Is Inquiry-Based Science Teaching Worth the Effort?

Not applicable — conceptual analysis, no new data

Not applicable; the target is the international science-education literature on inquiry-based teaching.

Conceptual/critical article in Science & Education, not an empirical study. Its purpose, in the author's words, is "to serve as a bridge between people holding different views and to identify key disagreements that have been sustaining the tension" over inquiry-based science teaching. We obtained only the abstract and the ERIC record, NOT the full argument, so this file records what the abstract supports and nothing more; the specific critiques Zhang makes of particular meta-analyses (Furtak, Minner, Schroeder) could not be verified. The same author later published a direct methodological objection to the guidance framing used in the PISA re-analysis literature — "Confusions on 'Guidance' in Inquiry-Based Science Teaching: a Response to Aditomo and Klieme (2020)", Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 10.1007/s42330-020-00116-4 — which is the concrete form of the objection and is the piece to chase next.

Zhang's claim is that the inquiry-versus-explicit dispute in science education is not an empirical stalemate that more studies will resolve, but a set of definitional disagreements that have gone unreconciled for over half a century and have recently hardened into open camps. The archive-relevant implication, and the reason this file exists, is that a pooled effect size for "inquiry" is close to meaningless when the disputants do not agree on what the treatment is: the same label covers open discovery, teacher-guided investigation, argumentation, hands-on practical work and project-based units. This is a warning about construct validity, not evidence about effectiveness, and it carries no effect estimate of its own. Read it alongside Aditomo and Klieme 2020, which demonstrates the same point empirically by showing that splitting the PISA inquiry construct into guided and independent forms flips the sign of the association.

Not applicable — no empirical estimate.

Not applicable. The empirical counterpart to this argument is Aditomo and Klieme 2020 (sign flip when the construct is split) and Minner 2010 (no association between pooled "inquiry saturation" and conceptual learning, but an association with two specific components).