Interpreting Guided STEM Inquiry: Preservice Chemistry Teachers’ Reflections on Autonomy, Challenge, and Instructional Support

Designing guided inquiry requires more than reducing teacher direction: open-ended science tasks must preserve learner decision making while providing sufficient support for disciplinary reasoning. Adopting an interpretivist perspective, this qualitative case study examined how preservice secondary chemistry teachers interpreted a guided STEM inquiry challenge after experiencing it as learners. In small groups, participants designed and tested a low-cost device to rapidly cool a drink by integrating thermochemistry, heat transfer, quantitative reasoning, and engineering design. The analytic corpus comprised 20 reflective portfolio entries focused on the activity from a 2023–2024 chemistry education course. Reflexive thematic analysis identified three themes. Participants valued task openness because it supported reasoning, design, and ownership, but described challenge as productive only while conceptual and mathematical pathways remained accessible. They perceived autonomy as sustained through task constraints, optional hints, peer expertise, and strategically timed teacher guidance. Finally, experiencing inquiry as learners prompted reflection on prior knowledge, timing, support, and feasibility for future secondary classrooms. Rather than demonstrating learning gains, the study identifies instructional conditions participants perceived as consequential and conceptualizes guided inquiry as a redistribution of when, how, and how visibly teaching occurs.