Documentation:Learning Principles & Strategies/Case Study Plant Biology
The Teaching Challenge
Video to go here!
Group Discussion Results
What may be going on for the students in this scenario?
- Trying to apply what they know about primary growth to secondary – not working
- Having sparse knowledge structure; can’t fit all pieces together well
- Unable to generalize
- They think the goal is memorization instead of concepts
- Motivation
- Mnemonic evaluation (memorizing terms in isolation of their relevance to deeper learning)
- Antithetical to how they’re expressed
What learning principles might help us understand the problem and determine teaching approaches?
- Knowledge organization
- Maybe motivation too
- Knowledge organization
- Meta-cognition
- Mastery integration
What teaching strategies might you suggest and why
- Give assignments requiring students to work in 3D ex. Produce animation
- Have students present/explain component processes to each other
- Reorganize presentation
- Cover memorization (anatomy) separate from concepts
- Be transparent about learning goals
- Provide structure so details are learned in context
- Flush out structure of generalized secondary growth
- Specialize to roots and stems
- Compare and contrast
- Fill in details (terminology)
Your rationale for the strategies suggested?
- Students benefit by giving them initially some appropriate organization structures for what they’re learning
- Creating contexts for knowledge retrieval and application that are based on problem solving and analysis
Resources
References
- Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M.C., Norman, M.K. (2010). How Learning Works: 7 Researched-based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Doyle, Terry. (2008) Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment. Sterling: Stylus