WEEK 1

INQUIRY VS. RESEARCH: A REVIEW

Nature of Inquiry and Research
One goal of education is knowledge acquisition. However, education is not just stocking your
brain with knowledge; it also encourages you to use acquired knowledge for a deeper
understanding of the world-an understanding that inspires you to create, construct, or produce
things for the betterment of your life and the rest of the world.

INQUIRY, a term that is synonymous with the word "investigation" is the answer to this
question. When you inquire or investigate, you tend to ask questions to probe or examine
something.
You do this kind of examination through your HOTS or HIGHER-ORDER THINKING STRATEGIES
of Inferential, analytical, critical, creative, and appreciative thinking to discover more
understandable or meaningful things beyond such object of your inquiry. Thinking in this
manner makes you ask OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS to elicit views, opinions, and beliefs of
others in relation to your research (Small et al., 2012).

CHARACTERISTICS OF RESEARCH
Research is a scientific, experimental, or INDUCTIVE MANNER OF THINKING. Starting from
particular to more complex ideas, you execute varied thinking acts that range from lower-
order to higher-order thinking strategies reflected by these research activities:
Identifying the topic or problem,
Dathering data,
Making theories,
Formulating hypotheses,
Analyzing data, and Drawing conclusions.
Cognitively driven terms like empirical, logical, cyclical, analytical, critical, methodical, and
replicable are the right descriptive words to characterize research.