I ran across this article this morning and it got me thinking about some of the strategies I use in teaching research through a guided inquiry approach using my ANTHILL model.
Using Inquiry Journals (Learn Direction by Reflection) during a Research Project I move students into the realm of decision making about the content, by guiding them to think about their own learning and to reflect on the strategies they need to get at the content they want to learn. These journals ask students to reflect on their process for getting at the content and allow teachers to see their struggles in gaining knowledge and then to be able to create zones of intervention. According to John Dunlosky, in the Fall 2013 issue of American Educator we cannot just focus on content we need to give students strategies on how to acquire it. This article provides insight about strategies to boost student learning.
The article identifies a number of strategies for students to process through learning new knowledge. But one in particular really stuck out for me and that is elaborative interrogation and self-explanation. This is a process by which a student considers new information as it relates to what s/he already knows through self-questioning. In my research model I ask the students to begin there. (A=analyze…I actually use the letters SIK (stuff I know) and tell students that we become sik if we don’t learn how to learn about new things. I ask them to think about what they already know about their topic, and to look for clues in the topic statement that might trigger some good “guesstimates” about where they might start looking for information on their topic. As an example a topic might be: What happened to cause the crew to mysteriously disappear from the Mary Celeste? Students are asked to identify keywords in that question that result in crew, disappear, Mary Celeste. Next they need to ask themselves questions like, “Is Mary Celeste a person or a thing?” “What helped me decide that she must be some kind of ship or plane?” “What is it that has happened that I need to find out about?” This begins to give students the strategies to build knowledge, followed up by asking students to WONDER about their topic. What do they want to find out, not what is superimposed on them by the teacher. These questions become their guiding questions. As they go through the research process they refer back to these questions over and over again. As they discover new information they may decide that their questions need to change or that they have new questions to ask. Students are not only actively processing the content they are focusing on, but they are also engaging in their building blocks of how they acquire new knowledge. This is integrated with their “SIK” (stuff I know), which leads to SINK (Stuff I Need to Know).
One highly effective method of learning identified in this article is distributed practice. An example given in the article is, “For instance, when preparing for a dance recital, most would-be dancers will practice the routine nightly until they have it down; they will not just do all the practice the night before the recital, because everyone knows that this kind of practice will likely not be successful.” (Dunlosky, p. 15) In other words extending the learning in smaller chunks over more time. This method is quite effective in a guided research unit as they get to the H (hunt) phase of the research model. Focused attention is given to the resource materials, reading, digesting, questioning each source separately, while infusing mini-lessons as new resources are introduced: search strategies, web-evaluation, citation and plagiarism. By breaking down the research into chunks students are approaching the content with distributed practice, but not only that, they are approaching how to build new strategies for gaining new knowledge (learning how to learn) through distributed practice.
Using Inquiry Journals (Learn Direction by Reflection) during a Research Project I move students into the realm of decision making about the content, by guiding them to think about their own learning and to reflect on the strategies they need to get at the content they want to learn. These journals ask students to reflect on their process for getting at the content and allow teachers to see their struggles in gaining knowledge and then to be able to create zones of intervention. According to John Dunlosky, in the Fall 2013 issue of American Educator we cannot just focus on content we need to give students strategies on how to acquire it. This article provides insight about strategies to boost student learning.
The article identifies a number of strategies for students to process through learning new knowledge. But one in particular really stuck out for me and that is elaborative interrogation and self-explanation. This is a process by which a student considers new information as it relates to what s/he already knows through self-questioning. In my research model I ask the students to begin there. (A=analyze…I actually use the letters SIK (stuff I know) and tell students that we become sik if we don’t learn how to learn about new things. I ask them to think about what they already know about their topic, and to look for clues in the topic statement that might trigger some good “guesstimates” about where they might start looking for information on their topic. As an example a topic might be: What happened to cause the crew to mysteriously disappear from the Mary Celeste? Students are asked to identify keywords in that question that result in crew, disappear, Mary Celeste. Next they need to ask themselves questions like, “Is Mary Celeste a person or a thing?” “What helped me decide that she must be some kind of ship or plane?” “What is it that has happened that I need to find out about?” This begins to give students the strategies to build knowledge, followed up by asking students to WONDER about their topic. What do they want to find out, not what is superimposed on them by the teacher. These questions become their guiding questions. As they go through the research process they refer back to these questions over and over again. As they discover new information they may decide that their questions need to change or that they have new questions to ask. Students are not only actively processing the content they are focusing on, but they are also engaging in their building blocks of how they acquire new knowledge. This is integrated with their “SIK” (stuff I know), which leads to SINK (Stuff I Need to Know).
One highly effective method of learning identified in this article is distributed practice. An example given in the article is, “For instance, when preparing for a dance recital, most would-be dancers will practice the routine nightly until they have it down; they will not just do all the practice the night before the recital, because everyone knows that this kind of practice will likely not be successful.” (Dunlosky, p. 15) In other words extending the learning in smaller chunks over more time. This method is quite effective in a guided research unit as they get to the H (hunt) phase of the research model. Focused attention is given to the resource materials, reading, digesting, questioning each source separately, while infusing mini-lessons as new resources are introduced: search strategies, web-evaluation, citation and plagiarism. By breaking down the research into chunks students are approaching the content with distributed practice, but not only that, they are approaching how to build new strategies for gaining new knowledge (learning how to learn) through distributed practice.