From: How People Learn (http://books.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/)
The Design of Learning Environments (p. 127)
Traditional curricula often fail to help students "learn their way around" a
discipline. The curricula include the familiar scope and sequence charts
that specify procedural objectives to be mastered by students at each grade:
though an individual objective might be reasonable, it is not seen as part
of a larger network. Yet it is the network, the connections among
objectives, that is important. This is the kind of knowledge that
characterizes expertise (see Chapter 2). Stress on isolated parts can train
students in a series of routines without educating them to understand an
overall picture that will ensure the development of integrated knowledge
structures and information about conditions of applicability.
An alternative to simply progressing through a series of exercises that
derive from a scope and sequence chart is to expose students to the major
features of a subject domain as they arise naturally in problem situations.
Activities can be structured so that students are able to explore, explain,
extend, and evaluate their progress. Ideas are best introduced when students
see a need or a reason for their use--this helps them see relevant uses of
knowledge to make sense of what they are learning. Problem situations used
to engage students may include the historic reasons for the development of
the domain, the relationship of that domain to other domains, or the uses of
ideas in that domain.
Larry Woolf;General Atomics;San Diego CA
92121;Ph:858-526-8575;FAX:858-526-8568; www.ga.com; www.sci-ed-ga.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Tarara
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2002 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: unexpected obstacles
I'm personally searching for ways to force students
to read the book, to come to class, to do the assigned work, to DO THE
THINKING. One way is the 'punitive' approach--part of the grade is
attendance or turning in outlines of chapters etc. where their grades suffer
if they fail to do these minimal requirements. If that drives students
away--so be it. [We do have a somewhat captive audience--every student must
take two semesters of a laboratory science, so they must choose from
Biology, Chemistry, or Physics.]