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NSTA 2005Yes,
they can! Science for at-risk learners
Ideas for Making Learners (and Teachers) Successful How Students Learn Science from the National Academy identifies 3 important principles that make learning and teaching effective:
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explores ways to facilitate and
operationalize those principles in helping learners who are at-risk of
school
failure to learn science. In particular, it will examine how readily
available
and relatively inexpensive technologies, such as digital cameras,
microphones,
camcorders, and science probeware, can make that process both easier
and more
productive.
Engaging Prior Understandings: As Donovan & Bransford (2005) note, all students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works, based on their prior experience. While this can be beneficial in linking new information to what students already know, these prior understandings can also pose problems because they may be based on a naïve understanding. As they note, if instruction doesn’t challenge the adequacy of those understandings, students “may fail to grasp new concepts and information, or may learn them for the test, and then revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.” As a result, even physics majors can make the same mistakes as novices when they have to put their understandings of topics like force and motion into action. If this is true for students in general, it may be particularly true of students who are at-risk of school failure, for a number of reasons: (1) As many of these students are poor, they often have limited opportunities for the kinds of experiences that would help them to develop their understandings; (2) Having experienced little academic success, many of these students are “passive” learners who regard knowledge as a game of having the “right answers,” one which they rarely win. Challenging assumptions involves taking risks, and they frequently try to minimize risks, as their experience suggests that risk-taking has few rewards. (3) Many students have persistent problems with focusing and sustaining their attention, and may by looking at the wrong thing, making it more difficult to make the necessary connections. This is particularly true if there are significant time gaps between experiences and their efforts to interpret and make sense of those experiences. (4) The process of making connections that lead to understanding requires students to have language skills that many find problematic. Their vocabulary is often limited and imprecise (e.g., they make frequent use of generic terms, such as “stuff,” and use weak descriptions, such as “a glass thing). Consequently, it is difficult for them to make useful connections between such “hazy” ideas. In particular, they have difficulties distinguishing concepts that are similar. They also have problems in making effective categorizations, as they tend not to take note of critical attributes for making those decisions. <><>
So, with
all of these challenges, is learning science beyond the grasp of these
students? Experience says definitely not. These students can learn;
they just
learn differently. Instruction needs to build on areas of potential
strength,
and in particular, the tendency of many of these students to rely on
“episodic
memory.” Ordinarily, this reliance is a problem, because abstract
memory is
generally much more efficient for recalling factual information. Good
students
make good use of abstract memory to extract information from textbooks
and
organize it. Episodic memory looks at recalling events, and these
students are
often the ones who can tell you about even the most irrelevant details
from a
field trip, but be unable to access the information the teacher expects
of
them.
<><>Tools
for building on experience – digital cameras,
camcorders, and microphones.
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How can
teachers use these students’ reliance on episodic memory to advantage?
One
problem with experiences is that they are temporary, and are soon
replaced by
new ones, before they can be processed. One potential answer: the
digital
camera (or in the case of actions and processes, the digital
camcorder). When
students have to capture images, they have to focus, quite literally,
on what
is important. Digital images have the advantage of being immediately
available
– no waiting for film to develop. In addition, once students learn how
to make
use of simple editing tools, such as the “crop” and “rotate” tools in
virtually
every photo editing program, they can also both correct mistakes and
select the
components from a photo that need to be emphasized, while eliminating
some of
the extraneous elements.
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A second
problem with experiences is that many at-risk students don’t use
language to
process them, so that they are much more difficult to access and use
later on.
For this, the sound recording capability available on every computer
can be a
very powerful tool. Students can then “narrate” their photos, using
their own
words (not the textbook’s) to focus attention on the important elements
in
their images. These verbal reports also have another advantage. These
are often
students whose written language skills are weak, and whose science
reports are
often skimpy, lacking detail, and filled with spelling and grammatical
errors.
Their recorded summaries build on what is likely to be stronger, their
spoken
language skills. At the same time, they are part of the audience in a
way that
they aren’t as far as their written reports are concerned.
Consequently,
listening to their summaries and descriptions, many of these students
find
themselves wanting to edit and revise because “it doesn’t sound right”
–
something that teachers have been trying to get them to do.
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Would
editing photos and sound clips be too complicated for students with
academic
problems? What about combining photos and narration? Previously,
perhaps, but
not any more. Here are some powerful programs that are still easy to
use for
both students and teachers. They’re also well suited to real school
budgets,
and some of them are even free.
Editing photos: Recording and editing sound files: Check out Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). It is a sound editor available for a variety of platforms that is free and easy to use. Students can click, hold and drag to eliminate mistakes and long pauses, while seeing the “voice print” of their own recording. More adventurous users can also apply various effects to alter the rate, pitch and tone of segments. (This also a way to “sneak in science,” even in activities that are not specifically focused on understanding the nature of sound.) Combining photos and sound files: For users of Windows, DubIt (http://www.techsmith.com/products/dubit/default.asp) offers a solution that even young children can use. Students import photos into the program and can sequence them by dragging and dropping. They then link a voice file that narrates each image, and the image stays on the screen for the duration of the sound clip, and together, the images and narrations combine make a movie. Students can avoid fancy settings, so as to focus their attention on the content. The cost: free. For Mac users, iMovie has similar functionality and it also can be downloaded for free. Learning With Understanding: The second of the three learning principles is the emphasis on learning with understanding, where the goal is developing competent learners. Donovan & Bransford (2005) maintain that to be competent, “students must: have (a) a deep foundation of factual knowledge; (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework; and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.” Ready access to a list of important facts about a topic doesn’t constitute a “deep foundation,” as facts need to have a conceptual framework that provides a context and indicates what and why particular facts are important for understanding a topic area. Similarly, to be useful, concepts take on meaning when they are represented from multiple perspectives that are rich with factual details. Thus, in the perennial arguments over whether teachers should focus on factual information or the “big ideas” that are at the heart of a topic or discipline, they would respond with “both.” If learning for understanding poses challenges for average and above average students, it certainly does for those who struggle academically. Students with learning difficulties pose a number of challenges, both for themselves and for their teachers. In addition to being “passive” learners who may be difficult to motivate, teachers often focus on their readily apparent deficient reading skills, as they frequently have problems with reading conventional textbooks. These materials may pose difficulties because of
Can learners who cannot make effective use of textbooks as sources of information hope to master complex information-intensive domains like science? While many of these students find reading problematic, they nevertheless can think, pose questions, and find ways to use data to answer them. That is, there is a distinction between “reading science” and “doing science” may be an important one to keep in mind. Tools for building concepts: Probeware and concept mapping software <>
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A second
advantage of many types of probes, such as
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Probeware
is one way of providing students with fact-rich experiences and then
giving
them a way to represent what
Metacognitive approach: A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students to learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them. Metacognition - - Reciprocal Teaching - Self-explanation of problem-solving - Self-assessment - testing hypotheses, experiments - Assessment - the purpose of assessment should be to make students' thinking and learning "visible" to both the student and the teacher. Learner-centered instructional environments: - Present students with "just manageable difficulties." - Teachers
need to find strengths that will help students
connect with the information being taught. Connections must be made
explicitly,
or they may remain "inert" and not support subsequent learning. Our chart showing one way to link science with making assumptions explicit Additional references . . . . |