I was very intrigued by the Gunckel article. There are a few ways I can directly relate to the article. In child development classes, we learned all about the patterns that very young children make from birth. A young child in a high chair will repeatedly drop his or her spoon and develop the pattern of, "hey, when I drop this spoon it's going to fall on the ground and make a funny sound!" I am also a firm believer in progressive education and learning by doing, not only because this is how I personally learn the best but because I have seen young scientists at work in a preschool classroom.
The inquiry based learning triangle makes sense to me. Students should be provided with experiences not only to make science meaningful but to realize that patterns exists in science and that there are select explanations to help us understand WHY things happen. What I see in schools does not make sense to me, especially after reading this article. The science I see in my classroom is almost a mirror image of the school science. Students are provided with many explanations, facts, figures and definitions. Then they are told about the patterns that exist and they might read about a project they COULD DO to connect these explanations and patterns. As we read through these every week I am always wondering what good it does these students to read about mealworms as opposed to actually having a direct experience with them.
After reading this article, not only am I frustrated (it is a common emotion in my life at this point in my internship!), I have a question. In regards to science, can we always provide students with meaningful, hands on experiences? What if they are studying DNA or evolution? How can we make these real? Can we always provide many experiences for our students?
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ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the mirror-image scientists' science that we see in our classrooms. Instead of providing the students with experiments, allowing them to ask their own questions, and then investigating those questions to reach a conclusion, teachers give them an explanation and then have them do an activity reflecting what they have already learned. Even looking back to when I was in elementary school, I remember doing very little hands-on science until fourth grade. In the primary-level, we would watch science movies, read from the textbook, and do worksheets in our science workbooks. I feel that it's important for us to provide students with meaningful hands-on/minds-on activities, especially in the primary level. Science is all about asking questions and exploration, and when students are given definitions and explanations before the exploration, it takes away from their learning.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question about having hands-on science activities for every lesson, I think it's important to have a mix. For example, if your class is studying DNA, the students could extract DNA from their cheek cells and look at it under a microscope and then the next class period have a discussion about what they saw, and then begin giving explanations. I'm not sure how to make evolution a hands-on experience though.