BP VII

I haven’t personally made that much research yet, simply due to being overloaded with homework these last two weeks. (Phew to 35 hours of work + eight essays/article analysis & two ceramic projects being due at once just this week. Let’s not mention last week.) I have made time to find articles for my topic but for now they are simply waiting in a folder to be read or tossed. I have, however, found my research topic; Changes to the school/learning system and if they are successful or not. Though I haven’t actively read any articles specifically for this, I have read articles useful for this while doing a few article analysis for Child & Adolescence development.

One of which is Direct Instruction vs. Discovery: The Long View by David Dean Jr. and Deanna Kun, which is a report over an experiment done by the authors. They separated a group of equally intelligent children in three groups; The practice group was allowed to develop their own ideas to solve problems provided to them. Direct instruction was given to group two to teach them how to solve the problems. The last group was a combination of practice and direct instruction. The results were curious with direct instruction scoring lowest on most assessments, the bi-group varying, and the practice group starting off rocky then succeeding greatly.

Another article I read was Beyond Active Learning: a Constructivist Approach to Learning by Susan E. Cooperstein and Elizabeth Kocevar-Weidinger. It went over constructive learning in which one does the activity before they learn the objective. (such as a science lab where you do an experiment to learn as opposed to learning about something and then doing the experiment to test it.) The article goes on to explain how the constructivist approach works best in a library.

That’s all I have for this week. Hopefully next week will be more fruitful.