Learning With Technology: A Constructivist Perspective
Chapter 7
Learning By Doing: Immersion in Constructivist Learning Environments
This chapter’s key insights are focused generally in the curriculum of science. The authors would like the teachers to have their learners work together in the pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities. Learning environments need to be presented with complex and relevant problem, project, or experience that the student can accept or reject as a challenge.
Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement
Chapter 10
Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
This chapter content is aimed at assisting students to retrieve information that they already know about a topic.
The activation of prior knowledge can be reached through the use of cues and questions presented by a classroom teacher. Cues involve hints of what students will experience. Questions perform about the same function when they illicit the topic the students already know. Cueing and questioning are at the heart of classroom practice is the key the authors which to relate. The following four generalizations can guide teachers in using cues and questions:
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Through the use of technology-supported learning environments several components such as information banks, symbol pads, construction kits, and task managers can be utilized for student learning and support for problem solving or a project to complete.
The problem context is important when establishing a problem.
The problem or project the teacher plans to present should be interesting, appealing, and engaging. Students must be engrossed with the questions at hand to be productive activists in the constructionist learning environment.
When a teacher is setting objectives for a lesson one must consider the social/contextual support at hand, learning process, student roles, teacher roles, and assessment of learning. The following essential questions need to be presented to check student conjectures, plans and argument:
* Do data that student provide support their explanations?
* Were the data challenged?
* Were student questions based on accepted laws and principles?
* Were student conjectures testable?
Science teachers in their expertise can develop other criteria, depending on what problems student are investigating.
(1) Cues and questions should focus on what is important as opposed to what is unusual.
(2) Higher level questions produce deeper learning than lower level questions.
(3) Waiting briefly before accepting responses from students has the effect of increasing the depth of students’ answers.
(4) Questions are effective learning tools even when asked before a learning experience.
The text offers some types of questions for use in the classroom. Each of these types promotes a different response of the student. Questions that elicit inferences have students think of things, people, actions, events, and states of being they might be studying. Analytic questions require students to analyze and even critique the information presented by looking for errors, arguments or assumptions, and identifying and articulating personal perspectives about issues.
Students presented with advance organizers were also assisted in learning new information. The researcher David Ausubel (1968) defined advance organizers in the following way:
[…]The organizer serves to provide ideational scaffolding for the stable incorporation and retention of the more detailed and differentiated materials that follow.[…].
Classroom practice in advanced organizers come in a differentiated uses. The list for perusal is Expository Advance Organizers, Narrative Advance Organizers, Skimming as a Form of Advance Organizer, and Graphic Advance Organizers.