Inquiry-Based Education: Bringing Students into the Scholarly Conversation

Keywords: Inquiry, Research, Composition

Abstract: College students often struggle to find scholarly sources, only attempting to do so when a researched assignment is imminent. However, because inquiry is the basis of scholarship, it is an integral, ongoing part of a student’s course of study. In this project, a business professor and librarian teamed up to design a semester-long, low-stakes series of weekly assignments. The inquiry-based project was scaffolded to allow students to search for and select sources on course-related topics of interest, which they were then asked to analyze and share with their classmates.