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Prior research has shown the effectiveness of inquiry education in increasing content knowledge and motivation. Improving learners’ epistemologies is an additional component that should be examined when considering inquiry effectiveness. The basis for students’ participation in inquiry-based science education (IBSE) is to emulate the scientific process in classroom learning – and, by extension, to alter their scientific epistemologies. In this chapter, we discuss the challenges associated with the construction and assessment of IBSE. First, despite it being a common underlying theoretical framework of inquiry units, assessments of learning outcomes rarely reflect a consideration of students’ changing epistemologies. Second, we examine whether inquiry practices in the classroom are constructed to alter students’ epistemologies. We integrate preliminary research findings from a week-long, researcher-taught ecology inquiry unit with urban adolescents, reporting on posttest assessments of students’ thoughts on sources of knowledge, their ecology content knowledge, and their understanding of the nature of science. While we expected this unit to foster learner epistemology, our results did not confirm our expectations. In fact, students who participated in the inquiry unit were outperformed by a comparison group matched on age and ethnicity in several unexpected areas relevant to learner epistemology. This chapter explores explanations of unexpected findings and recommendations for the future assessment and practice of inquiry couched in challenges associated with current challenges to instructing and assessing learner epistemology.

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.