Inquiry-based learning is an instructional approach that provides students with authentic problems, and the materials necessary for drawing their own conclusions. According to educational research, inquiry-based learning is one of the most promising approaches to teaching history, as it contributes to an understanding of the content, as well as the ability to reason with historical information. Unfortunately, history lessons are often characterized by teacher
storytelling, rather than student inquiry. The central question of this research proposal is therefore how history teachers can be stimulated to organize inquiry-based learning in class. To this end, a new theoretical framework is introduced, which considers teacher beliefs, or ideas and values, as
well as motivation, or the actual intention to do something. Through a study of personal beliefs and motivation of a large number of teachers, the first aim of this research is to explain why some history teachers use inquiry-based learning, whereas others do not. The second aim is to develop a training program that offers extended support for using inquiry-based learning in practice, and examine how this support influences teacher beliefs and motivation, in addition to their organization of inquiries in practice. The third aim involves a follow-up study on teachers who have participated in such a training program, to see how its effects on beliefs and motivation hold
up a substantial amount of time after the program’s end.