and support from administration that have contributed to the sustainability of this approach at McMaster University
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".