Inquiry-Based Learning: What Parents Should Expect in a Good School

In a conventional science lesson the teacher explains a fact and the class then practises it. In an inquiry lesson the order is reversed. The teacher might put a clay matka and a plastic bottle of water on the desk and ask which one will keep the water cooler, and why. The children guess, decide how to test it fairly, take measurements over a morning, and only then work out the explanation, with the teacher steering the discussion towards the science. Pakistan's National Curriculum Framework (2017) describes the inquiry method in similar terms: a process of framing questions, gathering and analysing information, and drawing conclusions from it.

Inquiry-based learning is related to project-based learning but it is not the same thing. SchoolNama's guide to project-based learning describes projects that run for weeks and end with a finished product shown to an audience. An inquiry can be much smaller: a single lesson built around one good question, a short experiment, or a structured discussion. A classroom can use inquiry regularly without ever running a formal project, and a school can do one well and the other badly.

Inquiry is not only a feature of expensive international schools; it also appears in federal curriculum documents. The Single National Curriculum's General Science progression grid for Grades 4 to 8, hosted by the National Curriculum Council and drawing on the 2020 General Science curriculum, lists scientific enquiry skills to be addressed across science topics. By the end of Grade 5, students should be able to ask questions, know five main types of scientific enquiry (observing over time, identifying and classifying, comparing and contrasting, fair testing, and research), use equipment to carry out investigations, and draw a conclusion from their results. By the end of Grade 8 they should be able to judge whether a hypothesis is testable, predict the likely outcome of an enquiry and plan a range of investigations. The 2017 National Curriculum Framework also lists support for inquiry-based learning among its standards for textbooks. Two caveats matter. The National Curriculum Council's own pages now describe the National Curriculum of Pakistan 2022-23, with model textbooks up to Grade 8 already in use, and we could not check whether its science outcomes carry these skills over unchanged. And the Council states that provinces have complete autonomy over curriculum, with the core curriculum going through provincial legal processes before it is implemented. So ask which curriculum and textbooks your child's school actually follows.

Some private schools present inquiry as part of their offer, usually through International Baccalaureate programmes. The City School's page for its Bahria Chapter in Islamabad says the campus offers the IB Primary Years Programme to create an inquiry-driven atmosphere, and describes inquiry in the programme as students exploring and investigating questions and problems that spark their curiosity. The same page states that the school is a candidate for the Primary Years Programme and is pursuing authorisation as an IB World School, so at the time we read it the campus was not yet authorised; that is a useful thing to know and to ask about. TNS Beaconhouse in Lahore says that as an IB World School it encourages inquiry and reflection. Beaconhouse's page for its Newlands campus in Islamabad does not mention inquiry, but lists a Primary Years Programme, a Middle Years Programme and the IB Diploma Programme among its programmes. A programme name tells you what a school intends. It does not tell you what happens in a particular classroom.

The research is where parents most need a straight answer, because the debate has two sides. In 2006 the educational psychologists Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark published a widely cited critique of minimally guided teaching, a family in which they explicitly included inquiry learning alongside discovery, problem-based and experiential learning. Their argument was that half a century of studies consistently show minimally guided instruction to be less effective and less efficient than teaching that strongly guides the learner. They added an important qualification: the advantage of guidance begins to fade only when learners already know enough to guide themselves. Put simply, a beginner left to work something out alone can struggle and learn little.

A 2011 pair of meta-analyses by Louis Alfieri and colleagues, drawing on 164 studies, put that argument to the test. When learners were left to discover things with no help, explicit instruction came out ahead under most conditions, with an effect size of d = -0.38 against unassisted discovery. But when discovery was enhanced or assisted, it came out ahead of other forms of instruction, with an effect size of d = 0.30. The authors concluded that unassisted discovery does not benefit learners, whereas feedback, worked examples, scaffolding and asking learners to explain their thinking do.

A 2016 meta-analysis by Ard Lazonder and Ruth Harmsen, which synthesised 72 studies, compared different kinds of guidance within inquiry learning. It opens by summarising earlier research, which has consistently shown that inquiry-based learning can be more effective than more expository teaching, as long as students are supported adequately. Its own finding was that guidance improved what students learned, with an overall effect size of d = 0.50 on learning outcomes. For another outcome, students' learning activities, guidance also helped overall (d = 0.66), but its effects varied considerably, and the authors said the relatively low number of studies did not allow any definitive conclusion about possible age-related differences.

A broad real-world picture comes from the OECD's analysis of PISA 2015, which covered 68 countries and economies. In almost all of them, enquiry-based teaching was associated with lower performance among students in the least disciplined science classes; in 33, that negative association disappeared in disciplined classrooms. Teacher-directed science teaching was associated with better science performance in almost all countries. Enquiry-based teaching, on the other hand, seemed the most promising way to nurture positive attitudes towards science in OECD countries, including interest and enjoyment. These are associations, showing which teaching went with which results rather than proving that one method caused them. The analysis suggested combining approaches: explaining basic ideas explicitly, using enquiry activities to consolidate them, and adapting lessons to students' needs.

Time is a trade-off worth asking about. Investigating an idea can take longer than being told it, and a lesson spent on one experiment is a lesson not spent explaining other ideas. The OECD describes supporters of teacher-directed teaching as arguing that it makes classrooms easier to manage and lets teachers cover a wider range of content. In Pakistan, examinations give that argument extra weight: the 2017 National Curriculum Framework acknowledges that students rely heavily on textbooks as the basis for appraisal and examination. A school that uses inquiry therefore has to decide how much lesson time it gives to investigation while still covering the syllabus its pupils will be examined on, and it is fair to ask how it makes that call.

Put together, the evidence points to what a good school looks like. Inquiry lessons are planned rather than improvised. The teacher chooses a question that leads somewhere, gives children enough structure to investigate it, checks and corrects misunderstandings during the lesson, and makes sure the key idea is stated clearly by the end. Explicit teaching still happens, especially when a topic is new. What you should be wary of is a classroom where children are left to find things out with little help, and the lack of teaching is presented as a philosophy. Equally, a school that never lets children ask questions, test ideas or draw conclusions is not teaching even the enquiry skills the SNC science grid sets out for the end of Grade 5.

SchoolNama's own records show how little a listing can say on this subject. We hold 6,687 campus records; 1,593 carry a curriculum tag, and three of those are tagged IB: the two TNS Beaconhouse campuses in Lahore and Beaconhouse Newlands in Islamabad. The tagging has gaps, too: a record whose name includes "IB Scheme" carries no curriculum tag at all. Apart from a Montessori tag on 197 records and a passing phrase in a handful of campus descriptions, none of our fields describes how teachers teach, and none mentions inquiry. What listings can do is settle the practical questions, such as city, area, curriculum and school type, so that SchoolNama's compare page can put two or three candidates side by side before you spend a morning in their classrooms.

The useful question on a visit is not whether a school uses inquiry but how it guides it. The evidence above favours inquiry that is planned, supported and followed by clear explanation, and gives no support to leaving children to find things out alone. A school that can show you how it does this, and how it fits that time alongside the syllabus, is giving you something concrete to judge.