Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock identifies 9 categories of instructional strategies that have been shown through research to be effective in the classroom. They base their conclusions on meta-analyses done by researchers at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. It is important to realize that there is much overlap in the strategies and the good techniques in one strategy are often used to advantage to enhance the learning effectiveness of other strategies. Below we list the strategies employed in this web activity. The strategies are listed in order of effectiveness as rated by the average effect size (achievement in standard deviation units).
Identifying Similarities and Differences: Your students can use the strategy of Indentifying Similarities and Differences by noting that the animals on the curve, including themselves, all have a lot of differences in size, shape, color, etc. Some are bipeds and others are quadrepeds. The striking similarity is that their motion data all fall on the same universal curve when plotted as normalized values. This is an important lesson: the same mathematical curve applies to a variety of different animals, thus unifying and organizing understanding, even though the particular animals are very different. Have your students list similarities and differences among the animals on the curve (e.g they all breath, but some have hair and others don't).
Summarizing and Notetaking: Students should take notes as they make their observations and take their data. An effective note taking structure is to use the left side for notes in text, perhaps an outline, and the right hand sides for drawings and other graphical aids that help organize and clarify their observations. In this case the graphical aids could be data tables and plots. Finally, a summary can be written along the bottom as the groundwork that holds the structure together (download an MSWord version of the note taking structure). This method of notetaking would be effective in this activity if students put all their observations together on the same sheet or group of sheets. For the most effective use of this technique, have students discuss and compare their notes and summaries.
Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition: Reinforce students positively as they explore and make progress on their observations and discussions and as they begin to understand and organize their data by plotting and using the power of mathematics. Have the students present their data and analysis so you and the class can recognize their good work. If some groups of students are capable of going on to the more advanced challenges, have them make presentations to the rest of the class. The very best reinforcement and recognition comes from parents, teachers, and other students.
Homework and Practice: You should assign reading about dinosaurs, geological epochs when dinosaurs lived, and motion. Students should tabulate their data, normalize their strides and speeds and plot their data on graph paper. When they are finished with the first two challenges, assign as homework a brief paper summarizing their data and analysis. Make similar assignments for the third challenge and the TRACKS activity. Very high achieving students could be assigned the most difficult step in challenge 4: too simulate a SaberZot that moves according to the universal curve.
Nonlinguistic Representations: This activity is replete with nonlinguistic representations such as graphics and animations. Students will learn more from nonlinguistic actions as they explore Norbesaur and his cousins. If the very high achieving students try Challenge 4 and deconstruct the Squeak project to find out how it works and construct a SaberZot that moves correctly, they will be working with nonlinguistic representations of ideas (programming commands) and mathematics (arithmetic). The natural integration of these representations enhances the learning experience.
Cooperative Learning: Setting up cooperative learning groups is the recommended way to maximize student learning in this activity. Five defining elements of cooperative learning are: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing. Reciprocal Teaching is a research-based strategy that can be used effectively with cooperative groups. The four phases are summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. If you assign groups to work on devising the best measurement system (Challenge 1), it is important for each student to contribute ideas. When working on Challenges 2 and 3, the team members can compare, summarize, analyze, question, clarify and learn mathematics together through discussion.
Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback: Objectives that are set shouldn't be too narrowly focused or learners tend to miss too much related material. For this activity a good objective would be to understand how properly normalized data can be organized on a universal curve. This mathematical behavior occurs commonly in nature and can be used to describe many other phenomena. Students could offer feedback to other students through discussions explaining their data and analysis. If you give your students a test on the activity, research shows that the optimal time is one day after exposure to the material. Feedback on exams or projects has been shown to enhance learning and the best form is an explanation as opposed to just being given the correct answer.
Generating and Testing Hypotheses: Both inductive (abstracting a principle from a set of specific observations) and deductive (using a principle to predict or obtain a specific result) reasoning can be used to advantage to promote learning. Deductive reasoning activities have been shown to be more effective, but it depends on the circumstance. The division into inductive and deductive is often blurred and the concepts are most valuable when considered as two extremes of reasoning. This activity offers an excellent opportunity for students to reason both inductively and deductively and compare the two processes. When students take and plot their initial data, you should encourage them to discuss the data plots and compare their plot to the universal curve with data for different animals. The universal curve concept is arrived at through inductive resoning. Students would use deduction, when they use their data plots and analysis to determine how fast one of Norbesaur's other cousins was moving. It has also been shown valuable for students to explain their reasoning and analysis, which they could do as homework or in class or both if time permits. Part of the assignment could be to compare the processes of induction and deduction.
Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers: These strategies all take advantage of students' prior knowledge and are good ways to start a lesson. As you give cues and ask questions, keep in mind that higher-order questions are more effective and students are more interested in things they already know something about. For example, good starting questions would be "Could dinosaurs run?" and "How would we know?" Remember that it is important to wait after asking your questions to give the students time to collect their thoughts before they respond - you will have a much better discussion. Don't worry if they don't get the correct answers, those are hard questions. The important thing is that your students are challenged to think. Advance organizers are a way of giving your students a brief "heads up" before starting a topic - they aren't outlines or summaries. Research shows the most effective advanced organizers are expository. In this case a story involving a Norbesaur a long long time ago would be effective.
