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This chapter presents the narratives of four faculty who have designed Inquiry-Based Learning courses for students in the first two years of undergraduate study at Emory University, a major research institution. Oxford College of Emory offers an array of inquiry-based courses, and students choose three such courses during their two years at Oxford. While inquiry has enjoyed clear successes in the courses of every liberal arts discipline at the college, one repeated area of struggle was “assessment” in these nontraditional courses. To address this question, a small group of faculty chosen for their representation of major academic areas of natural sciences (Organic Chemistry), social sciences (Economic Anthropology), literature (Literary Criticism), and language (Intermediate Spanish) convened during the 2013–2014 academic year to discuss and develop examples of assessment techniques in the inquiry classroom. This chapter offers their experiences in development and assessment of IBL courses.

This chapter provides an introduction to how the inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach is being used by colleges and universities around the world to improve faculty and institutional development and to strengthen the interconnections between teaching, learning, and research. This chapter provides a synthesis and analysis of all the chapters in the volume, which present a range of perspectives, case studies, and empirical research on how IBL is being used across a range of courses across a range of institutions to enhance faculty and institutional development. This chapter argues that the IBL approach has great potential to enhance and transform teaching and learning. Given the growing demands placed on education to meet a diverse range of complex political, economic, and social problems and personal needs, this chapter argues that education should be a place where lifelong and lifewide learning is cultivated and where self-directed learning is nurtured. To that end, this chapter argues that IBL helps cultivate a learning environment that is more meaningful, responsive, integrated, and purposeful.