Benefit of Clickers in Class?

Stephanie Chasteen wrote a blog post over at “The Active Class” that fits will with the theme of this blog.  So I wanted to share it here.  You (if any of you are still out there) will have noticed the lack of activity lately.  Yet, this is a long-term project, it’s about quality not quantity .

In her post, Stephanie outlines some research on using clickers in a classroom. Her post provides several links to additional research.  I found this research interesting as it demonstrated that clickers did not cause an improvement in student achievement.  Go read her post and the researchers’ attempts to explain this finding.

Technology – Roadblock to reform?

I know the title of this post will ruffle some feathers, but the research here reviewed raises some important issues based on observation of a tech-enthusiast teacher.  While the study classifies as a case-study so is not widely generalizable, the findings that technology hindered student-student discourse and caused more focus on completion of tasks rather than deep processing draw out important implications for how we use technology in our classes.  Those of us who enjoy technology must use caution so that our desire to integrate technology does not hinder our other goals for students.

The Importance of Generalizations in Social Studies

Shiveley & Misco (2009) suggest that generalizations are a logical step in teaching kids to think critically about what they know and transferring that knowledge to a variety of topics within the social studies. After understanding the relationship between “fact” and “concept” students will be capable of producing high-quality generalizations that eliminate isolation of ideas and stimulate crossover and relevance to the social studies curriculum.

Reform by Reframing

The human mind struggles to reframe existing systems. Breaking away from what has been to redesign something potentially better requires courage, vision, and initiative. This may be one of several obstacles to educational reform, but one school in Israel accepted the challenge with remarkable results.

The Failures of Elementary Social Studies

Since the inception of NCLB and standardized testing in math and language arts, teachers of all disciplines (specifically the creative arts) have been voicing distaste in how their subject is being treated as a distant thought. In this article, Dr. Paula A. Mathis (U. of Hawaii) and Dr. Nichelle C. Boyd (U. of Mississippi) discuss the effect that this is having on pre-service teachers in grades K-6 with the emphasis placed on answering the following:

Mind Games & Teacher Beliefs

Teacher Beliefs

A teacher’s beliefs about the nature of knowledge, her subject area, herself as a learner, and about how kids learn are among the many types of beliefs teachers possess about their vocation. Researchers have repeatedly found strong relationships between teachers’ educational beliefs and their actions including planning, instructional decisions, and classroom practices (see Pajares, 1992).

Research Summary

In her in-depth case study on the influence of a teacher’s stance of wonder, curiosity, and exploration on student engagement and learning, MacKenzie (2001) collaborated with a seventh-grade science teacher in a suburban middle school. The researcher spent many hours as a participant-observer in Ms. Moran’s classroom taking field notes, recording audio and video, examining Ms. Moran’s teaching materials, and conducting interviews. The data collected over the research period was analyzed by the researcher in collaboration with Ms. Moran.

Sequencing Middle Grades Social Studies

The Social Sciences encompass a number of different fields that must be woven together to provide the learner with an accurate understanding of the discipline. Teachers must be well versed in geography, history, culture, economics, and politics and government and sequence the knowledge appropriately so that the course does not haphazardly jump from topic to topic in an arbitrary manner while losing the learner in the process.

Guidry and Carson (2010) have identified the difficulty that many teachers have in sequencing their course appropriately which forces the instructor to rely on the textbook as a sole means of instruction rather than a tool to facilitate learning.

Knowing what your supposed to know: Problems with self-assessment

(Hear author read this post)

Most teachers want their students to become autonomous learners.  Part of this autonomy is an ability to self-assess, or to know when you have learned something & when you need more time/help.  Assessment requires comparison between a current state and a desired state of understanding.  However, in order to self-assess, students must be able to identify their own current state as well as their desired state.  This is difficult thinking.  This research notes that students must have some understanding of a domain in order to be able to tackle the self-assessment challenge.  That is, you must know something in order to know how much you know.  Or, if you know nothing, you tend to overstate what you know.

Mapping the Gap with Concept Maps

The use of concept mapping, also referred to as cognitive mapping, spans across many disciplines and settings including educational research, clinical psychology, classroom teaching, and field research.  Concept maps are reported to

• Deepen the creator’s knowledge of the domain,
• Represent the creator’s domain-specific knowledge at the moment of the maps creation,
• Provide robust data (i.e. statistically significant) as a research method when pre-post measures are collected and compared,
• Be most valid and reliable when the creator has received training on how to create a concept map (seeing examples of maps is most helpful),  and
• Provide map creators greater agility in exhibiting their understanding of the concept and its relationships with other nodes of information.

Learning beliefs & Text understanding

Many students believe learning equals memorization.  This belief is not surprising given the manner in which many teachers teach.  While students need to have some things memorized, few teachers would say memorization is their learning goal for students.  Yet, because students become so entrenched in their belief that memorization equals learning, promotion of deep processing by teachers is resisted.  Student beliefs about learning affect student effort, but does it affect their actual understanding? The research in this review investigates how student learning beliefs relate to students’ ability to process text they read.