An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Climate Change Issue and Implications for Teaching STEM through Inquiry

The importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and teaching through an inquiry approach, are critical facets in education today. The purpose of this chapter is to share useful observations and recommendations about teaching STEM through inquiry for practicing teachers. Three cases are used to collect data about participant interactions with an interdisciplinary activity related to climate change, human population growth, and atmospheric pollution (e.g., greenhouse gases and smog). Fifty-five participants, most of whom were pre-service teachers, completed a technology-rich activity, post-test assessment, and survey about the experience. The findings discussed include research results, the perspectives of the facilitating instructor, and recommendations for teaching technology-laden investigations through an inquiry approach. In general, the challenges related to teaching with technology and time constraints were found to be significant limiting factors in the success of inquiry-based teaching in STEM.

LOGO and Elementary Mathematics Education in Portugal

In the second part, the authors describe an elementary teachers’ training programme on mathematics education that during four years has every year provided a small time for the exploration of LOGO and promoted its use to teachers in the classroom. They reflect on this program and offer insights on teachers’ resistance to change their practices. The authors conclude the chapter with their own ideas for the implementation of LOGO in a group of schools in the near future.

Cultivating Student-Teachers’ Problem-Solving Abilities by Promoting Utilization of Various Ways of Thinking through E-Learning and E-Portfolio Systems

This chapter presents a teacher training program that promotes the use of various views and ways of thinking in each subject area (e.g., analogy and quantify in mathematics, and 5W1H in Japanese language courses) to cultivate problem-solving abilities. Although these views and ways of thinking are currently objectives in the Japanese National Course of Studies, teachers have not been instructed on how to teach them. The program was part of the Exercise of Integrated Learning, which is a compulsory course according to the Japanese national standards for teacher preparation programs. The course consisted of five three-hour lessons devoted to practice. Two additional sessions, each seven and a half hours long, were conducted with presentations on problem-solving exercises and a workshop on lesson plan revisions, respectively. The content of each practice lesson focused on one of the two following goals: (1) providing experience with problem-solving-related learning and (2) ensuring that teachers are able to create lesson plans for this type of learning activity. The program proposed in this chapter falls into the former category. In the program, students received homework assignments on the e-learning system after each lesson. In these e-learning materials, they practiced applying what they had learned during the lessons, such as problem-solving methodologies and views and ways of thinking in various subject areas. After the five practice lessons, there was a two-week gap before students gave presentations during a presentation session. The learners completed problem-solving exercises using the e-portfolio system the team developed. This e-portfolio system allowed learners to conduct collaborative problem-solving exercises while utilizing the aforementioned views and ways of thinking. Furthermore, learners automatically shared their performance records and outcomes after completing the tasks, and they were able to perform self-evaluations by following a rubric. Finally, the teacher analyzed the effectiveness of the course and revised the program.

Using Levels of Inquiry in the Classroom

The development of major concepts in a science classroom is explored through the instructional framework of varying the level of student inquiry. An exploration experience, interactive demonstration, discovery experiment, and application challenge serve as this framework for increasing the level in which the students ask questions, devise methods to answer these questions, and develop answers to the questions. Instructional technology tools such as classroom response systems, Google Docs, the use of blogs, and WebAssign are integrated into the inquiry experience to support the learning process. This inquiry model shifts the locus of control from the teacher to the student, as the student’s familiarity with new concepts deepens.

Using Digital Stories in a College Level Course on Rocks and Minerals

Digital storytelling juxtaposes the time-honored teaching and learning achievements of storytelling with the modern student’s affinity for technology. Although not commonly used in college science classes, the author incorporated digital storytelling in an upper level undergraduate geology course for majors at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. The overarching purpose of this exercise was to integrate the affective domain of learning within the course context. Informal comments from students indicated that this goal was indeed achieved by this exercise. Students identified technological difficulties and the time commitment necessary to create digital stories as the major hurdles they faced during the exercise. In this chapter, the author describes the course design, learning objectives, educational benefits, and strategies to overcome potential challenges of incorporating digital storytelling in college level science courses.

Technology and the Preschooler

More and more, schools are purposefully utilizing technology in the classroom for learning. As the technology era expands, the age of those interacting with technology seems to be shrinking. Can children in preschool benefit from the use of instructional technology? Children are highly adaptable and learn at faster rates than adults. Their brains are wired for increased synthesis of complex operations such as speech acquisition and even technology. In what way(s) would they best learn from technology? What learning behaviors could help shape preschool curriculum? Examination of how students explore, navigate, and interact with technologies provides direction for best practices in teaching.

Concept Maps as Tools for Learning Scientific Language

Learning scientific language continues to be challenging for many students because of its inherent complexity, volume of specific terminology, and many fields of science which incorporate the same terminology for different applications. In order to more effectively learn and apply the language of science, the authors propose the use of concept mapping. Research on concept mapping suggests that it is more effective than traditional teaching methods in students’ knowledge retention and transfer when compared to control groups that did not use concept mapping, but rather participated in class discussions, attended lectures, and read text passages regardless of educational level, settings, or subject domain (Nesbit & Adesope, 2006). Based on this synthesis of research, teachers are encouraged to adopt concept mapping as a pedagogical strategy in their science classrooms as no detrimental findings have been found related to its use. By providing students with a concept map of the terms which explains how the terms are related to the overarching concept or allowing them to build their own, students can begin to develop a deeper understanding of the language of science.

Getting to the Core

A semester-long project for senior undergraduate students was completed in a capstone course that focused on the analysis of ocean cores from the northern Gulf of Mexico continental shelf. The course was designed to facilitate students’ synthesis of their studies in geosciences by participating in laboratory studies, group work, and scientific writing on a complex project. The course structure, laboratory methods, technology uses and outcomes provide a framework for project-based courses in geosciences which hold inquiry as the central theme using ocean cores as instructional technology.

Learning Statistics with a Multimedia Resource

Researchers have often reported the negative attitude and low performance of students in statistics (Francis, 2002; Gordon, 1995; Ograjenšek & BavdažKveder, 2003). While considerable efforts and research have been undertaken to remedy this situation, researchers, educators, and policy makers have admitted a degree of failure in the teaching and learning of statistics and advocated a radical rethinking in the way statistics education is implemented (Cobb & Moore, 1997; Moore, 1997, 2005; Weldon, 2005). One approach that has been advanced is the use of multimedia instruction. Nolan and Lang (2006) observed that the potential for multimedia to enhance the statistics curriculum is clear, but there are challenges to developing instructional materials that take advantage of the riches of multimedia. It requires more than a simple translation of textbooks into the computer in order to obtain a tool that is effective for learning statistics. While statistical tools like SPSS have improved analyses of data, it has not significantly improved the learning of statistical concepts (Hawkins, Jolliffe, & Glickman, 1992). This has necessitated recommendations that technologies should not only be used as a computational tool, but also as a means for providing students with opportunities to explore conceptual ideas (Franklin & Garfield, 2006). It seems plausible that effectively-designed multimedia resources may help alleviate some of the difficulties students face in learning statistics. This chapter describes a prototype digital resource (StatConquer) for learning about correlation of bivariate data1, an important topic in many introductory statistics courses. The Chapter also explains how application of some principles in cognitive load theory and multimedia learning theory might facilitate students’ understanding of correlation. It is expected that by delineating the pedagogical approach of StatConquer, educators, researchers, policy makers, and instructional designers may adapt this design framework for developing other learning tools.

Fostering Inquiry in Science among Kinaesthetic Learners through Design and Technology

Students in the study developed positive attitudes towards studying science and D&T after the project. The study has opened up a route for linking science and CPA into D&T in a simple way that is within the school D&T and CPA curriculum, and one that places the focus on creativity as an outcome of curricular interaction via an inquiry setting.