Acquisition of scientific reasoning is one of the big challenges in education. A popular educational strategy
advocated for acquiring deep knowledge is inquiry-based learning, which is driven by emerging ‘good
questions’. This study will address the question: ‘Which design features allow learners to refine questions while
preserving student ownership of the inquiry process?’ This design-based research has been conducted over
several years with advanced high-school biology classes. The results confirm the central role of question
elaboration as an interactive process that leads from vague to complex and adequate. To make this happen, the
inquiry process must extend over a long time, learners and teachers should share a knowledge improvement
goal, and text produced by students should be structured by question–answer pairs addressing a single concept
using authentic resources. Further features are discussion with peers, teacher feedback with respect to answer
elaboration and conceptual differentiation, and finally, teacher guidance that should fade out in successive
inquiry cycles to ensure student responsibility.

• Good student questions in inquiry learning

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