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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 8, Issue 1, Article
16 (June, 2007) Kok Siang TAN Using “What if..” questions to teach science |
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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 8, Issue 1, Article
16 (June, 2007) Kok Siang TAN Using “What if..” questions to teach science |
Discussion
The teacher-talk section lasted about ten minutes. Students took about another ten minutes to think about how to pose and write down the questions. This involved closely studying the diagram on the projector screen, generating possibilities on how the questions may be written, and making sense of the questions and possible responses if they know the answers. This was what one student did – she provided answers to her own questions. (See Annex A, last example)
The next twenty minutes were spent on facilitating peer responses to the questions. It is interesting to note that the students came from two classes and may not have known each other well. Although this is may be an assumption, what is amazing was that they were able to warm up to a total stranger, the remedial teacher, in just a couple of minutes. They were chatty and fully engrossed in contributing to possible answers to their peers’ questions. There was laughter, an occasional argument and of course, delightful comments like “Ah, we didn’t know that!” or “Oh, now I see!” (for example, when the teacher commented that theoretically, replacing the Bunsen burner with a candle would still lead to pure water being collected as the distillate, but in practice, this would be a slower and a less efficient process). They also expressed surprise that the thermometer is not an essential piece of apparatus in the set up.
The entire classroom learning experience threw up several interesting and noteworthy teaching-learning issues for science teachers.
(1) Modeling real life learning experiences.
Reflective learning strategies, like the use of “what if” questions, can be effectively applied to classroom situations. These learning experiences are, in effect, models of real life problem-solving and learning experiences (Associated Press, 2007; CNN, 2003; Straits Times, 2003). By posing “what if” questions on the distillation set up, students not only get to see the “problem” from different angles, they also have to generate different possibilities and interpret the situation in different ways.
(2) Engagement of dialogic activity.
Students were actively engaged in generating possibilities, defending their ideas, and developing deeper insights through social interactions with peers. There were a lot of opportunities for student-student and teacher-student communication. Plain knowledge dissemination and routine assessment tasks following a traditional lecture-demonstration lesson would at best result in students being able to understand the basic technical concepts and to apply the knowledge within a very limited scope (that is, within the curricular requirements).
(3) New knowledge and learning opportunities.
From the students’ “what if” questions and the corresponding responses from the floor, including those from the teacher, new knowledge and challenges arose. Many of these were surfaced from the discussions and some could even be extended into mini projects or investigative activities in the laboratory. Although several learning situations arising from students’ questions and responses (Tables 2 and 3) are not within the curricular requirements, new learning experiences gained from this lesson could help students transfer their observation and analytical skills to other learning situations in future.
The experience may be refreshing but several concerns have also been identified.
(1) Readiness of the teacher.
In facilitating the discussion, the teacher has to be knowledgeable on the topic and open to unfamiliar learning situations. She or he has to be ready to accept students’ responses with some degree of plausibility and make connections between the students’ questions and responses with the technical details involved in the topic. In the school context, it may be necessary to link the students’ responses and ideas to what they are expected to learn from the prescribed curriculum (that is, from the syllabuses and textbooks). Although not every teacher is ready for such unpredictable learning-teaching situations, new learning situations like these could engage the teacher as a co-learner with the students, albeit an advanced one.
(2) Time constraints and proper closure for the lesson.
It is important to have a proper closure for the lesson. This means a good control over the time spent in the various stages of the lesson (from teacher talk to posing of question, peer responses and finally the summary). The teacher will need to tie up loose ends before summarizing the students’ contributions and presenting the entire concept to them. If necessary, a separate lesson should be conducted to evaluate the students’ understanding and abilities to apply newly acquired knowledge and skills. The concern here is that this remedial lesson was taught to a class of only ten students and it took about 40 minutes. To conduct a proper lesson of 60 to 70 minutes and to 40 students may not be as simple, especially when the more abstract science concepts and topics are being taught. Time constraint may hamper the facilitation of the students’ discussion for it to be as effective.
(3) Follow-up learning opportunities.
With the teacher’s experience, it would be possible to identify follow-up learning opportunities from this lesson. Some activities may be experimental, like letting students investigate by comparing the effectiveness of using a Bunsen burner and candles in a distillation set up. Other activities may involve evaluation of students’ ability to analyse information. For example, students may be asked to comment on the effectiveness of the distillation process based on two sets of temperature data of water leaving the condenser’s outlet - one set with water entering from the top of the condenser and another set from the bottom.
Although there is yet any research evidence to support the effectiveness of using ‘what if’ questions in a science lesson, observations from this lesson seem to suggest that students will show a high degree of motivation during and after such a lesson. They were actively on task, generating the questions, and discussing the responses during the peer response stage. At the end of the lesson, the students commented that the lesson was interesting. The teacher agreed but confessed that he had only prepared one diagram to teach the lesson while the rest of the teaching materials (the questions and responses) actually came from them. The students unanimously agreed in a choral reply, “That’s why!” Their enthusiasm could therefore support the assertions from research on the use of students’ questions, that students’ motivation to learn is driven by their own questions, especially if they can ask the right questions and answer them (Chin and Chia, 2004).
Copyright (C) 2007 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 8, Issue 1, Article 16 (June, 2007). All Rights Reserved.
