By Leslie Maniotes, PhD | Co-Creator, Guided Inquiry Design®
The framework currently shaping inquiry learning in classrooms around the world traces back to a single fifth-grade unit on sinking and floating.
It was never meant to leave the science lab.
And yet here we are.
If you search “inquiry-based learning” today, you will find a tidy four-level hierarchy — Confirmation, Structured, Guided, and Open — appearing in millions of shares on social media in the form of sketchnotes, thousands of district handbooks, and encoded into the logic of AI systems like Gemini and ChatGPT. It is presented as a universal roadmap for learning. Framed as a gradual release toward student independence. A scaffold toward what some call “true inquiry.”
There is just one big problem: the lineage of this 4 Levels model reveals a category error that has been hiding in plain sight for over fifty years.
The Paper Trail
The four levels of inquiry did not begin as a theory of how humans build knowledge. They began as a tool for auditing science lab manuals.
In 1971, Marshall Herron published “The Nature of Scientific Enquiry” in School Review. Herron wasn’t studying how children think. He was evaluating lab manuals — specifically, how much procedural freedom they offered students. He created a scale (Level 0 through 3) to determine whether a lab was a “cookbook” or a genuine investigation of physical phenomena.
The context was strictly empirical science. It was about verifying physical laws. It was never designed to describe how a student builds meaning in history, literature, or any other discipline but science.
For decades, this remained a niche tool in science education.
That all changed in 2008.
The Viral Pivot
In 2008, Heather Banchi and Randy Bell published a practitioner article in Science and Children titled “The Many Levels of Inquiry.” They took Herron’s academic scale and gave it the approachable names we now recognize everywhere: Confirmation, Structured, Guided, and Open.
The article was clear. It fit in a simple chart on a page. It was immediately useful to science teachers.
And then it jumped the fence.
Because the framework was so clean and so portable, educators outside of science began adopting it wholesale — without examining what it was built to do, or whether it was built for them at all. It moved from science journals into general instructional design textbooks as a citation reference for 4 types or models of inquiry learning. It appeared in district PD materials, teacher preparation programs, and eventually on Pinterest and Instagram, shared millions of times as a swimming pool diagram where the shallow end represents teacher control and the deep end represents student freedom.
Banchi and Bell published a useful article for science teachers building student’s capacity to do scientific experimentation. What happened next was not their doing — but the consequences belong to all of us.
The Category Error
When we took a tool designed for science verification and applied it to all disciplines, we committed a category error.
Here is the distinction that matters:
In science, you are often inquiring into an established natural law — gravity, chemical bonds, buoyancy. “Confirmation Inquiry” makes sense here because there is a physical reality to confirm. The inquiry is bounded by empirical evidence and replicable results.
In history, literature, social studies, or any humanistic discipline, “Confirmation Inquiry” doesn’t exist. If students are confirming a pre-set answer, they are not doing inquiry. They are engaging in a compliance task – not inquiry. That’s especially dangerous in todays information and AI landscape.
By adopting this model as a universal standard, we accidentally told teachers that inquiry is a logistical question involving who holds the question, who controls the method, rather than recognizing it as a cognitive and human process.
We gave teachers a control dial when what they needed was a design framework.
The Collision
This is where the error becomes a larger problem.
In 2007 — one year before the Banchi and Bell article reached the mainstream — Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century was published, grounded in thirty years of longitudinal research by Dr. Carol Kuhlthau into the Information Search Process (ISP).
Our definition of “Guided Inquiry” was never a level on a science checklist. It was a comprehensive framework mapped to the affective, cognitive, and physical phases of a learner’s journey through genuine inquiry — from initial uncertainty through exploration, focus, synthesis, and meaning-making.
But because the four-level model was simpler, more portable, and arrived at precisely the moment teachers were hungry for something they could use, it claimed the name. It redefined “Guided” in any instance to mean: the teacher gives the question.
In Guided Inquiry Design®, giving the student the question is not guidance. It is an intellectual bypass.
The Cost
When we use a science lab checklist to define inquiry for all learners, we lose the most important part of learning: the human process of coming to know.
The swimming pool metaphor — where the goal is to get students swimming independently in the deep end — assumes that teacher presence equals shallowness and student independence equals depth. But real inquiry, the kind practiced by researchers, doctors, lawyers, and scholars, is never done in isolation. It is guided, collaborative, and socially embedded at every stage.
Even physics experts talk through their thinking. That is not a flaw in the process. That is the process.
Meanwhile, in classrooms shaped by the four-level model, students are handed questions they never asked and asked to investigate on behalf of someone else’s curiosity. The result is what it has always been: compliance dressed as inquiry.
The students who disengage from these activities are not lazy or procrastinating. They are responding rationally to a system that was never designed for them. This form of inquiry does not honor their questions or their active role in their learning.
Reclaiming the Definition
It is time to draw a clear line. The impulse to scaffold inquiry was exactly right. The tool they were handed was not.
The four levels of inquiry — Confirmation, Structured, Guided, Open — serve a specific and legitimate purpose: scaffolding students into the practices of scientific investigation. Within that domain, they remain useful.
The commonly used ‘four types of inquiry’ framework popularized in recent practitioner texts is adapted from Banchi & Bell (2008). While it has been made accessible for classroom use, its origins in science education are often not made explicit. But, more importantly, they were never designed to define inquiry learning for all disciplines, all learners, or all purposes. Applying them beyond science education is not scaffolding. It is mismapping.
Inquiry learning — genuine inquiry learning — is the human process of learning from curiosity. It is what happens when a learner pursues a question that belongs to them, moves through uncertainty toward understanding, and emerges with knowledge they have genuinely constructed. That process has its own structure, its own stages, and its own substantial research base.
Inquiry is an approach to learning whereby students find and use a variety of sources of information and ideas to increase their understanding of a problem, topic or issue. It requires more of them than simply answering questions and getting a right answer. It espouses investigation, exploration, search, quest, research, pursuit, and study. Inquiry does not stand alone; it engages, interests, and challenges students to connect their world to the curriculum. Although it is thought of as an individual pursuit, it is enhanced by involvement with a community of learners, each learning from the other in social interaction. (Kuhlthau, Maniotes & Caspari 2007 p.2)
That is what Guided Inquiry Design® was built to support.
The field does not need more levels of teacher control. It needs a clearer understanding of what inquiry actually is — and what learners actually need when they are in the middle of it.
Leslie Maniotes, PhD, is a third-space researcher, curriculum and literacy expert, and co-creator of Guided Inquiry Design®. She has spent thirty years working at the intersection of learning, inquiry, and information.
Learn more at guidedInquirydesign.com
