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.

Research Summary:

This study problematized the effect of technology integration on the enactment of inquiry in a science classroom.  Inquiry-based science instruction has been promoted in some form for over a century, but still teachers struggle to implement inquiry-based teaching.  The teacher studied was identified because of their reputation as both an inquiry-based instructor and a technology enthusiast.  Data collection methods included non-participant observation, videotaping, semi-structured interviews and critical incident interviews.  Data was analyzed by developing descriptive codes of participant views of inquiry and technology, profiles of how inquiry was enacted and how technology was used, and comparison between inquiry divorced from computer technology and inquiry using computer technology.

When technology was used during inquiry activities, the students were more concerned with sharing responsibilities than learning new things.  The computer work became a collection of individually sequenced tasks rather than a collaborative effort.  ”Actually, using technology often meant less student discourse” (p. 172).  ”There was substantially more talk among group members when technology was not present (49 vs. 28% of the time)” (p. 174).  While this teacher clearly sought to engage students in inquiry learning and worked to have students socially constructing their learning, the classroom turned to more individualized work representing traditional school when computers were introduced.

Classroom Implications:

While there are many great uses to technology in education, we must realize that technology use does not equate to better teaching or better learning.  In this case, the teacher seems to become more traditional when using technology.  While, many things might explain this (teacher beliefs, tech savvy, etc), the implications cannot be ignored or swept under the rug as many edutechnocrats would have us do.  We must wake up and critically examine the way technology is being forced into classrooms.  If introduction of technology takes us steps backward, I would prefer a low tech school.

That said, a more reasoned approach would be to maintain pressure on our thinking about the fundamentals of education.  Rather than adopt technology for technology sake, we must critically examine our decisions to use technology.  Oftentimes our own blinders of “interest in technology” and “21st century” rhetoric keep hidden the way in which technology use might actually hinder authentic education reform.  I will take the substance of deep learning and cultivation of reflective thought in a classroom far before I fall for the flashing lights and whistles.  That is not to say technology cannot be leveraged to aid in achieving authentic education reform – we just need to proceed with caution.  To many of the edtech elitists want us to march blindly forward toward a Huxley/Postman predicted “end of education”.

Waight, N; Abd-El-Khalick, F. (2007). The Impact of Technology on the Enactment of “Inquiry” in a Technology Enthusiast’s Sixth Grade Science Classroom. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(1), 154-182.

Research Summary

The authors suggest that a critical component to understanding the need for generalizations is the ability to discern between fact and concept.

Fact: a specific and often isolated piece of information that is believed to be true and which can be confirmed by empirical evidence

Concept: an idea used to organize a class of objects or experiences, typically one or two words, which may be concrete (dog, chair) or abstract (love, justice).

Generalizations: a statement of a relationship between two or more concepts. It is believed to be true and applies to similar situations regardless of time, space, and culture. This statement may be used as a tool for prediction and is often framed as an if/then statement.

It is imperative to understand that the authors utilize generalizations in their article such that they are not bounded in the past or restricted to a particular place and time. Nomothetic generalizations have “predictive explanatory power” and have some sense of “universal validity” thus making them useful for student experimenting and hypothesizing to increase engagement within the course.

The authors also offer guidelines that any statement that includes a reference to a specific time (“during the 1800s”), place (“in the American West”), or culture (“Native Americans often…”) should not be accepted as a generalization so as not to confuse the learner and maintain uniformity.

The value of utilizing nomothetic generalizations in class is that it allows the learner to make bold statements and test them out in a wide variety of contexts. Math and science classes adopt generalizations as second nature and show the strengths and importance of allowing students to transfer their knowledge and findings to situations inside the classroom as well as outside of the classroom thus leaving a lasting impact on the learner and relevance to the social studies curriculum.

Classroom Implications

The researchers specifically discuss the lack of generalizations in social studies classrooms to be a result of standardized testing and the increased burden of standards. In addition, they acknowledge the disconnect between students and the social studies curriculum as many perceive the discipline to be “dull, irrelevant, and boring.” To this, they make one, telling statement:

Not only does a focus on generalizations have the promise to enhance vibrancy of classes and student interest, but it also has the potential to raise test scores through enhanced understandings of the content and improve the development of citizenship skills and dispositions.

Citation:

Shiveley, J.M., & Micso, T. (2009) Reclaiming generalizations in social studies education. Social Studies Research & Practice, 4 (2), 73-78. Retrieved 26 April 2010 from http://www.socstrp.org/issues/PDF/4.2.6.pdf

Research Summary

In the 1990’s the Israeli Ministry of Education called for proposals that envisioned “an innovative school of the future” that would “remain within the standard budgetary constraints of the regular primary school” (p. 9). A proposal for what became the Cramim Experimental School was accepted, and the school began operation in 1995.

The minds behind Cramim reframed school as “a knowledge system, based on the state of the art, interdisciplinary study of the nature of humans, and the nature of knowledge” (p. 8). Significant time and energy was given to establishing a true learning community, in which teachers operated within organizational groupings similar to those of the students for “professional development, social networking, community cooperation, adaptation of subject matter, problem solving, and decision making” (p. 15).

Technology played a central role in the classrooms. In fact, traditional desks do not exist in Cramim’s “double-space learning environments” (p. 13). Instead, there are small tables for collaborative work, mini-auditoriums for multi-media and student or teacher presentations, and a computer gallery with multiple workstations for students. A teacher’s office completes the space. Additional centers specific to science, technology, music, media, art, and theater compose the rest of the school building.

Students were divided into groups based on age (5-7, 8-9, 10-11), and each “home” (the double-space learning environment) provided learning space for students from two different age groups. Thus, the instruction and learning was partially nongraded.

The teachers had been trained to teach in the established system of schooling, but Cramim was truly experimental. As a result, even though Cramim hired teachers with degrees in education, they found it necessary to retrain the teachers to operate as partners in the learning community.

While the experimental school has been supported by the Ministry of Education and Tel-Aviv University, Cramim has had to prove its effectiveness via traditional measures of achievement. Following a period of stabilization, the school began administering various testing instruments to assess student achievement. The students outperformed their peers in the traditional schooling system in all areas of the TIMSS tests and all areas of the MEITZAV—a national test given in Israel. As a result of this success, the Cramim model has now been replicated in eight additional schools. These new schools are showing similar results, even though the instructional approach is an overt departure from the established system.

Implications

The experience and success of the Cramim Experimental School illustrate several likely conclusions.

First, success at true educational reform requires thought and preparation. The school’s formation team spent three years exploring and developing a theoretical framework. They considered deep issues, including the nature of human beings, the nature of knowledge, and the sociocultural environment in which education would take place. This resulted in a thorough theoretical framework that provided guidance for everything from the school’s architecture to its instructional program. Such an approach far exceeds thinking behind the trial-and-error approach found in many “reforms.”

Second, in bringing successful reform to life, details matter. If the theoretical framework is shelved and never applied, the planning is void of value. However, a commitment to the framework forces consideration of many details. Classroom design, student grouping, technology integration, teacher training—these and many more details become important if the framework is to be given a proper experimental treatment.

Third, the theoretical framework becomes focused through goal-setting. From their preparation, the team identified ten school goals that address the importance of individual development, the world-view students would develop through instruction, the role and importance of creativity, and several other noble ideas. These goals, a distillation of the theoretical framework, guided pedagogical decisions.

Fourth, the physical environment contributes to a reform’s success. The Cramim Experimental School required distinct architecture to implement its program. Had the school been forced to use traditional classroom spaces, the success the school experienced would likely have been jeopardized. Additionally, the building design cued teachers in to the type of instruction the school desired. It was much more than a roof and four walls. It communicated values rooted in the school’s theoretical framework.

Fifth, the ideas of school as a “knowledge system” and of a “learning community” seem complementary. The concept of community is frequently mentioned in “reform” plans, but this case study questions the possibility of traditional educational approaches allowing the fostering of a learning community. Cramim suggests the reframing of school is a prerequisite to establishing a learning community.

Finally, Cramim suggests that a reform designed without significant mindfulness of standardized testing can produce successful students even when achievement is measured through testing. As one notable educator has said, if you develop a good school the test scores will take care of themselves. Cramim supports this idea.

It should be noted that despite Cramim’s success, policymakers in Israel have not expressed an interest in the innovation or its remarkable results. Though they frequently mention “evidenced-based policy” in their speeches on education, the politicians have largely ignored the ten-year action research of Cramim School. As a result, Cramim and its associated schools continue to operate “outside the current culture of school education” (p. 18).

Questions Worth Pondering

• What do we mean when we use the term educational reform? Is small-scale trial-and-error an effective means of exploring reform?
• Do we know the theoretical framework behind our current practice? Do we have principles that guide our pedagogical decisions?
• Why do many “reforms” fail to reframe school? Without reframing, is authentic “reform” possible?
• How do we build the needed support to reform through reframing? Can such an approach be attempted in our current sociocultural environment?
• If we could, how would we reframe school? What would be the nature of the resulting reform?

Chen, D. (2010). Schooling as knowledge system: Lessons from Cramim Experimental School. Mind, Brain, and Education 4, 8-19. Available in pdf format for download.

1. To examine what undergraduate education students observed about social studies instruction in K-6^th grade classrooms; and
2. To explore practicing teachers’ reflections on social studies instruction

Research Summary:

It is important to note that the researchers acknowledge a deficiency in social studies instruction for elementary grades prior to NCLB (76), but this situation has only been compounded with the increased emphasis on federal testing as well as the sanctions that come with poor performance (78). They also pose a substantial question at the beginning of their research: how can the United States of America morally, ethically, and intellectually, appear not to defend students needing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that social studies brings (77)? The study consisted of representation of all grade levels and, following pre-service teachers noted an absence of real world relevance, peer interaction, and hands-on approaches as well as a lack of student-centered activities.

Here is a sampling of some of the activities these pre-service teachers observed:

“…a major emphasis on coloring U.S. symbols such as state flags, birds, and flowers. There was heavy memorization of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, or state capitals with no explanation of the meaning of documents or purpose of symbols.”

“…purpose of worksheets was to look up definitions or to locate points on a map to record.”

And a comment by an “honest” teacher on the reasons for not using engaging activities:

…a classroom teacher honestly admitted to using the textbook, suggesting uncertainty with how to teach social studies, “it was too difficult for me to teach social studies any other way.”

Researchers noted several important conclusions about the study:

1. The gap between university preparation for teaching social studies and the current elementary classroom needs to be bridged.
2. In-service teachers need more pedagogical content knowledge of social studies.
3. Pre-service teachers should make a personal commitment not to allow their “action lab” experience to alter how they were taught to teach social studies.

Classroom Implications:

The bigger picture shows a lack of emphasis on developing young Americans into active citizens who participate in the democratic process, but we must also be cognizant of the constraints and stress that elementary teachers are experiencing in finding appropriate allocation of time for each content area. Mathis and Boyd complete their article by offering a glimpse of how districts should be dealing with these inconsistencies through a hybrid model of social studies and literature. Elementary teachers should work with curriculum coordinators to find core values in the social studies that are represented in literature so that they may cover both content areas simultaneously. Districts must also work with experienced teachers to emphasize the importance of the social sciences and avoid developing a generation of ill-informed students that are unprepared to be active members in our democracy.

Reference:

Mathis, P.B., & Boyd, N.C. (2009). Who is teaching social studies? Pre-service teachers’ reactions. Social Science Research & Practice, 4(3), 76-85. Retrieved from http://www.socstrp.org/issues/PDF/4.3.7.pdf on 5 April 2010.

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.

In the first weeks of the study Ms. Moran was reported to have employed a “procedural” stance. She selected this stance with the intention of guiding students towards adopting the habits of mind, social interactions, and procedures expected in a science classroom. An example of procedural discourse used was, “Okay, now I want you to get your lab books out and label the top of the page” (MacKenzie, 2001, p. 145). After procedures became habitual, Ms. Moran was reported to have changed her stance.

An Inquiry Stance & Methodology

“Mind games” (a termed coined by Ms. Moran) were “inquiry activities centering on hypothetical situations posed by Ms. Moran at least once during each instructional unit.”

The major operation Ms. Moran employed in delivering the Mind Game to students was a series of questions. The language used by Ms. Moran during these questions reflected a stance toward her teaching and students’ learning conveying puzzlement, uncertainty, wonder, and possibilities. Through the language of “what if,” “might,” “what would the world be like,” or “why or will it eventually disappear,” Ms. Moran was trying to convey her major goals and her primary image of what science was to the students. (p. 145)

The goals of employing Mind Games were various however; those focused upon enhancing social interactions were primary. They included

• Getting the students to argue (debate) with one another (when arguing was appropriate),
• Arranging the environment to be conducive to group work, and
• Encouraging students to count on each other as resources.

Outcomes

As the school year progressed, the number of statements or questions posed by students to each other dramatically increased to the point that Ms. Moran’s role became one of moderator and subject-matter expert. She also acted as “a catalyst in igniting the students’ imaginations, as a praiser, or as a devil’s advocate.”  According to the researcher, all of the roles Ms. Moran inhabited during Mind Games helped her reach the goals of “maximizing students use of creative and critical thinking skills” (p. 149).  Another important outcome of using an “inquiry stance” was Ms. Moran’s ongoing enthusiasm about teaching. Accordingly, MacKenzie (2001)  stated, “The improvisational nature of Mind Games was a source of enrichment for the teacher” (p. 151).  See Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) for a detailed dissertation on employing an inquiry stance.

Points to Ponder

1. Learning is like …
2. Teaching is like …
3. Kids are like …

In her thought-provoking text, “Teaching in Mind,” Judy Yero interrogates the profound influence of teachers’ beliefs on student learning (see the author’s website for summary).  Yero (2002) asserts the metaphors a teacher uses when describing his or her work unveil deeply held beliefs.

For example, a teacher who responds to the prompt “Teaching is like…” with “tending to a garden” may envision their students as blossoming flowers who only need a little TLC to thrive. Yet upon deeper examination, consider the life-sustaining role of the gardener (i.e., the students can’t survive without my attention) and the implications of considering a student as a seed (i.e., dormant aka not alive until the teacher tends to it).

This simple example should be motivation enough to get us pondering our metaphors as a way to illuminate what we believe about students, teaching, and Schooling. Analyzing our metaphors is one exercise among many we can undertake to better understand how our beliefs impact the ways we approach teaching and learning with students.

References

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle. S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York: Teachers College Press.

MacKenzie, A. H. (2001). The role of teacher stance when infusing inquiry questioning into middle school science classrooms. School Science and Mathematics, 101(3), 143-153.

Pajares, M. F. (1992). Teachers’ beliefs and educational research: Cleaning up a messy construct. Review of Educational Research, 62(3), 307-332.

Yero, J. L. (2002). Teaching in mind: How teacher thinking shapes education. Hamilton, MT: MindFlight Publishing.

[Author's Note]

I am a student of students. I spend my days reading, writing, and contemplating about teaching and learning; in particular, about teachers-as-learners. Research on teachers is encyclopedic–covering many areas such as pedagogy, philosophy, dispositions, and cognition. I find much of this research problematic because its conducted by researchers ON and ABOUT teachers instead of with them, and because it fails to help all of us students of students bridge the gap between research and practice.  In other words, it does not answer our most important question: How does research finding X about teachers influence student learning? Frankly, if educational research does not attempt to answer that key question then it is indeed “purely academic” and of little value to teachers, and of even less value to our children.

In my future posts, including this one, I will present reviews of empirical research studies that take-up teachers as the main subject AND report findings that may assist us in mapping and bridging the gaps between our ways of being and knowing, and those of our students. GG

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. In this article, the authors produce a middle school social studies sequencing framework to assist new teachers in conveying the wide range of content that comprises the social sciences in a manner that is effective and hierarchical to ensure fluidity and comprehension.

Research Summary:

The framework constructed by the researchers begins with a study of geography and ends with the economics of the unit. Curriculum should start with a study of geography (using the five themes) begin to assess how geography has shaped history. The instructor must decide between teaching the history component through a chronological, thematic, or conceptual framework while guiding students towards a deeper understanding of how history has influenced culture.  From this point, a study of culture (as a lived experience of place) should commence and guide itself into a discussion of how unique cultural features have given rise to political and governmental institutions. The course should then proceed to a study of politics and government by analyzing the governmental institutions of a region and moving towards an understanding of how the economic system is a byproduct of the political and governmental institutions. The unit of study would end with an analysis of the economics of the region using base concepts. The last day of the unit should offer a comprehensive look that ties together all aspects of the social sciences covered in the framework with the teacher working to fit all pieces together and assess what they have learned.

Classroom Implications:

The sequencing framework offered by the researchers provides logic and structure to all teachers (novice and experienced) with a guide to simplifying a complex subject that contains a number of intricacies. In addition, the questions that guide the teacher from one topic to another offer opportunities for overlap and transfer that will increase retention among learners. Finally, this type of framework will offer confidence to the instructor who is wary of abandoning the textbook for fear of teaching content in the wrong sequence.

Reference:

Guidry, A., & Carson, J. (2010). A sequencing framework for middle grades social studies instructional unit. Social Studies Research & Practice, 5(1), 105-118. Retrieved from http://www.socstrp.org/issues/PDF/5.1.10.pdf

(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.

Research Summary:

Kruger and Dunning (1999) set up four research designs to investigate students self assessment abilities.  Each of the investigations studied how participants’ self assessment of performance compared to their actual performance.  In each of the investigations the participants who scored in the top quartile more accurately self assessed than those participants who scored in the bottom quartile.  Those who scored in the bottom quartile overestimated their performance greatly.  Also, those participants in the bottom quartile did not benefit from seeing how their peers answered questions.  They were truly incompetent and unaware.

In one of the studies, the participants were asked to take a logic test, then self-assess their performance.  After this initial self-assessment the participants received some basic instruction via a self-directed packet on logic.  Then the participants were asked to re-evaluate their original performance.  After the “instruction” the participants ability to self-assess increased significantly.  By providing even some basic competence, the students metacognitive abilities improved.

Classroom implications:

I admittedly struggled to consider how this research might inform classroom practice.  Importantly, this research highlights the need for teachers to explicitly encourage students to develop metacognitive abilities by consistently asking students to think about how their ideas have changed over time.  One thing I have tried in class is making lists of ideas regarding a topic and taking a digital picture of the initial ideas.  Later, I ask students to critique and revise their initial lists after some instruction.  Then I encourage students to think about their own learning by asking questions like, “What things caused your ideas to change?” or “Why do you think you originally thought the way you did?”

This research further illustrates the need to scaffold student thinking.  Metacognition is a very abstract and difficult task.  We must first provide students with experiences on which they can reflect.  If we ask students to complete a task (self-assess), but have not given them the tools (basic competence) needed to accomplish the task, the students are likely to fail.  Instead, we must carefully build student understanding and thinking abilities over time.  If we do not lay the groundwork through concrete experiences we cannot expect the higher order thinking to be fruitful.

Questions to ponder:

• Sometimes our rhetoric around student-directed learning places too much emphasis on students “discovering” knowledge.  How does this research highlight the vital role teachers have?
• How can we help students recognize their own incompetence in an area even without basic understanding?

Reference:

Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.

• 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.

Article Review

According to the findings of Boxtel, Linden, Roelfs, and Erkens (2002), creating concept maps as a classroom-based collaborative exercise among 15-16 year old science students contributes significantly to learning because of several reasons including providing students the opportunity to talk about the phenomena via the picture (aka the concept map).  Furthermore, according to the authors, concept maps when created collaboratively, offer students the opportunity to practice skills such as negotiation and reflection.  Jointly creating a concept map means students engage in questioning, reasoning, and resolving disagreements. The authors state, “When peers work on a common task, mutual understandings must be created and sustained” (p. 42).  Mutual understanding means shared meaning achieved through reflecting on both individual knowledge but also integrating and building upon the knowledge expressed through the contributions of their co-creators.

Another major benefit of using concept maps in the classroom is the ability for students (and teachers) to compare students’ conceptions of new information prior to instruction to those after instruction.  The pre-post cognitive dissonance as manifest on the concept maps by knowledge gaps and inconsistent reasoning affords opportunities for instructional strategies or other types of interventions which assist students directly to clarifying misconceptions.

Points to Ponder

1. How could concept mapping serve as both a teaching-learning activity and a formative and/or summative assessment tool?
2. How could exploring content in a graphic, non text-dominant ways provide insights into overall student development?
3. How could using a creative activity like concept mapping enliven (or alternatively hinder) domain-specific learning?

Asking students to demonstrate what they know can take many forms along many broad continuum e.g., freedom-restraint, creativity-reproduction, fun-lame, etc. You may consider concept maps an “old school” activity, one you employed back-in-the-day. Or perhaps you’ve never used concept mapping as an activity to extend learning (domain-based, social, and otherwise), nor as an assessment tool.  Regardless of your prior experience, concept mapping is worth (re)exploring in depth. Go forth and Map the Gap!

For my additional reviews of empirical studies examining concept maps see this annotated bibliography on Concept Mapping.

Reference

Boxtel, C., Linden, J., Roelofs, E., & Erkens, G.   (2002).  Collaborative concept mapping:  Provoking and supporting meaningful discourse.  Theory Into Practice, 41(1), 40-46.

Research Summary:

Chan & Sachs (2001) discuss two ends of a continuum for learning beliefs.  On one end, students hold constructivist views of learning and believe learning to be qualitative.  That is, learning involves deep mental processing and meaning making, with more connected ideas being learnt more thoroughly.  On the other end of the continuum students hold a quantitative view of learning.  Students on the quantitative end believe memorizing more facts about a topic results in learning.  These students typically have a more passive perspective regarding learning.  Researchers investigated students’ views on learning from grades 4 and 6 and compared these views to how well students performed on text processing tasks.  The text processing tasks were questions designed to see how well students thought about the text, not if students could remember individual pieces of information from the text.  Students were not asked which item was in the text, instead they were asked to solve an application problem using information from the text.

What the researchers found is that, not surprisingly, older students held more constructivist views of learning and were able to process the text better.  Yet, when age was controlled for (taken out of the equation), students with more constructivist views of learning were able to process text at higher levels.

Classroom Implications:

If students who hold more constructivist views of learning actually process text at higher levels, we must ask ourselves how we might change students’ views of learning.  If our students view learning as a process rather than a product, as something to do rather than something that is done to them, their abilities to learn may actually improve.

Importantly, we must consider the messages we send students about learning.  When our assessment is aimed at rote memorization or simple repetition of teacher notes, students are likely to think learning equals memorization. When we cover one topic and move on (never explicitly connecting topics) students are likely to see knowledge as compartmentalized rather than deeply connected.

I propose we not only change our implicit messages (method of delivery, assessments, etc), but that we forcefully attack students’ passive views of learning.  By asking students to reflect on what learning is, we better prepare them for life, not just the “test”.  Try asking your students, “What does it mean to learn?”.  The responses might surprise you.  Then, you will be better prepared to engage students in conversations about how they learn.  For example, you might ask students, “How does a Powerpoint presentation inhibit our abilities to play with ideas? Why would “playing” with ideas help us learn better than me just telling you answers?”

Reference:

Chan, C.K. & Sachs, J. (2001). Beliefs about Learning in Children’s Understanding of Science Texts. Contemporary Education Psychology, 26, 192-210.