Powerful Task Design by John Antonetti & Terri Stice

Author:John Antonetti & Terri Stice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2019-06-08T20:19:18.680699+00:00

Figure 4.14 A Trapezoid and a Rhombus

TRUST THE LEARNERS!

Name the Thinking! There is one more consideration to keep the task strategy rigorous: The teacher must make certain that students capture the naming of the patterns, truths, or attributes they find. This naming of the thinking in this strategy leads to concept attainment and vocabulary development.

Let’s go back in time and look at the concept attainment model. Based upon the work of Jerome Bruner (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 2009), concept attainment is an indirect instructional strategy of Generating and Testing Hypotheses. Teachers plan for the seeing and naming of a concept, but do not direct learners to see it or point out what they are seeing. Students are tasked with figuring out the common attributes of a group or category or content by comparing and contrasting examples and nonexamples.

A kindergarten classroom might have a collection to consider that includes a hermit crab, a roly-poly (isopod), and a worm. The nonexamples might include a rock, a drinking straw, and a crayon. As the students brainstorm a list of commonalities amongst members of the example group, they may hypothesize that the group is living things, things that can move, or things you find under rocks. All of these are plausible hypotheses and exhibit analysis of commonalities.

It is then the teacher’s responsibility (and privilege) to be fully present and prepared enough to provide more examples and nonexamples to clarify the plausible hypotheses to the concept she needs to reach. Simply forcing the learners to consider that a ship is another nonexample allows them to eliminate the things that can move and things you find under a rock. To further the testing of the remaining hypothesis, as well as bring more richness to the concept at hand, the class is then tasked with coming up with more examples of living things as well as nonexamples.

It is interesting to note that the same collection of creatures can be presented in an upper-grade science class to elicit the concept of invertebrates. The inability to actually see the absence of a backbone may cause students to struggle more to figure out the missing attribute, especially when the nonexamples are presented. Obviously, the nonexample set would be quite different from the set used in our kindergarten example.

In essence, Generating/Testing Hypotheses is finding patterns of similarity and checking for consistency within the group. We have found in classrooms two very important design considerations in planning these tasks: The original pattern set should consist of exactly three examples before including more examples. And those examples should look as different as possible while still retaining the essential attribute or concept. This allows the learners to compare two members of the group for an initial finding and then check it against the third as a safety test before the idea is articulated. The gradual addition of more examples keeps the brain from being overwhelmed while still demanding testing and reconfirmation of the original hypothesis, or revision to include the new information.

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