Inquiry Course Characteristics and Outcomes
All Inquiry 444 courses or Inquiry Attribute courses must contain four individually necessary and collectively sufficient features:
- Inspire curiosity. An Inquiry student will compose open-ended questions that lead to further investigation into increasingly focused problems and issues.
- Develop understanding and perspective-taking. An Inquiry student will explain a central issue or question of the course using at least two unique perspectives.
- Clarify standards of thinking. An Inquiry student will be able to identify, compare, and evaluate different interpretations (hypotheses, explanations) of a given phenomenon.
- Create effective communicators. An Inquiry student will present in clearly organized form the results of the investigation into questions or problems they have posed.
In addition:
- All designated Inquiry 444 course enrollments must be capped at 25.
- All designated Inquiry Attribute courses must be capped at no higher than 25 or 35 students in a) total course enrollment, or b) weekly discussion sessions, labs, or other interactive contexts.
- All Inquiry courses must be lower-division (i.e., 400- or 500-level) courses.
- Inquiry 444 and Inquiry Attribute courses may also count for Writing Intensive, Discovery Lab (DLAB), and disciplinary breadth requirements.
- Academic departments and their colleges may decide whether the Inquiry 444 and Inquiry Attribute courses that they offer may also count toward course credits within their majors.
The University of New Hampshire's Inquiry 444 course is at one and the same time one course and many courses. Its singularity derives from the common learning outcomes that are associated with a set of agreed-upon "characteristics" of inquiry courses at UNH. The variety stems from the many unique versions of the INQ 444 through which those characteristics are made manifest and the outcomes achieved.
We wish to acknowledge the Davis Educational Foundation for a generous grant it made in support of this work.
