Abstract:

“Inquiry Practice” is a core competency targeted in China’s primary and secondary science curricula and has been a key educational concept and instructional approach in science education globally over the past three decades. While there is a strong advocacy for integrating authentic inquiry that mirrors scientific practice into the classroom, empirical analyses on the alignment between classroom inquiry and real scientific inquiry remain scarce, and no consensus has been reached on what constitutes “authentic classroom inquiry.” This study analyzes 34 award-winning elementary science class videos and lesson plans from a city in eastern China to examine how inquiry tasks are implemented in the classroom, assess their authenticity, and discuss what forms of authentic inquiry are needed in elementary science education. Findings reveal that over 90% of the classes included at least one inquiry task, with half to two-thirds of class time on average devoted to inquiry activities. However, most tasks involved simple experiments or observations, differing significantly from authentic scientific inquiry in both cognitive and epistemological dimensions. Classroom inquiry exhibited low openness, with teachers dominating the introduction and conclusion phases, while students rarely engaged in autonomous exploration, negotiation, or argumentation. Although fully replicating scientific inquiry in school settings may not be feasible, teachers should strive to balance structure and openness in inquiry tasks, guiding students to simulate authentic scientific practices through cognitive, epistemological, and social dimensions.

Key words: science inquiry, inquiry practice, science classroom, epistemology, discourse analysis, classroom argumentation