ABSTRACT
This module is about learning through enquiry. This is just a way of describing learning in which process skills (or enquiry skills) are used to gather evidence to test whether certain ideas can explain phenomena and events in the world around us. Learning this way is important for several reasons. First, we are concerned to develop understanding, and understanding depends on the learners working things out for themselves. This is as true for adults as for children; we understand something when we have made sense of it in our own way and it fits with our experience and ways of thinking about related events or phenomena. So personal involvement in sense-making is important. When we are given isolated facts without being able to relate them to our own way of looking at things, we can only ‘learn’ them by rote memorisation. While there is place for memorisation (in learning the names given to things, for example), this does not help us understand and develop concepts that enable us to make sense of new experience and apply it in decisions in our daily lives.
