2025/05/29 by Daniel G. Krutka, Mark Hlavacik · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy #Global Education and Multiculturalism #Innovative Teaching Methodologies in Social Sciences
paper · doi:10.1080/00933104.2025.2507595
openalex publication_date 2025/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) is a lesson-planning framework designed to implement inquiry for social studies educators as conceived in the C3 Framework. For this study, we drew on scholarly literature to assess 311 IDMs published online for their functionality. Functional IDMs were (a) framed by a compelling question that avoided potentially harming students by ensuring their question is both open and ethical for classroom discussion; (b) constructed cohesively by providing students a balance of sources in response to the compelling question, aligning their internal components, and avoiding false binaries that unnecessarily limited students’ answers; and (c) included a compelling question that is both debatable and social to facilitate what we term civic inquiry. Using these criteria, we determined that slightly less than half of IDMs exhibited at least one design flaw with one-tenth IDMs being potentially harmful, one-fifth misconstructed, and almost three in ten not meeting either the debatable or social criteria for civic inquiry. While we recognize that personalized inquiries and question-based seminars can constitute quality lesson design, they do not meet these refined criteria. This theoretical clarity should support both scholars and practitioners as they determine which lessons are most appropriate for diverse educational contexts.