Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning is an activity based group learning strategy created in 1994 to improve chemistry instruction and now used in more than a thousand American high schools and colleges across other subjects as well. Students work in small groups of three or four, each member taking on a defined role such as manager, recorder, spokesperson or reflector, and they work through carefully sequenced activities rather than receiving definitions and explanations from a lecturing instructor. The activities move from questions that activate what students already know, to questions that lead them to notice patterns and relationships in new material, to questions that ask them to apply the resulting concepts to new situations, a structure grounded in constructivist theory in which the instructor's role is to facilitate rather than to lecture.