Classroom Strategies That Work - Generating & Testing Hypotheses & Cues, Questions, & Advanced Organizers

The process of generating and testing hypotheses involves the application and use of knowledge. It is a complex mental process that is often associated with and isolated to science. But take it out of the science context. It's simply a matter of asking, "IF I do this, WHAT might happen? IF that things acts or responds in a certain way, WHAT may happen?"

Researchers suggest the following six tasks for students in classrooms:

1. System analysis: For example, students study the ecosystem and make predictions about what would change if a certain species of animal were altered or removed.
2. Problem solving: Have students look at various solutions given obstacles posed by the problem. 
3. Historical Investigation: Construct hypotheses about historical events for which there is no agreed-upon resolution. (Assassination of JFK.)
4. Invention: Students examine a need and then work to create a solution for the need.
5. Experimental inquiry: Students observe a phenomenon, make a hypothesis about why or how that event happened, and set up an experiment to test their prediction. 
6. Decision Making: Students define a situation and then weigh criteria to decide which choice makes the most sense.

Technology plays a role with hardware items such as probeware for the science experiments. Then, of course, the software applications that can be used for data collection such as Google Spreadsheets or Excel. There are many interactive flash activities on the web for cause and effect as well. Finally, I want to mention Google Earth Historical Imagery. Using the feature within Google Earth allows you to time travel. So you could go back in time and hypothesize what happen to make things appear as they do now. 

The final Classroom Strategy that Works is Cues, Questions, and Advanced Organizers. This strategy focuses on helping students learn to retrieve, use, and organize information. Teachers use cues as explicit reminders or hints about what students are about to encounter. Use technology to create visual cues to help students and post around your room. Teachers use questions to trigger student memory to access their prior knowledge. Using blogs would be a great way to pose questions for students. Blogs allow shy students to voice their thoughts that they may never voice in class.  Advanced organizers are structures provided to students prior to learning to help them classify and make sense of the new content. There are lots of technology applications for students and teachers to use to create graphic organizers which will be the focus of this post. I have written about graphic organizers before, so I am going to add some additional options here.

What are your ideas and thoughts on these two strategies?

This post concludes the series on Using Classroom Strategies that Work in the 21st Century Classroom.

Classroom Strategies that Work - Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback

Wow! What a month! Our district has been transitioning from one email program to another. Part of our jobs as ITFs was to train every single employee in the district on the new email program. Needless to say that is why it has been a while since I posted.

It is the day before Thanksgiving break around here, which means that I have time today to catch up a little bit. So, first thing is to share my thoughts on Marzano's strategy for setting objectives and providing feedback.

Students learn best when they know the goals or objectives of a lesson or activity. Teachers do this by using essential questions, "I Can" statements, rubrics, and graphic organizers. Research indicates that when students know the goal or learning target, their performance increases by 27 percentile points. Teachers should also help students set their own learning goal and can use sentence stems to help them in the process. For example, "As a result of this lesson, I will be able to..."

A great way to incorporate setting objectives and technology is to let students keep a digital portfolio with artifacts for each objective. In our district, we have Google Apps so Google Sites would be an easy way to create portfolios. Other options could be Wikispaces, PBWiki, and the like.

For the feedback portion of this strategy, research indicates four criteria for effective feedback includes:

• Feedback should be corrective in nature.
• Just indicating which answer is right or wrong has a negative impact on achievement. The best feedback includes an explanation of why a choice is correct and why the other choices are not.
• It should be timely.
• Timing is crucial. Immediate feedback right after a test is best. The longer the delay, the less improvement three is in achievement.
• Feedback should be specific.
• When feedback relates specifically to identified knowledge or skill, the student understands what they need to do to improve their performance. Tap into your inner coach!
• Students can provide some of their own feedback.
• Allow students to track their own progress. For example, they might keep a chart of their accuracy, or speed, or both while learning a new skill. 

Technology provides some options to help teachers give feedback. Most of my schools have some type of student response system, but there are free options available online.

Socrative is a free online smart student response systems that is getting great reviews from educators. They provide "educational exercies and games." Socrative works on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Teachers select the activity and students login and interact real time with the material. Reports are available online, but can be saved in a Google Spreadsheet or as an Excel file.

Poll Everywhere is free for 40 participants or less. It provides a great way to create real-time experiences using mobile devices to obtain instant feedback and information.

If you use Google Apps, there is Google Forms. I love Google Forms. They are simple to create and can be used for a multitude of things. One great aspect is the fact that the data is dynamic. It is added to a spreadsheet as the data is collected which allows you to manipulative and analyze. It also has a feature called flubaroo (flubaroo.com) that can be used to grade the data collected from the form. How cool is that!?! For ideas on how to really use Google forms in the classroom, check out this site for 80+ ways.

Please feel free to share other ideas in the comment section.