Appendix B : Social Studies Inquiry: Designing Questions and Investigations

At the heart of the Standards for Social Studies Practice is the idea that knowledge and understanding arise from inquiry: asking questions, conducting research to find answers, analyzing ideas in discussions, and presenting conclusions. Inquiry serves to deepen conceptual understanding of content, going beyond a listing of names, dates, and facts. The stages of inquiry in the Standards for Practice are intended as a guide, rather than as a rigid linear process.

Developing inquiry-driven curriculum and lessons entails providing opportunities for students to answer both questions developed by the teacher and those developed by students. In the course of any given grade or unit, students should have opportunities to answer both their teacher’s and their own questions about ideas and texts connected to the social studies standards. The questions included at each grade level in the framework are merely samples to suggest the kinds of questions teachers and students might arrive at on their own.

Designing Teacher-Developed Questions to Promote Inquiry

Effective teacher-developed questions for fostering inquiry are often two-fold, as they start out broad and then hone in on specifics. This questioning process has been described as a nested set of questions that distinguishes between guiding questions, which initiate an inquiry, and supporting questions, which assist students in addressing the open-ended guiding questions. 

For instance, if an eighth grade teacher, working with the standards connected to civics, initially asked a guiding question about how power can be balanced in government, he or she could follow it up with a supporting question about how the framers of the Constitution attempted to address issues of power and freedom in the design of their new political system. Further examples of the sort of guiding questions that can initiate inquiry are placed in the introduction to each grade or course, with sample supporting questions under each of the main topics of the Content Standards. These two types of questions are included not as prescriptive guidelines but as generative examples to help teachers develop their own questions, suited to the grade-level appropriate texts their students use for reference.

Guiding questions frame inquiry for the course or grade. It is good practice to have students revisit the guiding questions as they learn, and to hold discussions at the close of the year in which they make an argument for a particular answer to a question and support their answer with examples and evidence from the texts and other materials they have studied. 

Designing Student-Developed Questions to Promote Inquiry

Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, who study questioning techniques in education and other fields, recommend that teachers and students follow a simple protocol, which they call “the Question Formulation Technique,” to help students formulate rich conceptual questions in any subject area. This technique is designed to develop a classroom environment in which the students’ role is to take initiative for their own investigations, while the teacher’s role is to provide facilitation, guidance and resources. The protocol includes the following steps:

Develop a Question Focus

A focus is a stimulus of some sort. A question focus for social studies would be a text, photograph, painting, map, graph, or other artifact related to the Content Standards. For example, sixth graders about to study ancient Mesopotamia, might be given, with little introductory background information, an excerpt from the almost 4,000 year-old Code of Hammurabi, the subject of sixth grade Content Standard 30 (“If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out…if a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out...”). 

Produce Questions, and then Improve Them

Students first work in groups to generate as many questions as they can and record them verbatim. At this stage, they should simply get on paper whatever they wonder or would like to know about the text, without judgment or discussion. Then they start to classify their questions, sorting the closed questions (those which can be answered with a “yes,” “no,” or one-word answer, such as “When was this written? Who wrote it?”) from the open-ended ones (those that cannot be answered with a “yes,” “no,” or one-word answer, and which are likely to require more research, synthesis, reasoning, and argumentation, such as “What is the purpose of laws?” “How do today’s laws compare in fairness to those long ago?”). At this stage, students are likely to find that they can improve their questions by rephrasing or combining them.

Prioritize the questions 

Students rank the suitability of the questions according to the teacher’s specific criteria (for example, “choose 3 questions you’d be most interested in researching”) and explain how their choices fit the criteria.

Plan the next steps and reflect

Students and the teacher together plan how they will use the questions – as the basis for a short or extended student research project, a Socratic seminar, or other project. Finally, students reflect on what they’ve learned and how they learned it.

Some Sources of Answers to Social Studies Questions

To answer the questions they have formulated, students use reference and trade books, textbooks, and information available on the Internet such as:

Using Questions in Close and Critical Reading

Formulating questions teaches students to assume a critical stance toward whatever they read and view, rather than taking any content – verbal or visual – at face value. Asking students to record questions encourages them to interact with a text, instead of reading or viewing it passively. Numerous studies of improving students’ reading comprehension focus on the importance of students asking themselves questions related to texts as they read them.

Evaluating Sources of Information

Since social studies involves the study of current events (and since students are more likely to gain their information online than from print sources), students increasingly have to apply media and news literacy skills and be aware that many websites contain written text, images, and data that have been manipulated to advance particular interests. Asking questions such as “What is the source of the information?” “Can it be verified?” helps students become more sophisticated consumers of news and opinion.  

Putting News and Media Literacy to Use in Social Studies

The framework presents grade 8 and high school standards for news and media literacy, including: 

• Exploring what it means to be a good digital citizen

• Observing and describing how technology can influence people.

• Evaluating digital media bias and media messaging 

• Developing research skills to create artifacts and attribute credit, including using advanced research searches, digital source evaluation, and synthesis of information.

• Understanding databases and organizing and transforming data. 

Using Evidence and Reasoning to Answer Questions

As outlined in the Standards for Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening in Social Studies, included in this Framework and derived from the standards of the Common Core Framework (2010), effective use of information to make and support claims is fundamental to constructing explanations and making arguments. Students may produce formal or informal reports or demonstrate their understanding through a variety of means, such as engaging in discussions, debates, simulations, or multimedia presentations. Answering their own questions in a thorough way brings the process of inquiry full circle, deepens understanding of history, geography, economics and government, and provides practical experience in applying questioning and researching to participation in civic life.