Ardian Mici

Article Reflection ~ 10/5/09 Callback
November 17, 2009

"How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom"

Part III, Ch. 9,

By: John D. Bransford and M. Suzanne Donovan

This past summer, I participated in a full immersion science course on Green Energy, "Inquiring Minds", organized by BU and NEU. While the course strengthened my scientific content knowledge in several areas of physics with hands-on experiments, the callback sessions reinforced the belief that teaching science is not just merely understanding the physical phenomena and the laws that govern them. It is much more than the formulae and their applications, textbooks and experiments. Teaching science has to deal with common preconceptions that are hard to defeat and creating a new mindset that science is counter-intuitive.

The first Great Lesson for me was dealing with common preconceptions. Disconfirmation helped me learn more than my experiments and anything else I studied about them. Reading the pages of "How Students Learn" (by Donovan et al. Part III, p.385-417), I was struck by two things: a) that starting the inquiry by the Scientific Method, could lead to even more undesirable results than one can think, and b) every teacher must find time to get students write about their experiences. Answering questions "why we do what we do?" and explaining the reasoning behind it empowers the inquiry process to an unthinkable degree. In "How Students Learn" the authors note that in many occasions, following the method rigidly could damage the scientific inquiry, the curiosity behind observations, the genuine imagination. I had no idea that I was going to experience such feeling when an engineer, friend of mine, came to teach our class "How Magnamike Works?" (Engineers use magnamike to measure the thickness of very, very small objects.) So, we wanted to measure how many dimes fit in 1 inch, in 1 cm, etc. As I proceeded to write the requirements for the experiment, many students started to loose concentration, by chatting or becoming impatient to use the magnetic device rather than to my follow my directions. At that point, my friend, stopped me and invited the students to first observe, then repeat the process like scientists, using magnetism to measure things. My friend wanted them to think and question what was possibly happening? And have them discuss about it. Everyone was focused and excited to learn about this new device, as an engineering tool. At the end, everyone wrote a few comments and students shared their findings in group.

While teaching a lesson on the conservation of energy, I noticed that students were so much more excited to "dissect" a "hair dryer, a solar car cooler and an electric toothbrush, rather than being asked to copy all the steps I wrote on the whiteboard for the experimets. They wanted to investigate and see what was inside the devices. They took it from there and put devices to work right away. At the end, they wrote about their observations, answered questions, such as how they thought energy was transforming? what was the first noticeable type of energy? how was that energy used?, etc... Writing about science, using their own words to discuss and share, was like a 'wake-up call' for each student's learning. Writing about the process, and diagraming energy pathways, gave them confidence and clearer understanding of what they did and how they proceeded, (metacognition). That was a fun hour of scientific investigations, which must be repeated.

A. Mici

Andover School of Montessori

400 S. Main Street

Andover, MA 01810