Inquiry-based social studies is about more than students asking questions. To investigate compelling questions and develop meaningful conclusions, students need opportunities to apply the tools and concepts of civics, economics, geography, and history. In this article, I look at the role of student tasks in an inquiry classroom and how those tasks help students develop the knowledge, evidence, and reasoning needed for meaningful inquiry. You’ll learn why tasks are an essential part of social studies inquiry, how disciplinary thinking helps students analyze evidence and build arguments, and how even young learners can use inquiry to think like historians, geographers, economists, and citizens.
Inquiry-based teaching and learning require questions. They offer a genuine purpose for students’ efforts and suggest a structure for building teaching units. Questions are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Once students ask questions, they need ways to investigate them. If social studies inquiry is going to succeed as a regular teaching practice, questions must be married to tasks and sources. This is where students begin using the disciplinary tools and concepts of social studies and start thinking like historians, geographers, economists, and citizens.
One of the goals of inquiry-based learning is helping students move beyond collecting facts. Students need opportunities to analyze evidence, explain their thinking, and support their conclusions.
The C3 Framework for social studies describes this process through the disciplines of civics, economics, geography, and history. Each discipline provides tools and concepts that help students investigate questions and better understand the world around them.
These disciplinary tools include
Students develop these skills through carefully designed classroom tasks.
As with questions, curriculum tasks can be closed or open-ended. In most classrooms today, closed-ended tasks dominate. Students answer worksheet questions, take pop quizzes, and write definitions...lots of definitions!
These tasks are not necessarily bad. In fact, they can help students develop their content knowledge. But if they are the only thing kids do during social studies class, they can seem like a grind—a far cry from a "hooray for social studies” moment!
To create those "hooray" moments, teachers may try two approaches. One approach is to simplify the tasks. The idea here is that easier assignments encourage students to complete them with little effort. The other approach is to supplement traditional tasks with "fun" activities, such as classroom Jeopardy. Here, teachers hope to ramp up student interest by taking their minds off more tedious work.
In the end, neither approach works. Kids see efforts to dumb down their assignments as just more busy work. And while they may participate in classroom games, they tend to see them as a waste of classroom time.
But there is a silver lining to this classroom cloud!
Teachers do not need to trick students into learning. The close-ended tasks they assign are only boring or silly when they serve no bigger purpose. A genuine or compelling question gives a purpose to student work. And when kids can see a real purpose, they typically respond well.
In an inquiry classroom, students investigate questions through the disciplinary lenses of civics, economics, geography, and history. These disciplines provide students with ways of thinking about problems and evidence.
Students consider how people participate in communities, make decisions, and solve shared problems.
Students examine wants, needs, scarcity, and the choices people make when resources are limited.
Students explore how location, environment, and place influence people and communities.
Students analyze evidence from the past to understand change over time and explain events.
When students use these disciplinary lenses, they engage in the kinds of critical thinking in social studies that inquiry is designed to promote.
In an inquiry classroom, open-ended questions need close-ended questions to round out teaching units. But questions also need associated tasks for students to demonstrate their new and evolving understandings.
So, just as an open-ended question needs close-ended questions to frame a unit, an open-ended task—such as constructing an evidence-based argument—needs close-ended tasks to scaffold students’ knowledge and understanding.
Let's consider an example from a kindergarten economics unit to show the working relationship between open- and close-ended questions.
Compelling Question: Why can't we ever get everything we want and need?
Supporting Questions
The close-ended questions give support, structure, and substance to the compelling question.
By answering a set of tasks associated with these supporting questions, students come to understand the issues around the topic and build their content knowledge.
In this wants-and-needs unit, the ultimate task is an open-ended one: students make and support one of several arguments responding to the compelling question.
For example, a kindergartner might start by saying, "We can't ever get everything we want and need." Another might make a very different argument: "We can get most of what we need, but only some of what we want."
Some teachers might be tempted to stop there. These kids are showing some understanding of the issues, and they can say what their perspectives are. But these statements are opinions—that is, claims about the topic that lack the support or evidence that explains their thinking.
An argument expresses a claim, but that claim is backed up with evidence. In an inquiry unit, evidence is gathered when students complete the kinds of close-ended tasks that boost their stores of knowledge about a topic.
Back to our needs-and-wants unit, a close-ended task to help kindergartners learn the difference between needs and wants could ask students to sort and categorize a set of images—a glass of water, a stuffed animal, a coat, and a loaf of bread—and then explain how they made their decisions.
They might complete a second categorizing task by sorting images of goods and services and describing how they meet needs and wants.
To address the third supporting question, students could brainstorm what options are available when scarcity exists.
As students complete these kinds of close-ended tasks, they build content knowledge and develop the skills of making and supporting an argument—skills that can be useful in any setting.
Let's now return to the needs-and-wants unit to see how the close-ended and open-ended tasks work together.
With their new understanding of needs and wants, goods and services, and scarcity, students can now provide support for their initial claims in response to the question, "Why can't we ever get everything we want and need?"
A student who makes the claim that "we can't ever get everything we want and need" might support that claim by adding, "because stores might run out of stuff."
Another student might assert the same claim but choose different evidence: "We can't ever get everything we want and need because I don't have that much money."
A third student might make a very different argument: "We can get most of what we need, but only some of what we want because we have to get what we need first."
And a fourth might argue that "we can get most of what we need, but only some of what we want because we can't afford everything."
These students are no longer simply answering questions. They are using evidence, reasoning, and disciplinary thinking to explain their conclusions.
They are the thinking strategies, questions, and concepts students use to study social studies through civics, economics, geography, and history.
They help students move beyond asking questions to analyzing information, using evidence, and explaining their conclusions.
The four core disciplines are civics, economics, geography, and history.
They can use maps, timelines, images, discussion prompts, sorting activities, and evidence-based writing to examine social studies questions.
Examples include evaluating evidence like a historian, analyzing scarcity like an economist, interpreting maps like a geographer, and considering community decision-making like a citizen.
Making and supporting arguments is essential to a civil society, especially if we are going to learn how to talk with one another rather than yell at each other.
That open-ended task, however, relies on students building their social studies knowledge and skills by doing close-ended tasks.
So, both open-ended and close-ended tasks are necessary in an inquiry classroom. But when they are closely paired, they become sufficient for students to deeply engage with ideas and with one another.
And when students use those tasks to gather evidence, analyze information, and support claims, they begin thinking like historians, geographers, economists, and citizens—the ultimate goal of meaningful social studies inquiry.