Introduction
Even as I was driving into school this morning, I was thinking about a beginning for the presentation. The first thing that came to my mind was the purpose of this two day professional development. Without appearing patronizing, I think we might say that there are two basic reasons:
1. We want to develop ourselves professionally, and
2. We want to learn how we can help our students achieve 'success in school'.
Having said that, I will digress and reiterate that I’m defining the word ‘success in school’ operationally. Harvard physicist, Bridgman, had developed the idea of 'operational analysis' to add meaning to concepts that we often use. To define something operationally, we have to describe in detail ‘how to observe or measure something’.
This brings fond memories, because after I explained Bridgman's ideas, I first used this concept first 14 years ago with a lot of smart Grade 9 students. I had asked them to write on a page, how they’d define ‘success in school’, and ‘success in life’. You may want to try this with your students sometime, because the students can come up with interesing ideas, other than just 'making lot of money'. In any case, let’s move on to my first slide in the PP presentation. You can read the long version you've got in the Word format on your floppy discs, at leisure, after this brief presentation.
1. The core skills of students in languages, mathematics, science and computing can be improved in schools by using suitably developed programs, which are based on understanding the theories and research in cognition[BS2] and learning.
2. By increasing the use of technology in our schools for ‘pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and school organization’, the learning standards of students will rise noticeably.
There are numerous theories of learning that educationalists have suggested over the past century. I can’t resist making this observation as a physicist that the number of fundamental particles has kept pace with this growing number! Early on it was the contributions of Thorndike, Skinner and Piaget that were important to us as educators, just as electron, proton and neutron numbers were important for physicists to pursue their study of matter and energy. To illustrate the vast amount of data that is already available online on this topic, I want you to change the address in your browser from www.msn.com to www.google.com. Type the phrase ‘theories of learning’ and then click Google Search. Some of you will be amazed with the results. [When I tried the google search with ‘theories of learning’ at home, I had about 685,000 hits returned to me in 0.14 seconds].
After pointing out the context and overview of this study, I will elaborate on my philosophy. Moving on from theory to practice, I’m going to show how I have utilized these ideas to develop my lesson plan for teaching the students a unit from the IGCSE physics syllabus, ‘Transferring energy by heating’, [page 54 in the link Coordinated Science Double Award Science]. I will then show you how an analysis of my assessment of the students has been done, during and after instruction using statistical techniques including the use of a box-and-whiskers plot. Finally we will conclude this session by examining some of the questions and issues raised.
The subjects in my study are 56 students from Grade 9 at Emirates International School (EIS), in the United Arab Emirates. I am going to elaborate on the local environment in which the school operates, by first acknowledging my admiration for His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (HH), the Crown Prince of Dubai, for his vision and leadership. He is the first cyber Sheikh, as Gulf News reported in November 2000. Most of us are familiar with HH’s initiatives to increase accountability in all spheres of work in the government. By demanding punctuality, discipline, innovation and eradicating corruption, to list a few, HH has raised the standards of service. To foster Dubai’s drive for quality, a calendar published by the ‘Dubai Government Excellence Program’ in 1999 had many of Sheikh Mohammed’s quotation and HH’s favorite quote too.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must
outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It know it must
run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gazelle or a lion.
When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
Recognizing that technology alone cannot assure success, HH has set up scholarships for study in the best academic institutions for the youth in the country and taken various initiatives to build up the local human resources. HH’s fascination with technology has been instrumental for allowing us instant Internet access at our homes and school too. In my view, His Highness’s passion for quality is worth emulating in schools, because schools too are part of the service sector. In fact our school letterhead acknowledges this notion by reinforcing that it is ‘A community service of Al Habtoor Group’. In his inaugural speech at the Second International Conference on the Development of Education through Technology reported by Gulf News on May 15, 2001, HH said,
In the first conference two years ago I gave directives to officials to speed
up the working out of practical plans to help push education to world
standards that keep pace with comprehensive development in our country.
I confirmed the need to redesign education to match the era of information
Technology…The communication and information revolution has changed
many educational theories. We are living in a time of the smart school… a
school which is open day and night… Our education system must open
windows of knowledge for students and give them a free hand in selecting
specialties, asking questions and finding answers, and helping them to improve
their capabilities, skills and talents’.
EIS, founded in 1991, has grown over the years and now enrolls over 1700 students representing at least 70 nationalities. The school has had its periods of change and in 1997, the developmental planning at the school had taken on a new impetus. A decision had been made to pursue ‘Accreditation for Growth’ through the protocol developed by the Middle States Association Commission of Secondary Schools in Philadelphia. In May 1999, the school achieved accreditation by the Middle States Association and agreed on a Mission Statement, Belief Statement and Objectives. Recently the owners of the school approved a comprehensive computer development plan in May 2001.
The Chairman of the Al Habtoor Group, Mr. Khalaf Al Habtoor regularly articulates his concerns in the column of Al Shindaga making his comments on the issue of the day. I was fascinated with one particular issue. I would urge you to read the entire text of his comments by clicking on Chairman’s Message in the January 2001 issue because it is relevant to our discussions in this session. He raises numerous issues there and calls for a drastic need to reform our educational system. He refers to the following among other things:
· Need for a flexible education system,
· Encouraging self learning rather than rote learning
· Enabling students to think and discover facts for themselves
Such efforts towards school improvement also reflect the concern of the policy makers in the country. For instance, the Abu Dhabi National Consultative Council articulated its concerns about the falling educational standards, reported in Gulf News on May 29, 2001. Three aspects are noteworthy:
1. The council called for the modernization of the education system, in particular the introduction of computers in schools at all education levels.
2. Members called for a strong role for local education zones in the implementation of education policies and a review of the school syllabus.
3. In addition, the council said it wanted to see an increased role for parents’ associations to boost coordination between schools and parents.
Coming back to the subjects, the science department at EIS groups students as mixed ability classes. The students are prepared for a two-year Coordinated Science Double Award course for the IGCSE examination. Two of the classes I teach are extended classes (in which the students could score grade BB or higher) and the third class is a probation group (in which the students are moved to an extended or core curriculum at the end of Grade 9. For students following the core curriculum, the highest grade possible is a CC).
For those familiar with the United Kingdom’s National Curriculum, this age group is referred to as Key Stage 3. The government’s current strategy is to make education for 11 to 14 year-olds challenging, demanding, vigorous and inspiring across the whole curriculum.
Although the students in EIS do not follow the National Curriculum, they take an exam administered by the IGCSE and EDEXCEL. For Key Stage 3, the government has outlined Schemes of Work in the Secondary Science Teacher’s Guide, delineating the principles for constructing a scheme of work in science. This is a model some teachers could use to plan their lessons.
While the purpose of this study is not to focus on the National Curriculum, I personally favor the implementation of a standards-based curriculum from the middle school upwards. I am referring to the National Curriculum in this study just to refer to a standards-based model of curriculum design. In my opinion, a standards-based curricular design would be worth implementing across the whole school from K-12 because they can facilitate the achievement of aims and objectives in a practical manner. By standards, I am referring to both content and performance standards of the students.
Philosophy
Though they were written almost three-quarters of a century ago, Whitehead’s[1] statements in his essay The Aims of Education inspire me to this day because of its relevance to our times. At the outset he states:
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane
feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely
well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we
should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert
knowledge in some special direction…
This quote also reinforces and clarifies important aspects about the two themes that I have referred to above. The operative words I would like to highlight are ‘expert knowledge’, ‘merely well-informed’, ‘culture’ and ‘humane feeling’. Whitehead argues that the primary objective of intellectual development is self-development. While referring to the curriculum, he cautions against loading it with inert ideas, ideas that cannot be assimilated or applied in new situations. I could immediately appreciate this, having endured two decades of an educational system that rewarded information recall rather than encouraged application. From the beginning I have held the motto, ‘What you teach, teach thoroughly’, just as Whitehead has remarked. This I believe will help students demonstrate their competence in a range of levels, from simple knowledge and recall to application and evaluation questions as laid out in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Early on in my teaching career, I had developed an appreciation for humanistic[BS3] vision of Maslow[2] and Rogers[3]. These two people pioneered the study of human motivation and relationships. I believe both these aspects are critical for effective instruction to facilitate student learning. Motivation is a major factor that will enable the students to remain lifelong learners. Likewise, establishing rapport and a personal relationship with the students, makes it possible for the teacher to engage the students in meaningful learning. Nelson Mandela in the closing remarks of his talk at the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 observed:
What is crucial is that a ruler must love his people.
When he does so he will be able to raise the living standards of people.
If we replace the words, ruler with teacher, people with pupils and living with learning, these words become relevant to what we are discussing today. In my opinion, the the various domains of emotional intelligence and other theories of social intelligence, ‘buzz words’ of the day, stem from the developments on the humanistic ideas proposed by Maslow and Rogers.
Theories of learning
With students and teachers coming
from such varied backgrounds and cultures, the choice of a particular style or
blend of styles for instruction would depend on not only the teachers’ personal
backgrounds but also the aptitude, ability and attitude of the students who are
being instructed at any given time.
I had pointed out earlier that there is a wealth of information on the web that is useful, although some of it is unreliable and even offensive. We must teach our students how to separate the wheat from the chaff. The ability to discern, differentiate and distill the essentials from this mass of information is vital if the web is to remain useful. This obviously does not apply only to the web. The other day, in Oscar Wilde’s satire, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Algernon remarks ‘More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read’.
Most of us have gone through teacher training or teacher certification courses in our careers. At that time we’ve come across several theories of learning that we can use to plan our lessons. I should confess that there are moments when I have felt that this process is so pedantic and impractical. Part of the problem could simply have been the mode of delivery that was used by my instructors. In any case, as teachers and educators we have a major responsibility towards the students we educate. It is imperative that we constantly reexamine our own philosophies and techniques used for instruction. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says:
Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly.
I often use analogies with my students to facilitate understanding and relating examination success with winning in the game of FreeCell is one of them! When one starts a new game, the screen appears daunting, much like a 2-3 hour examination, because 52 cards have to be moved to the home cell to win. However, with two traits, confidence and persistence, most of the games can be won with relative ease. I would like to share with you now Gagne’s theory of learning, a theory that had its origins in military training settings! It is practical and therefore I have used it as a framework to illustrate my sample lesson plan. Gagne’s theory used nine instructional events along with their corresponding cognitive processes:
(1) gaining attention (reception)
(2) informing learners of the aims and objective (expectancy)
(3) stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
(4) presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
(5) guiding the learning (semantic encoding)
(6) eliciting performance (responding)
(7) providing feedback (reinforcement)
(8) assessing performance (retrieval)
(9) enhancing retention and transfer (generalization)
I have utilized these nine instructional events as a framework to write out my lesson plan for this unit on ‘Transferring energy by heating’. It is important for the students to understand the concept of specific heat capacity[BS4] in this unit because they are expected to apply their knowledge in various situations. Again, while there are numerous links on the web, I could not find anything on specific heat capacity that was particularly useful, except the one above.
Speaking of organizations, schools need to examine the difficulties that they have, and take into account the different kids of resources that are available. There are some schools, such as EIS, that are well equipped. Some others are not. Scientific apparatus, textbooks, educational multimedia materials such as videos and CD-ROM’s are only tools, just like technology. They have to be utilized by competent teachers to facilitate learning. Although a thorough discussion of this topic is outside the scope of this presentation, these considerations are important before we set out to change anything. Dewey had suggested this approach as early as 1916 in his famous book Democracy and Education.
For instance, experiments in the physics laboratory have a notoriety of not working often. Some of you may have heard the quote: ‘If it moves it is biology, if it smells it is chemistry and if it doesn’t work, then it is physics’. Technology can help here in many ways.
By recording the evidence when it works and it doesn’t, students can be presented with real-time data. Of course, it is important for the students learn it themselves by doing it. The idea of introducing technology is not to deny them the experience of learning by doing. (I will elaborate on this later). Neither is it to engender behaviorism through rote learning. The idea of recording the experiments is to utilize them to design instruction online like I have illustrated in my lesson plan. The advance organizers that is mentioned here, reinforces the reception learning that Ausubel has emphasized. The photographs and questions that follow in http://www.innathansworld.com/physics/thumbnailheat.htm have been selected to serve as a bridge between new learning materials and the existing ideas of the subjects.
Further, by utilizing technology, we can upload and share information about numerical practical aspects in the curriculum. For instance, in the above case where a student has not done the experiment to determine the specific heat capacity, s/he can at least visualize one such experiment that is from a reliable and authentic source.
At one time, my colleague and I had a combined lesson with the students to introduce them to the web and show them how they can utilize the web in a productive manner. By having our websites linked, we don’t duplicate our work but provide pointers to the students for accessing other valuable resources. Students whether we like it or not, spend a lot of time on the computer, chatting, playing games and surfing online to name a just a few. We can practically guide them in the use of this remarkable too. I believe that our own unique personalities too can flourish in this diversity. Teachers can in this manner, subtly appeal to the intelligence and sensibilities of the students.
I would have liked to put my other ideas down but the time is too short to go into them. But one other person whose ideas are really useful for us as teachers is Vygotsky. Where do we pitch our lessons? That’s one nagging question. Well, Vygotsky provides us with the answer. He says, it would help to focus on the ‘zone of proximal development’. That’s a region (including both knowledge and skills) that students are not capable of handling on their own, but can cope with, if they have help from their teachers. This I reckon is what Martin’s been referring to as HIGH CHALLENGE, LOW STRESS.
Other interesting links:
Multimedia Lab
For my diagnosis, I have used box-and-whiskers plots. To continue this research on the influence of technology, I propose to do t-tests in which I shall compare the results of the subjects to various assessments used. I shall also study their responses to a questionnaire I will design soon. I want to see how they respond to this questionnaire after I have instructed them on another unit from the IGCSE physics syllabus, ‘Force and Motion’, [page 52 in the link Coordinated Science Double Award Science]. However, for this unit I will deliberately rely less on technology and use traditional modes of instruction. In both the units, the subjects are expected to master only one formula.
Although the mean is the most popular measure of central location, I have chosen the median[BS5] to analyze my data for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, most of our normal classes have scores that are unusually large or small, values that statisticians would refer to as outliers. There are studies that have shown that there is a 7-year cognitive gap sometimes in our classes, and the median is less sensitive to these extreme values!
Secondly, with the median value, quartiles[BS6] and the IQR[BS7] we can display them beautifully using the ‘Box Whiskers plot’ or simply ‘box plot’[BS8]. These provide us with a visual summary of the students’ assessment results at a glance. The line in the box plots displays the median score, the score that divides the entire data set into two equal halves, or the 50th percentile of the class. The first quartile Q1 is the 25th percentile of the class and the third quartile Q3 is the 75th percentile of the class. Thus the box shows the spread in the middle 50% of the class. The data points that lie outside the box are the outliers, and these data point’s behavior is outside the “observed norm”. Typically these data points (both the outliers and extreme outliers) are dropped from the analysis. They are represented by the whiskers and represent the lower and upper fourth of the distribution. The distance between the extreme ends of the whiskers is the range[BS9].
Questions
With all the holidays and other disruptions coming our way, I’ve not been able to get further in my study. The box plot I have showed you above will help me diagnose the results of my assessment. Some questions that come to my mind straight away include:
Is technology a factor that significantly affects student performance? Specifically:
[1] Whitehead, Alfred North (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays, New York: Macmillan.
[2] Maslow, Abraham (1970), Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed., Harper & Row.
[3] Rogers, Carl R. (1961), On Becoming A Person, Houghton Mifflin Company
[BS1]Hyperlink is an electronic link that will provide you direct access from this document to another link on the world wide web. You can go directly to those links by clicking on the UNDERLINED BLUE text, indicating a hyperlink.
[BS2]Cognition refers to the development and reorganization of mental processes in the brain. Martin’s been referring to this as brain research, and that’s one way of expressing this complex process.
[BS3] The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘humanism’ as a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.
[BS4]This physical quantity refers to the amount of heat energy that must be supplied to raise the temperature of 1 kg of a substance through 1 0C. Heat energy (Q) is calculated using the formula Q = mcΔθ, where m is the mass of the substance, c is the specific heat capacity and Δθ refers to the change in temperature.
[BS5]The median of a data set is the middle value after the data has been ranked in order of size. It divides the data set into two halves. For an odd number of student scores, the middle value is the median. For an even number of student scores, the average of the two middle values would give the median.
[BS6]The lower quartile Q1 is the median of the lower half of the data set, and the upper quartile Q3 is the median value of the upper half of the data set.
[BS7]The distance between the first and the third quartile gives the range or spread of the middle 50% of the students’ scores and is called the interquartile range (IQR).
[BS8]The ends of the box are at Q1 and Q3, and called the left and right hinges of the box. A vertical line is drawn within the box to indicate the median value (or the second quartile) Q2. The lines that are drawn from the left end of the box to the lower extreme (lowest score), and from the right end of the box to the upper extreme (highest score) are called the whiskers.
[BS9]The range gives the spread between the largest and smallest values, thus providing a quick but simplistic measure of variation in the data set.