Inquiry I
Can students Synthesize their knowledge?
My musings from March 19th, 2012
My one big question from all such activities is the synthesis. Sugar and Bonk (1998) found that students had difficulty transferring skills and synthesizing knowledge despite all the hands -on, discussions, multimodal learning. That is an issue I face repeatedly in my class after doing all these “fantastic” activities. Are student able to extract the knowledge we want them to acquire from these activities?
Reference:
Sugar, W. A., & Bonk, C.J. (1998). Student role play in the World Forum: Analyses of an Arctic adventure learning apprenticeship. In C.J. Bonk & K.S. King (Eds.), Electronic collaborators: Learner-centered technologies for literacy, apprenticeship & discourse (pp. 131-155). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers
This question bothered me for a long time. It had evolved not just from the course discussions but also from what I am seeing in the clasroom. We often organize these fantastic lessons with apps, games, simulations but in the end students are not able to identify the core idea that we had attempted to explore. I have wondered if the teaching went wrong, if the activity was too distracting, if the students weren’t mature enough for such higher level thinking, if….
In my quest – I have come to a conclusion. To embed such learnings in a sound pedagogical process – like T-GEM. Also in the end after the students modify their models there need to be a discussion or an explanation about why they changed their models. Here I am aiming at Meta-Cognition. Students needs to think about their thinking. I think the synthesis is not happening because the students do not connect the dots and so teachers need to provide for that opportunity to let students do that- through discussions- through written explanations [ on a blog].
Step 2 : Try it in the classroom
Step 3: If it doesn’t work – modify plan.
Did I just apply the GEM methodology!!!!!