Using Visual Discrepant Inquiry to Spark Student Investigation

By Glenn Wiebe

The Visual Discrepant Inquiry strategy is a perfect activity for introducing foundational knowledge at the beginning of a history lesson or unit. The added bonus is that it also encourages high-level inquiry and claim-making using evidence, supports close reading of sources, and is an excellent way to engage students in your content.

The basic idea of a Visual Discrepant Inquiry is to present your kids with a puzzling, paradoxical, or inconsistent problem that they attempt to solve using prior knowledge and contextual clues. This visual version is based on a verbal/text-based strategy developed by former NCSS president and middle school teacher Michael Yell using resources and materials from Jean and William Bruce. 

What it can look like

The process of rolling out the Visual version of a Discrepant Inquiry with students is fairly simple.

Find an image, graphic, map, or political cartoon that is potentially confusing, distracting, or misleading if certain parts of it are hidden. You want your kids to experience some cognitive dissonance as they view the image. Don’t worry, that’s a good thing. (Mintz, 2022)

Use a tool such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides to paste your image over a series of four or five slides. Using the software’s Insert Shape feature, cover portions of the images so that you’re able to reveal more and more of the image on progressive slides. The idea is to build the mystery among your students by revealing just enough information to encourage conversation.

The slide progression could look something like this:

Divide your kids into groups of two or three and tell them that they need to solve a problem: “I am going to show you a photograph and your job is to figure out where and when the photo was taken and decide what is happening within the photograph. You can use clues you see in the image and whatever background knowledge you might have. You are not allowed to Google the image or use your devices to help solve these three questions.”

Reveal the first piece of the photo jigsaw and provide time for kids to discuss possible solutions to the problem. Lead a conversation that allows groups to share ideas and their evidence. We always ask our students to use this sentence structure when making a claim that addresses the guiding question: “We believe that the answer is __________ because of ____________.” An example might be: “We believe that it’s the 1930s because the photo is in black and white, plus the clothing looks old.” This helps encourage critical thinking and the use of evidence.


Provide a hard copy or digital graphic organizer to help students keep track of their thinking over time. This is one we use:


A powerful part of the graphic organizer is the ability of the students to visualize their thinking over time, in particular, the changes in their thinking as new information and evidence are revealed.

Repeat the process until only the last piece of the puzzle remains. (Our suggestion is that you do not reveal the final piece until the next class period. This not only generates a lot of buzz outside of your class but also prevents the students from 1st hour passing on the “answer” to your remaining periods. It also provides time for student brains to simmer around possible answers.)

A great way to support student-to-student conversations during this part of the activity is to introduce a strategy titled “Stay and Stray.” Each group selects someone who will “stray” from their group, rotating through each of the other groups, sharing their respective group’s ideas for answering the prompt. This is a great way to quickly share a wide range of student thinking, as each group has the chance to hear possible claims from every group.

Ask students to create a paragraph on their graphic organizer summarizing their final guesses, using evidence to support their claims.

Start the next class period by asking students to review their graphic organizers. Do they want to change any of their final answers?

Reveal the final piece and have kids compare the actual answer to their first few guesses. Use this conversation to lead into your instructional unit or other summarizing, analyzing, and Claim/Evidence/Reasoning activities.

This strategy also works really well with other media types such as maps, political cartoons, charts, and even text.

Where can you find images?

Start with your own physical, digital, and mental collection of images and view them through a Discrepant Inquiry lens. Are there images with interesting bits or important parts that, if hidden, would generate student curiosity? Searching online using keywords such as “interesting, odd, weird, historic” with references to your specific topic or time period will often provide possible images to use. Asking an AI chatbot such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT for ten images (on your topic) to use with a Discrepant Event Inquiry activity will also provide some possible ideas.

Differentiation for Primary and Intermediate Grades

The Visual Discrepant Inquiry can be adapted for all grade levels and social studies disciplines. There are a few things that a teacher can do to modify the strategy:

Teachers can guide the activity as a whole group conversation. This allows a teacher to make suggestions, point out specific details, and corral off-task thinking. 

Use what one elementary teacher called a “Magic Wand” to highlight details. The magic wand is simply a piece of 8.5 x 11 white cardstock taped to a yardstick. Holding the extended card stock a few feet in front of the large screen isolates specific parts of the projected image, creating a mini-screen that spotlights a very small portion of the larger image. This provides a great way for students to see exactly which part of the image a teacher or student might be talking about.

Using fewer image reveals can help younger students stay focused.

Conclusion

Making claims using evidence is foundational to the art of inquiry. Whenever we can grab student interest in content while at the same time encouraging historical thinking, we take the win. A Visual Discrepant Inquiry is a powerful activity that is collaborative, engaging, and aligned to process skill standards that should be in every social studies teacher’s toolkit.