Inquiry as a Compass: Revising a Social Studies Education Program Around Questions, Tasks, and Sources

In response to national and state trends promoting inquiry-based social studies over the last decade, social studies teacher educators at the University of Kentucky revamped their pre-service program to create alignment around the key inquiry concepts of questions, tasks, and sources. Part of the program revision involved the creation of a new observation instrument to assess students during their field experiences. Drawing from four years of data from the instrument, the authors discuss what the observational data reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of their students’ inquiry practices as well as what the data suggests about program coherence between university coursework and field experiences.