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.