The Importance of Prior Knowledge

The Blue Walloo

Over the next few days, we will explore the controversy regarding allocating additional funding to The Blue Walloo. Stakeholders supporting the move have expressed concerns that failure to do so will provide incentive to further defund similar programs. Those opposed state that such funding sets precedents that are difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

Please state and defend your position regarding the funding of The Blue Walloo. You must include supporting evidence and a concise conclusion.

What is wrong with this exercise?

Do you know what The Blue Walloo is? Did you make a guess--and if so, what did you guess?

It could be a night club, an oceanographic exploration, an endangered bird, a novel, a painting, a secret service operation, a cultural event…

What if I gave you the following words to define--would this make the exercise accessible?

blue

controversy

funding

precedents

stakeholders

opponents

concerns

walloo

allocating

programs

Now, try substituting the phrase “The Blue Walloo” with one of the following:

Brexit

Polar bears

The Children’s Festival

The Food Bank

The Museum

The Norther Gateway Pipeline

OK2BME

Foreign Aid to Nigeria

The Humane Society

Municipal snow removal

The Heritage Front

House of Friendship Shelter

ION LRT

International Space Exploration

Arms trade with Columbia

Reception House

The Public Library

Employment Insurance

Medical research

Local hockey team

Local Symphony Orchestra

Safe Injection Site

Automotive Industry

Cyber surveillance

Now try a different one of those. How does the meaning change?

How can we use this exercise to inform our approach to teaching students what they need to know  when learning and improving their reading comprehension?

If you are from outside of southwestern Ontario, you may have found some of the last examples equally mystifying as “The Blue Walloo”.

Students come to us with a wide variety of prior experiences. We have students who have lived in different countries, and different cultures within our own country. Some students are learning English as an additional language. The diversity in cultural and socio-economic backgrounds means that the prior knowledge and vocabulary they understand cannot be assumed. We need to actively build those into our teaching so that there is an accessible context from which students can reflect, build connections, make predictions and evaluate the validity of statements.

Cross-Curricular Considerations

This applies not only to language as a distinct subject area, but all academic areas. Relevant vocabulary needs to be introduced and prior knowledge developed in order to ensure that students are able to access the subject matter.

For example, word problems in math need to use examples that students can understand and relate with. One way of ensuring this is to enlist students to create and share their own word problems.

For content areas such as social studies and science, sharing introductory materials in a variety of reading levels for students to access, keeping an active glossary that is built upon as a class, and reviewing, summarizing and sharing in small and large groups collaboratively can help to provide the necessary prerequisites for content fluency. There are many great sites that can be used to this end, just a few of which include:

National Geographic Kids

Brittanica School Online

PebbleGo

Capstone Interactive Library

Newsela

CNN10

Culturegrams

Kids Info Bits (Gale)

Epic Books

BookFlix

Can Points of View

This is not by any stretch an exhaustive list, but should help provide a starting point. If you teach or attend school in Ontario, the Library Learning Commons site will have links to most of the above resources.

               

Science as Science Does--Some Food for Thought

I have a confession to make: I may have gotten it all wrong.

On an email list I belong to, there was recent discussion about the difference between "recipe science" and "actual" (research-driven) science. This, along with observations I made at the regional science fair in my area, has made me reflect on the subject, along with the general state of science education in Canada (and North America).

I have also been thinking about the Lemonade website and it's focus that certainly leans towards recipe science rather than experimentation.

Sound pedagogy seems to once again butt up with my urge to create and share activities. Looking through my various science pages, there is a great deal of material. It is very hands-on, which is a good thing, but it also tends to be quite prescriptive. Where open-ended exploration, questions and experimentation should be, instead there are detailed steps to complete activities that others have already done.

It isn't always a bad thing; learning concepts through doing can be a great starting point, but it isn't the way science is done either, and it isn't the way children learn best.

About a week ago, I added a Science Fair Guide page to the site in order to allay my guilt in the hopes that it would help visitors make the move from more comfortable activities, such as those found on my Edible Science page into more creative and experimental research-driven science. It's a start, but I've been thinking more about the problem and I know there is more to do.

We have a growing tendency as a society to do more and more things "for" our kids than past generations. Safety, while very important, has caused us to reduce the amount of play and open-ended exploration our children experience. Perhaps all the prescriptive activities in school are a symptom of this trend. 

There is another explanation however, and that is that it is easier for teachers who may not be as comfortable with science to create lesson plans based on predictable activities than on serious inquisitive research. Given the increasing demands of standardized testing, this becomes even more of an issue since open-ended learning can be messy and time-consuming. Certainly more is learned through open-ended learning, but there is a marked lack of certainty that the kind of learning students experience will show up on the test. Knowing the concepts and the results ahead of time means a teacher can match up the activities with the test; it is not the way science is done, but it does comply with the demands of test preparation.

Science class traditionally involves a lesson, a lab in which students replicate a prescribed "experiment", and a written lab report. In the elementary years, it is sometimes even more removed as students watch a teacher (or a video of a teacher) perform a demonstration. Some more progressive schools also have science fairs in which students are encouraged to do their own research and experimentation, however, this is often considered an "extra" and is not the way the majority of classes are run.

Having said that, there are fantastic teachers out there who are willing to take risks to ensure their students learn well, such as this teacher whose grade two class studied bee behaviour and even had their research published in Biology Letters. This shows that not only is it possible to teach science in an open-ended manner, but that this can be at a high level with young children.

Consider the fact that children naturally learn in much the same way as scientists perform research:

• they explore
• they ask questions
• they test hypotheses
• they try different approaches
• they problem solve
• they adjust their activities based on their current level of understanding

So much of what we do as parents and teachers instead involves "showing" and "sharing" rather than encouraging children to take a more active approach to their learning. Science, which could be the easiest subject for young children to explore naturally, is often presented as a pre-packaged activity instead.

I am guilty of this, particularly through my website.

Solutions

The good news is that there are some simple solutions to this problem. It is pretty easy to adapt an activity into an exploration, for instance. Take the very popular silly putty (aka "flubber", "slime" or "gak" etc.) recipe from my site.

By experimenting with different proportions of ingredients, different glue types etc. this can become more of an exploration and discovery-based activity than an end-product focused science craft. 

Another type of activity on my site involves building a model, such as in this rubber-band racer activity. Experimentation can come through varying the body shape and proportions, trying out different lengths and thicknesses of elastics, using different materials for the body, etc. The speed and the distance traveled in different conditions can then be compared.

These are just a couple of examples, but this sort of experimentation can be applied for many of the activities on my site. 

By using examples such as this, it becomes easier to make the transition from prescriptive activities to authentic, original research for teachers and parents who find science to be beyond their comfort level. In fact, this is the way I originally imagined my site would be used, but I see that my presentation has become more prescriptive over time. As I update pages, I will work on this issue. 

Ideally, students will learn how to explore, ask questions and use sound scientific methodology to create and perform experiments to help them learn more about a topic. This is a far cry from following a list of steps to create a replica of a past experiment.

To be clear, there is value in replication, and it forms a vital role in scientific research, but when this is the only aspect of science we encourage in our classrooms, everyone loses.