Inquiry-Based Learning across STEM Disciplines: Critical Thinking Sub-Skill Development and Cross-Subject Transfer in Upper Primary Schools of Pune

Abstract

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) positions students as active investigators whoformulate questions, collect and analyse evidence, and construct explanatory understanding — a pedagogical orientation fundamentally different from the direct instruction model that dominates much of Indian upper primary school science and mathematics teaching. When IBL is implemented across multiple STEM subjects simultaneously, it provides an integrated intellectual environment in which the same critical thinking skills — analysis, inference, evaluation, and synthesis — are practised across different disciplinary contexts, potentially accelerating their general development. This quasi-experimental study compared critical thinking sub-skill gains across four measured competencies between 124 Classes 6–7 students in STEM-integrated IBL sections and 124 matched students in conventional instruction across eight schools in Pune. IBL students showed significantly larger gains on all four critical thinking sub-skills over a 20-week implementation: analysis (+8.6 points on a 25-point scale, p < 0.001), inference (+8.4 pp, p < 0.001), evaluation (+9.0 pp, p < 0.001), and synthesis (+9.2 pp, p < 0.001). Cross-subject transfer — assessed by performance on novel problems requiring application of critical thinking skills outside the subject in which they were practised — was significantly higher in the IBL group (67.4% transfer rate versus 48.6% in the control group, p < 0.001). These findings support integrated, cross-STEM IBL as a multidisciplinary school practice that accelerates domain-general critical thinking developmen.  KEYWORDS:Inquiry-based learning, Critical thinking, STEM education, Multidisciplinary pedagogy, Knowledge transfer, Upper primary school,Pune, Cross-subject integration