The Inquiry Wheel

During our lecture the other day in my MSED class we discussed the inquiry wheel. Below you can see a picture of what an inquiry wheel looks like. As you can see there is a circular section in the middle that says "questions" and arrows point from that circle to 9 other boxes, each it's own type of category. Note that there is no specific order of this wheel. This is because when scientist are asking questions, they have no specific order on how or what type of questions they are going to be asking.The purpose of an inquiry wheel is to allow the scientist to always be asking questions throughout the whole process of whatever experiment they are conducting. If something with the experiment goes wrong or the results don't turn out, you may have to go back and ask different questions, but the whole point is it allows you and helps you to ASK QUESTIONS. The inquiry wheel is also flexible because it doesn't require you to go in any step by step specific order. The wheel allows for constant reflection as well as improvement which is one of the reasons it is so nice to work with. I personally have never heard of this wheel before. Then again, I haven't taken a science class since my junior year of high school. I really enjoyed learning about the inquiry wheel and I really think that it is more effective for scientist of any ages, but especially the younger scientist to use. I remember back in middle school hating science experiments because we had to follow a step by step series of questions we had to ask and answer about our experiment. If something didn't end up falling into place or anything like that then we had to change our whole experiment and start over on the series of questions. Unlike that method, like I said before, the wheel allows room for improvement so you can take the data or information you've already gathered and build from it apposed to starting from scratch like we used to have to. I really think it is a nice model that is helpful and useable for many ages.