Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: Thinking Level of students



At 12:37 PM 9/16/01 -0500, John Clement wrote:
There is one other hypothesis which has not been included in your list. The
method of teaching is inappropriate to getting students to understand the
relationships.

Yeah. That too.

One would presume that any successful method would have to
include the missing pieces that have been listed, as well as supplying some
motivation and require active engagement rather than just note taking. No
teacher wants to admit that the methods they are using do not work, but that
may be exactly the case.

Roger.

The motivational factor is obviously important. On thing that I see is that
the thinking level appears to put a limit on what can be learned, but below
that limit students achieve gain scores all the way from zero to that limit.

OK.

Perhaps increasing the types of experiences that the students have, and
working on certain basic skills may increase the limit, but increasing the
thinking level is really a better solution.

I understand the thought, but "better" is probably not quite the right way
to say it. Students need adequate motivation AND adequate general-purpose
thinking skills AND an adequate basis of axioms and raw facts. These are
all indispensable. Good teaching may help in all categories. Experience
(the right kind of experience) may help in all categories. (By analogy: in
an ordinary car, you can't say that the engine is "more important" than the
fuel, or vice versa. Unless you have both, you're not going to get very far.)

If we were convinced that there was an abundance of motivation and an
abundance of background information in a particular area, then we might
conclude that general thinking skills were the rate-limiting step, and it
would be appropriate to concentrate resources there. But I'm not at all
convinced that earth/moon/sun geometry questions fall into this category.