How Experience Affects Learning
Making Science Relatable and Relevant
What do you see when you look at the image to the left?
Do you think of Campbell's Soup? Starburst? Eggo waffles? How would what you see change if you had grown up in Spain, Canada, or on a farm? Our past experiences change the way in which we see and interpret the world around us. Educators must remember this when they introduce concepts in the classroom. Each student brings a unique set of experiences and ideas to the classroom that will shape the way they interpret content and ultimately see the world around them. |
"If we accept the notion that learning is essentially a process in which individuals use what they already know to construct new meanings, then students' ideas, experiences, and sense-making practices are, simply put, essential building blocks in learning and teaching." -Using Everyday Experience to Teach Science by Warren and Rosebery
The process of learning is making connections between new information and what we already know. We piece ideas together to make sense of them and relate them to things we are familiar with. When teaching students, it is important to consider the experiences they bring to the classroom and the ones they don’t. Unfortunately many students see science as disconnected from other content areas. It is a subject taught in school that is not connected to their lives or to any other subjects. Helping students apply content learned in class to everyday experiences allows them to build pathways between science and the world around them.
Students bring a diversity of experiences to the classroom, and it’s our job to tap into those. Experiences should be integral to our approach to science education. If the curriculum does not include opportunities to tap into experiences students have had, we are missing a wonderful learning opportunity and doing a disservice to our students. If we desire students to learn concepts rather than memorizing them, we should help them build memories and connections to prior experiences.
Experience is a twofold process. Not only is it important to acknowledge and honor the experiences students bring to the class with them, but it's also important to create experiences for them in the classroom. The 5E model of lesson planning helps teachers create these experiences for students. If students don’t have prior experiences to connect to science phenomena, teachers must build those into the lesson. Additionally, we learn through experience, so we have to ask ourselves what we are teaching our students when they sit in desks all day and just listen.
Students bring a diversity of experiences to the classroom, and it’s our job to tap into those. Experiences should be integral to our approach to science education. If the curriculum does not include opportunities to tap into experiences students have had, we are missing a wonderful learning opportunity and doing a disservice to our students. If we desire students to learn concepts rather than memorizing them, we should help them build memories and connections to prior experiences.
Experience is a twofold process. Not only is it important to acknowledge and honor the experiences students bring to the class with them, but it's also important to create experiences for them in the classroom. The 5E model of lesson planning helps teachers create these experiences for students. If students don’t have prior experiences to connect to science phenomena, teachers must build those into the lesson. Additionally, we learn through experience, so we have to ask ourselves what we are teaching our students when they sit in desks all day and just listen.
Why do experiences matter?
One way to see how experiences shape the perceptions of students is to ask them to draw a scientist. I usually do this with my ninth grade students at the beginning of the year. I provide white paper, markers, and colored pencils and the only instructions I give is to draw a scientist. Ninety-five percent of my students draw variations of the image below.
This leads to a conversation about what scientists do and what they may look like. This should also generate a conversation of how women and minorities are underrepresented in STEM fields. Teachers should work to bridge the gap between the science classroom and the outside world. As students begin to see the world around them as scientific, they will start to see themselves as scientists.
Playing the Game of School
Students rarely try to connect what they are learning to the outside world. In fact most students tend to keep academic knowledge separate from world knowledge. Many students do not actually attempt to learn for further use, but rather attempt to get the right answer and receive validation from their teacher. They are playing the game of school. Until recently, I was guilty of this my entire educational career. I got every question right on the test but failed to see how the concept related to anything outside of the science classroom. My teachers made it incredibly easy to play the game of school, and I was only challenged when I had to extend lab results and data to a real-life concept. In my experience, opportunities to leverage prior knowledge were rare, and I do not think I'm the exception. I know many people that were not model students, but they were able to make connections between what they learned and what they saw in the world around them. Even though I had higher scores in class, I am confident they learned much more.
Not only does building in opportunities to share experiences support learning, it enhances student participation. Gone are the days when the teacher was the “Sage on the Stage.” Teachers should be guides on the side as students drive their own learning. How can students drive their own learning? They must participate. They must speak up about what they know, ask questions about science phenomena, and relate prior knowledge to content learned in class. In order for students to do this, they must feel safe and comfortable in your class. You must establish a culture of learning. This does not happen overnight, and may take a considerable amount of time, but the many “ah-hah” moments will be well worth it.
One way I foster curiosity in my class is to provide merits to students that make connections between concepts and ask thought-provoking questions. When students reach a certain number of merits they are awarded prizes like getting into a basketball game free or a mechanical pencil. Another way to make abstract concepts more real is to use POGILs. POGIL, or Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, is an activity in which students work in collaborative groups to unpack concepts. If you serve students of poverty, as I do, many experiences that we have that we take for granted like going to the zoo, camping, having dinner around a table with family, or blowing out candles on a birthday cake are foreign to them. I learned quickly I cannot expect my students to have experienced things that I have. To level the playing field, I try to create experiences for them to relate to. The 5E Model for lesson planning starts with Engagement. I used to think this meant show an interesting video clip, but now I know it is much more than that. Give students an opportunity to experience the concept in some small way. If you are studying electricity, give them a battery, bulb, and wires and watch what happens. If you are studying photosynthesis, plant some seeds in different locations and start taking data. Give the students an opportunity to work with the concepts before they even know what the concepts are. This creates those memories to which connections are made that allows students to learn.
One way I foster curiosity in my class is to provide merits to students that make connections between concepts and ask thought-provoking questions. When students reach a certain number of merits they are awarded prizes like getting into a basketball game free or a mechanical pencil. Another way to make abstract concepts more real is to use POGILs. POGIL, or Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, is an activity in which students work in collaborative groups to unpack concepts. If you serve students of poverty, as I do, many experiences that we have that we take for granted like going to the zoo, camping, having dinner around a table with family, or blowing out candles on a birthday cake are foreign to them. I learned quickly I cannot expect my students to have experienced things that I have. To level the playing field, I try to create experiences for them to relate to. The 5E Model for lesson planning starts with Engagement. I used to think this meant show an interesting video clip, but now I know it is much more than that. Give students an opportunity to experience the concept in some small way. If you are studying electricity, give them a battery, bulb, and wires and watch what happens. If you are studying photosynthesis, plant some seeds in different locations and start taking data. Give the students an opportunity to work with the concepts before they even know what the concepts are. This creates those memories to which connections are made that allows students to learn.
Barriers
Unfortunately there will be naysayers. Teachers that claim there is not enough time to “cover all the standards,” much less build some circuits. My response to that is it is much better to truly understand a few things than barely understand many things. Depth is more valuable than breadth. One of the biggest barriers to getting students to talk about personal experiences in the classroom is timidity. You must create a culture of learning in your classroom. One way to do that is to reward students for speaking up, especially when they’re unsure of themselves. You must provide wait time so that the well-experienced students don’t always have a comment before anyone else can recall an experience. Incorporating projects in which students must draw connections between content and the real world can help. For example, at the beginning of the year, have students write about the science that they encountered over the summer break. At first students may look at you strangely and try to convince you they did not do any science. With some prodding, they may soon realize that cooking is science, lightening is science, and mixing things together is science. Even skateboarding is physics, which is science! Other students will begin to answer until everyone has stated at least one thing that was science. Many students, especially those from poverty are visual learners. Consider incorporating an assignment in which students must visualize important concepts. For example, have students take photos of inertia occurring around them and submit their photo with an explanation of how it demonstrates inertia. As we remove barriers to using prior experiences as learning tools, we will have better participation and increased learning outcomes for students.