In education science you don’t have

In education science you don’t have just one individual – you have a class of thirty or so students and a teacher, all interacting with one another – it’s a very complex system. There have been attempts to directly compare two ways of teaching the same science subject – in an inquiry-based versus a traditional setting: the researchers didn’t find much of a difference. Yet they mostly evaluate the results in terms of how much of the subject matter was conveyed. In terms of the students’ or teachers’ motivation or enthusiasm for science, which are important in the inquiry-based approach, there might well have been a difference.