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Here is a short article written for the NSTA a number of years ago on the rationale behind the use of Interactive Science Notebooks. As fourth and fifth graders we aspire to the quality of thought and work this teacher's eighth grade students produce, but we are on our way. Using Interactive Notebooks for Inquiry-Based Science The interactive science notebook (ISN) is a perfect opportunity for science educators to encapsulate and promote the most cutting-edge constructivist teaching strategies while simultaneously addressing standards, differentiation of instruction, literacy development, and maintenance of an organized notebook as laboratory and field scientists do. Students then have a packaged notebook representing all of their learning throughout the year...[it is an extremely effective] innovation in enhancing general learning through the encouragement of writing across the curriculum, personalization, and metacognition strategies, while simultaneously serving to promote more specific inquiry-based science instruction by which students focus, experiment, reflect, and apply based on their personal connections to learning. You can learn anything!Growing your mindABSTRACT: One hundred years after its conception, the scientific method continues
to reinforce a kind of cultural lore about what it means to participate in inquiry. As commonly implemented in venues ranging from middle school classrooms to undergraduate laboratories, it emphasizes the testing of predictions rather than ideas, focuses learners on material activity at the expense of deep subject matter understanding, and lacks epistemic framing relevant to the discipline. While critiques of the scientific method are not new, its cumulative effects on learners’ conceptions of science have not been clearly articulated. We discuss these effects using findings from a series of five studies with degree-holding graduates of our educational system who were preparing to enter the teaching profession and apprentice their own young learners into unproblematic images of how science is done. We then offer an alternative vision for investigative science—model-based inquiry (MBI)-- as a system of activity and discourse that engages learners more deeply with content and embodies five epistemic characteristics of scientific knowledge: that ideas represented in the form of models are testable, revisable, explanatory, conjectural, and generative. We represent MBI as an interconnected set of classroom conversations and provide examples of its implementation and its limitations. Read the complete paper here. |
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