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GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING

How Do We Get Students to Focus on the Right Stuff?

By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist
08-Jul-14


Increasingly, we expect students to be able to answer important questions about “big ideas” in our classrooms. This is not an easy task. Among other things, it requires students to be able to recognize the information that is most relevant, and then find connections and patterns in that information. Researchers at the University of Kansas have recently investigated the kinds of scaffolding that might support students in being able to identify relevant information and organize it in ways that will help them see patterns.
The researchers designed lessons on a number of topics, where students were provided with a note-taker that had a “critical question” as its starting point. The note-taker then had sections where students define key terms, answer supporting questions that had been planned by the teacher, and record the answers to these supporting questions using a graphic organizer, reflect on the main idea, and consider the relevance of the main idea for the world beyond the classroom.
This intervention was compared with a more traditional lecture and discussion format. The two groups were given the same information in the same time frame and both started with the same critical question. The differences between the groups were as follows:
• The experimental group had the structured note-taker (named a “Question Exploration Guide” by the researchers).
• The information for the experimental group was sequenced according to the note-taker, and the questions in the notes were explicitly posed and answered.
• The experimental group’s discussion focused on the questions in sections (4), (5), and (6) of the note-taker.
Lessons were conducted on the topics of biological weapons and chemical weapons. The question exploration guide for the lesson on biological weapons was structured into a table, prompting students about the critical question, the key terms to bear in mind, the supporting questions, examples and effects, treatments and problems, and the main idea and “how it can be used.”
There were 116 participating Grade 7 students. Students were assessed one day after the lessons took place on tasks that measured (a) factual knowledge, (b) understanding of relationships between ideas (causation, comparison, etc.), and (c) ability to generalize main ideas.
The researchers were also interested in determining the effect of the treatment on students of different ability levels and so the results were also disaggregated according to students’ previous grades.
What were the results?
• Students using the question exploration guide outperformed students in the traditional lecture discussion condition on 49 of the 50 comparisons made. The results were statistically significant and mostly achieved a large or very large effect size.
• The advantage in performance was equivalent to as much as 38 percentage points on some comparisons.
• The advantage was evident in all areas assessed.
• The advantage held for students of all ability levels.
• The difference for low-achieving students between the experimental group and the control group on measure (c), which assessed their ability to generalize main ideas, was equivalent to 36 percentage points.
What does this mean for our classrooms?
These results replicate the results of other studies, which have shown that supporting students to explicitly focus on the important information using techniques such as “strategic thinking steps,” graphic organizers, and structured questions can deepen their understanding of big ideas.
In the case of this study, the combination of a planned path of questions and a graphic organizer to record the answers to those questions seems to have allowed students to see patterns and connect information in ways which supported them in thinking more deeply about the information.
The structured discussions following the note taking facilitated the students in making generalizations. The finding that this was also quite strongly the case for lower achieving students is important, considering that it is precisely this kind of more complex thinking that they seem to struggle with.
Reference
Bulgren, J., Marquis, J. Lenx, B. K. and Deshler, D. (2011) “The effectiveness of a question-exploration routine for enhancing the content learning of secondary students.” Journal of Educational Psychology 103 3, pp. 578-593.
The materials used in this study are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023930.supp.
From April 2012.




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