Investigative Skills: A Pathway to Life Long Learning
Investigation is a word that has quite a lot of meanings and so people have differing ideas of its exact definition. I hope to touch upon a few different ideas of investigation in order to explore many realms of possibility within the context of it.
One facet to think about is observation. It is actually the very first form of investigative skills a person will perform. As early as 18 months old, babies are able to learn and adapt to situations by purely watching what others are doing and gaining an understanding of the methods used; the skills needed to execute this and what doing these actions will achieve. This is how babies are able to learn movement, language and reading of social cues. Modelling activities may sometimes be construed as ‘doing the work for them’ but it is actually the skill of observation. By watching an activity being done, a child can think about the steps it takes to complete, how those steps come together and what the point of the activity is in the first place. This is basically a hallmark of the vast majority of activities even beyond school in some form.
Another crucial way to look at investigation skills is problem solving and logic. This is most obvious in subjects like maths, where you are given a multistep problem or open ended question and have to look at the evidence presented and find an answer. For science, you create a hypothesis, test it and see if your hypothesis is correct. If we look towards the humanities this can also look at case studies and perspectives. For example, can we trust this information as a reliable historical source? Which river defences should we employ with regard to national and local circumstances.
This type of investigation, often called ‘critical thinking’ in academic circles, has been shown in numerous psychological studies to have big impacts on academic performance and career outcomes. Also, on an anecdotal note, if I look back to my own experiences on a few occasions, my plans have been thrown completely off course and I have had to sit quietly for a few moments and work out what some reasonable alternatives are and which would be the best to adopt. That is almost automatic to me but it's easy for me to take for granted that those problem solving skills have been instilled in me for many years. If I didn’t have people in my life teaching me to think this way, maybe I would have just hid under a table or panicked.
The most interesting area of investigative skills is what I like to call intellectual curiosity. The best way to describe this, is the display of any person's innate desire to know something even if it doesn't lead to anything useful. This is just as important, although sometimes overlooked when it comes to talking about investigative skills. You may be able to see this in the everyday behaviour of any child, whether it be staring out of the window at an object especially attentively, really random questions or playing with objects that you wouldn’t associate with play. In school we cultivate this curiosity by asking open-ended questions to get students to collect ideas and realise what they understand and what gaps in knowledge they want to learn. Projects also facilitate this curiosity by giving students a responsibility for interpreting the task, coming up with their own way to meet the demands of the task, and evaluating what they did well and what needs improving.
So why teach these both at home and in school? Well if dig deeper, the underlying theme is that these all involve putting some ownership of learning onto the child. This not only helps to build a stronger desire for children to come to lessons to learn, but also crucially teaches them how to learn, which is much more useful in the long term and makes them more adaptable to a whole host of hurdles that come their way.
Mr Powell, Year 5 Teacher.
