Teachers' Use and Understanding of Strategy in Inquiry Instruction*

The purpose of this qualitative multicase study was to find out how experienced teachers who do and do not use inquiry-teaching methods in their classrooms vary in their knowledge of inquiry. The hypothesis was that the inquiry teachers would have a more detailed and complex understanding of inquiry than those teachers who did not use inquiry in their classrooms, and that the structure of their knowledge would include more concepts found in the expert literature on inquiry than for the noninquiry teachers.