Impact of Structural Inquiry-Based Learning Approach on Future Teacher Performance

The study examines the impact of structural inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach on future teacher performance - their test achievements and perceived mental effort invested in completing tests. The study included 38 students at the Faculty of Education in Belgrade who were trained how to create instruments for assessing physical quantities, such as thermometer and barometer, while attending the course Geographical concepts through experiments. Focusing on interdisciplinarity, the course tasks encouraged participants to think about new problem situations and detect causal relations among physical phenomena. The results show that the IBL approach has led to higher achievement and lower values of perceived mental effort. The decrease in mental effort points to the possibility of handling larger amounts of information in working memory and processing them in long-term memory. Due to complex relationship between the variables, the model of neural networks has shown that mental effort and the cognitive complexity of the item significantly affect on the participants' achievement. The results are useful to in-service teachers as they point to the effectiveness and the guidelines for the implementation of the IBL approach.