Mission-focused inquiry learning (MFIL)

Pedagogical Approach Patterns

Description:
Mission-focus inquiry learning (MFIL) can be seen as one pedagogical approach aligned with a social constructionist learning theory (alternatively referred to as social constructionist pedagogical philosophy). A key feature of this pedagogical approach is the attention to designing learning tasks that provide opportunities to ensure that learners can build up their requisite knowledge and skills at the lower levels of the Bloom’s Taxonomy before applying the learnt knowledge and skills to an authentic mission. Engagement in tackling a meaningful mission in turn helps learners to gain deeper understanding of the concepts and skills targeted in the course learning outcomes.

Typically, a course adopting an MFIL approach would break down a larger mission into smaller chunks of mission components, each of which requires the application of a specific set of knowledge and skills. Thus a course adopting an MFIL approach would comprise a sequence of curriculum components, each of which would involve the adoption of a curriculum component titled as “acquisition and application of knowledge and skills to construct a solution”. Thus, each cycle of MFIL inquiry should include learning tasks going from lower to higher levels of learning outcomes based on the Bloom’s Taxonomy in the same domain/topic area.

To select an appropriate mission, the learning designer should select an authentic mission that that (1) course participants are likely to have engaged in or aspire to tackle in their disciplinary practice, and (2) Successful completion of the mission entails achieving competence in the targeted learning outcomes. The natural sequence in working through the mission provides the underpinning structure of the topic sequence at the course level.