Portland State Universitie's Definition: "Students will learn various modes of inquiry through interdisciplinary curricula—problem-posing, investigating, conceptualizing—in order to become active, self-motivated, and empowered learners."
Inquiry and Critical thinking has been an essential part of second semester in senior inquiry. Critical thinking, as I see it is being able to analyze beyond the numbers/results in our data into the reasoning behind how we got those results and even further into the data into where we see error and how the error (s) occurred. With Dr. bury she is constantly challenging us to to think and investigate further into our data for our final and for other assignments. Critical thinking, I see is essential when it comes to projects such as our final for Dr.Bury because in order for us to fully analyze our data we as students need to be able to think beyond the surface of our data and see the underlying reasons as to how we got our results, what the errors were to our data, how those erorrs occurred, and how if the test or data were to be collected again it could be done differently.
One example of Inquiry and Critical thinking, as mentioned above was the Dr. Bury Final data collection/experiment ( Graph and data, analysis ). With the experiment I was required to think critically about the underlying reasons to my data and to also think critically about how to function excel. While Excel seems like something that needs taught, with critical thinking I was actually able to discover from how to find results of one functin (for example, how to find the standard deviation), I was able to find resources and generally on my own discover how to carry out the function in excel to get the desired answer.
Another example would be the spring research paper. I wrote my spring research paper on alternative school scheduling and whether or not switching from the traditional 5 day school schedule would positively affect student performances. With my spring research paper, during the time I was researching I had to consider factors and use critical thinking to determine how factors such as child care costs and bus routing would affect students and families.