Designing inquiry questions

Create

To encourage progress, both in learning about inquiry questions and in learning about how musical influence works, aim your inquiry at the creation of two things:

• A short essay, report or presentation that summarizes what you have learned about the influences on or by your chosen composer
• A list of the questions that you asked, categorized by their usefulness in your investigation.

Report your findings

This step is important because reading a great deal about something can make you feel that you know it and yet leave you unable to recall or explain it. Taking the extra step to organize what you now understand into a coherent report, essay, presentation, or even conversation, is an important step that will help connect the facts you learned to each other and to the other things that you knew before the investigation. It may also lead you to notice gaps in your understanding and ask a few more useful questions before you wrap up your investigation.

Categorize your questions

Your investigation should bring numerous new questions to your mind. For example, if you were investigating the influence of Johann Sebastian Bach on European Classical music, some of your research might cause you to wonder:

Examples of questions inspired by an investigation

• What does "well-tempered" mean?
• Just how many of J.S. Bach's descendents were also composers?
• Does Classical music really sound so different from Baroque?
• What is counterpoint?

Typically, as you do your research, you would just follow up on these questions, to see what the answers tell you in relationship to your main question. But for this investigation you should write down each question that the investigation inspires and make notes on what you found out in answer to that question.

After you are finished with your investigation and your report/presentation, categorize your questions. You can do this either by creating a table with three columns and putting each question in the correct column, or by creating a question "tree" in which each question leads either to an answer, to other questions and searches, or to a dead end. In either case, you should end up identifying three types of questions.

A question tree

Question categories

• Questions that you answered with a few facts
• Questions that inspired further questions, deeper investigation, insights, attempts to test or practice tentative understandings (for example, while listening to or discussing music, or while playing an instrument), or attempts to organize, compare, or check the information you have gathered.
• Questions that you abandoned because understanding the answer required background knowledge that you do not have

It is important to realize that how a question is classified depends on the learner and the context.