STEM Integration in K-12 Education by Margaret Honey

Author:Margaret Honey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Learning from Real-World Situations

One hallmark of integrated approaches, though not unique to them, is the use of real-world situations or problems. They can bring STEM fields alive for students and deepen their learning, but they may also pose particular challenges for them.

There is evidence that use of detailed concrete situations with rich perceptual information can prevent students from identifying the abstract structural characteristics needed to transfer their experiences to other settings. Goldstone and Sakamoto (2003) and Sloutsky and colleagues (Kaminski et al. 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Sloutsky et al. 2005) found disadvantages to increasing levels of perceptual richness, especially when the added features were irrelevant to the structural features the students were meant to learn. Goldstone and Sakamoto (2003) found that the effects of the perceptual richness differed depending on students’ initial capabilities: students who were already able to attend to the abstract features of a situation were unlikely to be distracted by perceptual richness, whereas those who had difficulty grasping the abstract information were more likely to be distracted by superficial features.

It may be that real-world situations can be designed to encourage students to attend to the critical (as opposed to irrelevant) features of the situation. Kaminski and colleagues (2009) tested this idea by having students learn a mathematical rule either with entirely generic materials, so the rule’s connection to the symbols was entirely arbitrary, or with materials in a familiar context that follows the rule (in this case pictures of beakers of liquid combined with some left over). They found again that the relevant concreteness had advantages for learning of the particular rule, but that the generic materials resulted in better transfer to another context that followed the same rule but in which the objects didn’t compel the rule as they had in the relevant concrete learning materials. Although Kaminski and colleagues do not test claims about rich contexts directly (their “concrete” condition is an abstract image meant to resemble real objects), this work does reveal some of the trade-offs for perceptually rich and lean curriculum materials when measuring learning and transfer.

One implication of this research is that classroom instruction designed to promote the use of knowledge across different contexts should include instruction in the abstract or generic representations of the concept being taught. Teachers should not expect students to be able to infer the underlying symbolic or abstract representation of a problem by solving the problem using a single concrete instantiation (e.g., Goldstone and Sakamoto 2003; Goldstone and Son 2005; Kaminski et al. 2006a, 2006b; Sloutsky et al. 2005).

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