A politician, a social scientist, and a social worker Walk into a bar: Towards a taxonomy of social studies inquiry questions

Abstract

Inquiry-based learning has gained prominence in secondary-school humanities education in Singapore in recent years. In Social Studies (SS), the loci of inquiry learning are “Issue Investigation” as found in the 2016 Express and Normal (Academic) syllabus and “Performance Task” in the 2014/15 Normal (Technical) syllabus, respectively. Due to the relatively short time inquiry has been given explicit emphasis, to date research into this new aspect of SS education remains very limited. This paper focuses on an important yet often neglected step of the SS inquiry process—the development of inquiry questions. To explore how different ways of crafting the SS inquiry question may lead to distinct inquiry approaches and processes, a taxonomy of SS inquiry questions is proposed based on empirical observations. The taxonomy comprises three categories of questions: the “politician’s question”, the “social worker’s question”, and the “social scientist’s question”. The implications and applications of this taxonomy for SS instruction are also discussed with reference to the multifaceted aims of SS education in Singapore.