Questions, Quests, and Quizzical Thinking: Scaffolding student Inquiry through the Internet

Inquiry-based instruction in social studies began as a transformative movement whose proponents included Shirley Engle, Donald Oliver, and James Shaver in the middle of the twentieth-century. Inquiry-based instruction is relevant to twenty-first century social studies and is gaining even more importance in the age of the Internet. Six specific websites are presented that can be used for student inquiry and research primarily at the middle school level. We describe ways of utilizing these sites to drive student involvement and self-assessment while also presenting criteria for selecting additional websites to use in the classroom.