Epistemic inquiry involves exploring questions such as:
How do I know this? How strong is the evidence? How valid are alternative explanations? Why do we need several perspectives? etc etc
Furtak et al. (2009) explored the huge literature dealing with inquiry based learning. The codification of styles of inquiry into procedural, social, conceptual and epistemic.
They were also able to measure the degree of teacher mediation in this model. They found that teacher led inquiry where the epistemic facet was stressed had the most positive effects on student learning.
“The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the impact of variations of inquiry-based teaching and learning on student achievement in experimental and quasi-experimental studies published in the ten years following release of the National Science Education Standards (1996). The study presented a new four-faceted model for inquiry and applied it to the sample of studies identified for inclusion in this meta-analysis. Results of the meta-analysis indicate the studies meeting the stringent inclusion criteria had a mean effect size larger than those previously reported. Furthermore, the subset of studies that emphasized epistemic facets of inquiry had higher effect sizes, and studies with a longer duration had a larger positive effect on student learning.
An example of looking for and codifying expert practice at a very micro level was explored by Furtak and Ruiz-Primo (2006).
“ Can different levels of informal assessment practices be related to levels of student learning? This study addresses these issues by exploring how 4 middle school science teachers used questions as a method of informal formative assessment, and compares those practices to measures of student learning. The approach to exploring each teacher’s questioning practices is based on viewing whole-class discussions as assessment conversations in which the teacher has the opportunity to draw out and act on students’ evolving understanding. Assessment conversations are described as consisting of four-step cycles, where the teacher elicits a question, the student responds, the teacher recognizes the student’s response, and then uses the information collected to further student learning. Our results indicate that the teachers whose enactment of informal formative assessment was more consistent with this model had students with higher performance on embedded assessments. This trend was also reflected in the posttest scores. In addition, we found that teachers focused more on epistemic, rather than conceptual, features of scientific inquiry in their discussions. The study underlines the importance of informal formative assessment during scientific inquiry discussions for teacher training and professional development as a way to increase student learning. We adopted the term assessment conversation to refer to these daily instructional dialogues that embed assessment into an activity already occurring in the classroom. In contrast to initiation–response–evaluation (IRE) sequences that involve the teacher initiating a query, the student responding, and the teacher evaluating the student’s contribution. …. assessment conversations permit teachers to gather information about the status of students’ conceptions, mental models, strategies, language use, or communication skills to guide instruction. “
References Furtak, E.M, Seidel, T, Iverson,H and Briggs, D (2009) RECENT EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF INQUIRY-BASED TEACHING: A META-ANALYSIS AND REVIEW, Paper Presented at the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, August 25-29, 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Furtak, E.M and Ruiz-Primo M.A (2006), Informal Formative Assessment and Scientific Inquiry: Exploring Teachers’ Practices and Student Learning EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT, 11 (3 & 4), 205–235