‘COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN?’ ELEMENTARY INQUIRY AROUND INFORMATIONAL AND NARRATIVE TEXTS Mark Enfield School of Education University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Paper presented at: The Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research on Science Teaching New Orleans, LA April 15-18, 2007 Abstract Attention to literacy has raised attention to the use of texts in science learning. Elementary teachers are encouraged to use informational texts in their science teaching. Students need to learn to read and make sense of information from these texts. Concurrently science educators focus on helping improve the inquiry skills and practices taught in schools. An assumption is that children can learn about inquiry by using informational texts to find answers to questions. This research describes findings from a longitudinal case study of one classroom. The findings suggest that students tend to raise questions and engage in inquiry oriented activity when responding phenomena represented in narrative texts. Students’ utterances raise questions or attempt to explain phenomena occurring in narratives. In comparison, students’ responses to informational text tend to be conceptual. Students’ utterances made limited connections to phenomena and did not offer explanations or inquiries about phenomena. The findings reported here suggest a role for carefully selected narrative texts as contexts to engage students in meaningful inquiry about phenomena. This does not reject informational texts as valuable, but restructures notions about how different text genres are meaningful and useful in science learning.