Artifact 1 Analysis
Context:
This paper was written for Science Methods regarding a problem of practice that I had in my field work at the time.
Analysis of Artifact/Relationship to Focus of Inquiry:
This artifact demonstrates that students become leaders when they are exposed to different activities. In other words, I found that some students learn best in a teacher-centered lecture setting, and become leaders when the teacher is lecturing in their level of participation, while as other students prefer a more student-centered manner of learning in which that are actively engaging with the material. However, this made me wonder why--why was is that I all of a sudden had this new group of leaders emerging in the classroom, when before they just fell asleep all the time?
I then realized that different multiple intelligences were being used in both of these activities. Gardner (1983) states that all people have different proclivities towards certain intelligences, and that these intelligences can be used to teach them. In this case, the lecture mainly focuses on the auditory and the visual intelligences as the students are seeing the material on a PowerPoint and they are listening to the teacher say it. On the other hand, when I had the students model the structure of an atom, the kinesthetic intelligence was being used as they were moving around the demonstrate the material. This supports what Gardner was saying in that students learn in different manners--maybe the students who were leaders during lecture learn best in this style, while as the students who became leaders in the kinesthetic activity learn best by moving. This leads me to conclude that lecture may not be the evil that I thought it was from the beginning-in fact, some students may prefer to learn via the lecture, as evidenced by the fact that those same students became silent when we tried the kinesthetic activity.
The problem with this artifact though was that it does not measure retention of the content material--it measures student engagement with the content material and student leadership in the classroom, however it does not directly measure whether or not doing this activity helped the students to retain the content material. However, this data does lead me to believe that the more engaged students are with the material the more likely they are to retain it; it seemed that the people who became leaders were also the students in the class that understood the material the best. In the future, I would thus include a mini-quiz both after the lecture portion of the class as well as after the kinesthetic portion of the class to see which people learned it after each way. Furthermore, if I had two chemistry classes, I would try to reverse the order that I taught the content so as to determine whether it is the method of differentiation that works or the fact that the content material was repeated.
Furthermore, there was still about two thirds of the class that had still not "come out" and become leaders, which led me to want to try and differentiate instruction to get them as well. Now that I know that certain students learn best in some settings, and others learn best in other settings, I will try to continue to differentiate instruction on purpose so as to see whether I can also get the portion of the class that still has not become a leader involved and engaged in the learning process so that they might be able to retain the content material better.
This paper was written for Science Methods regarding a problem of practice that I had in my field work at the time.
Analysis of Artifact/Relationship to Focus of Inquiry:
This artifact demonstrates that students become leaders when they are exposed to different activities. In other words, I found that some students learn best in a teacher-centered lecture setting, and become leaders when the teacher is lecturing in their level of participation, while as other students prefer a more student-centered manner of learning in which that are actively engaging with the material. However, this made me wonder why--why was is that I all of a sudden had this new group of leaders emerging in the classroom, when before they just fell asleep all the time?
I then realized that different multiple intelligences were being used in both of these activities. Gardner (1983) states that all people have different proclivities towards certain intelligences, and that these intelligences can be used to teach them. In this case, the lecture mainly focuses on the auditory and the visual intelligences as the students are seeing the material on a PowerPoint and they are listening to the teacher say it. On the other hand, when I had the students model the structure of an atom, the kinesthetic intelligence was being used as they were moving around the demonstrate the material. This supports what Gardner was saying in that students learn in different manners--maybe the students who were leaders during lecture learn best in this style, while as the students who became leaders in the kinesthetic activity learn best by moving. This leads me to conclude that lecture may not be the evil that I thought it was from the beginning-in fact, some students may prefer to learn via the lecture, as evidenced by the fact that those same students became silent when we tried the kinesthetic activity.
The problem with this artifact though was that it does not measure retention of the content material--it measures student engagement with the content material and student leadership in the classroom, however it does not directly measure whether or not doing this activity helped the students to retain the content material. However, this data does lead me to believe that the more engaged students are with the material the more likely they are to retain it; it seemed that the people who became leaders were also the students in the class that understood the material the best. In the future, I would thus include a mini-quiz both after the lecture portion of the class as well as after the kinesthetic portion of the class to see which people learned it after each way. Furthermore, if I had two chemistry classes, I would try to reverse the order that I taught the content so as to determine whether it is the method of differentiation that works or the fact that the content material was repeated.
Furthermore, there was still about two thirds of the class that had still not "come out" and become leaders, which led me to want to try and differentiate instruction to get them as well. Now that I know that certain students learn best in some settings, and others learn best in other settings, I will try to continue to differentiate instruction on purpose so as to see whether I can also get the portion of the class that still has not become a leader involved and engaged in the learning process so that they might be able to retain the content material better.