Middle reflection questionnaire

Questionnaire 2

1.     Take some time to think about your topic. Now write down what you know about it.

·       That inquiry learning in history is a natural way for students to enagage with historical knowledge and understandings rather than simply acquiring facts.

·       However in practice this is not what is always undertaken. Inquiry based learning as an approach is not often used by teachers in the classroom.

·       An emphasis on Inquiry is proposed by the new Australian History curriculum

·       There is minimal information about inquiry based learning in history or social studies for early years students

·       When inquiry is used with children it needs to be guided by the teacher to ensure that they are working towards a deeper level of understanding. Appropriate questioning can be one vehicle to help them move forward and teaching them relevant skills to search, collect, organise and understand information.

2. How interested are you in this topic?  Quite a bit

3. How much do you know about this topic?   Quite a bit

4. Thinking of your research so far - what did you find easy to do? Please list as many things as you like.

·       Once I started to research using the databases I became more confident. I started to build up lots of resources

·       I began to explore different ways of searching, using a variety of search terms and trying different approaches. Experimenting with the limiters and filters etc

·       The actual skills of using Boolean operators and managing each data base is getting easier

5.  Thinking of your research so far - what did you find difficult to do? Please list as many things as you like.

·       Sorting out what is really relevant to my search

·       Formulating a clear focus for my essay

·       The organisation of the information collected was difficult, especially as the amount grew!

·       It is difficult finding material that is specific to the lower primary situation and specifically to history. Elementary and primary are sometimes too broad.

·       I am not able to read everything thoroughly while I am searching so I am collecting more than I need. It seems a bit mountainous at the moment. I really don’t feel as though I am gaining a lot more knowledge about the topic as I have not had the time to really engage with the materials, I’ve been too consumed with collecting.

·       It was difficult to keep track of where all my information was coming from. I started to note down on the printed documents what database it came from, but this was probably a bit too late in the search process.