摘 要: | It is argued that the lack of consensus on what constitutes an inquiry-based approach makes the generalization about it difficult, because the concept is relatively unspecific and vague. This problem can partially be solved by constructing a set of activities promoted by inquiry, thus defining the inquiry objectives for classroom and laboratory teaching. Five high school and college Mexican teachers' PICK (pedagogical inquiry/content knowledge) was documented and assessed by means of Loughran, Mulhall and Berry's (2004) l-CoRe (inquiry content representation) developed by the authors through a proposal of a set of seven inquiry activities. They were also interviewed to construct the professional and pedagogical experience repertoires, a second tool by Loughran et al. (2004) to document PICK. It was observed that all teachers interviewed have used inquiry to modify their students' way of thinking, mainly through question posing. Some of them employed research as their main tool to promote scientific inquiry but others mentioned the lack of time to do it. It is interesting to notice that in spite of the fact that inquiry is out of the curriculum in M6xico, the teachers make use of it to improve their teaching practice. According to their answers, their actions in the classroom or the lab were classified within the three general approaches expressed by Lederman (2004): implicit, historical and explicit. It is concluded that a given teacher cannot be classified exclusively in one of them, because in his/her activities one general approach overlaps the others. The authors conclude that Lederman's classification has to be taken into account as an orientation to characterize a given activity of one teacher, even though the same teacher may use another activity characterized by other general approach. That is, Lederman's classification applies to characterize activities, not persons
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