C h a P t e r t h r e e
Organizing idea
Building categories that hold information and let us manipulate them is possibly the basic component of what we consider to be intelligence.
To look at a scene and see beyond the specific items to how they belong together . . . well, think about what that means to us.
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c e n a r I o a Personal InvestIgatIon: what Makes eleCtrICIty?Eight- year- old Seamus is apparently playing in the kitchen. In front of him are a number of plates. On one is a potato, cut in quarters. Another contains an apple, similarly cut. The others contain a variety of fruits and vegetables. Seamus pushes into the segments of potato a number of copper and zinc plates that are wired together and to a tiny lightbulb. He nods with satisfaction when the bulb begins to glow. He disconnects the bulb, attaches a voltmeter, examines it briefly, and then reattaches the bulb. He repeats the process with the apple, examining the
bulb and voltmeter once again. Then come the raspberries, lemon, carrot, and so on. His father enters the room and Seamus looks up. “I was right about the rasp-berries,” he says, “we can use them as in a battery. But, some of these other things. . . .”
Seamus is, of course, classifying fruits and vegetables in terms of whether they can interact with metals to produce electric current.
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c e n a r I o a FIrst grade ConduCts an InvestIgatIonIn a first grade in Canada, Lisa Mueller talks to her students about their next proj-ect, which is the study of reproductive mechanisms in plants. Using buckets con-taining seeds, bulbs, and tubers from various plants, she will ask students to classify them according to their characteristics using trays with compartments into which they can sort the seeds, bulbs, and tubers. Then, the students will be asked to raise questions about their categories. Finally, Lisa will give them soil and containers, and the students will plant them under various conditions and watch as they ger-minate and begin to grow stalks and leaves. Figure 3.1 shows the buckets and trays
a. explaining the data and the trays. b. Making categories FIgure 3.1
a. b.
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ChaPter three Learning to Learn Inductively 39
as she explains their use and the students in the act of classifying and reporting their categories to the other students. Then, in Figure 3.2, we see the whiteboard as the teacher records the characteristics focused on by the students and some of the questions they ask, such as “Will the big seed grow into a big plant?” and “Will the purple bulb grow into a purple plant?”
As the students begin to plan their experiments and test their hypothesis, they consider ways they can alter the conditions they provide:
• Will more or less sunlight make a difference?
• Will amounts of water make a difference?
• Will how deeply they are planted affect growth?
Lisa records these questions and provides each student with a manual to record the conditions they will create. The students also begin to label the containers. The assistant principal, who grows plants as a hobby, provides the class with an ultra-violet light so that varying degrees of sunlight can be provided.
Figure 3.3 shows the planting taking place. In Figure 3.4 you can see some of the labeled containers.
raising questions FIgure 3.2
Bruce Joyce
As the students tend their plantings and observe the results, the teacher can help them connect to sources on the web that provide information about the plants from which the seeds, bulbs, and tubers were selected. For example, see The Better Homes and Gardens Plant Encyclopedia (www.bhg.com/ gardening/
plant- dictionary) and the United States Department of Agriculture Plants Database (http:// plants.usda.gov).
Planted the seeds, bulbs, and tubers FIgure 3.4
Planting the seeds, bulbs, and tubers FIgure 3.3
Bruce Joyce
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An important reminder: without hands-on experience, consulting the web or print sources can be a superficial exercise— looking for answers developed by others but without the information on which these ideas were grounded can result in misconceptions and shallow understandings. The investigations by the students should provide them with a sense of how knowledge is created.
We find ourselves in complete agreement with the recommended standards generated by the Academy of Sciences, where laboratory experience grounds the material that is presented in textbooks and digitally (National Research Council, 2012).
Cooperative/ inductive inquiry teaching and learning is similar across grades and curriculum areas. Lisa’s first- grade class is working in a fashion we can imagine for upper- grade and secondary students. Classifying poems in a class on English literature is not very different from gathering and clas-sifying plants.
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c e n a r I o PlantIng BulBs on the FIrst day oF sChoolIn an investigation in line with Lisa Mueller’s inquiry with her first- grade students, Diane Schuetz also provided her first- grade students (on the first day of school!) with sets of tulip bulbs to be classified. The students formed groups according to size, whether two were joined together (“Some have babies on them”), whether they had “coats,” or whether they had the beginnings of what looks like roots.
Now the students are planting their bulbs, trying to find out whether the variation in attributes they identified will affect how the tulips grow. (“Will the big ones [bulbs] grow bigger?” “Will the babies grow on their own?” and so on.) She has designed the science curriculum around the basic processes of building catego-ries, making predictions, and testing their validity.
We stress that our students are natural conceptualizers. Humans organize information all the time, comparing and contrasting objects, events, emotions—
everything. To capitalize on this natural tendency, we arrange the learning environment and give tasks to students to increase their effectiveness in form-ing and usform-ing concepts, and we help them consciously develop their skills for doing so. Over the years we have generated guidelines for shaping the environ-ment and tasks that facilitate concept formation. As students become more skilled in inductive learning, we modulate our behavior, helping them create appropriate environments and tasks. Learning how to think inductively is the critical goal and students need to practice it, not just be led through it. We are fortunate to have the benefit of a large body of research as we shape contem-porary models for learning and teaching inductively. The result is considerable
clarity for remarkably direct ways of teaching a critical and complex process by many investigations experienced throughout the years of schooling. The guidelines for designing those inquiries are straightforward.
One is focusing the investigation— helping the students concentrate on a domain (an area of inquiry) they can master, without constricting them so much that they can’t use their full abilities to generate ideas. At first we do this by presenting the students with data sets that provide information in the domain that will be the focus of the lesson or unit and by asking them to study the attributes of the items in the set. A simple example is to present kindergar-ten or first- grade students with cards containing several letters from the alpha-bet and ask them to examine them closely and describe their attributes. The domain is the alphabet: letters and their names. Another example is to present fifth- or sixth- grade students with a data set containing statistical data on the countries from a region of the world— say, Latin America— and ask the stu-dents to study the data on each country carefully. The domain is Latin American countries, with the subdomain of statistical data.
Second is a drive to conceptual control— helping the students develop con-ceptual mastery of the domain. In the case of the alphabet, the goal is to dis-tinguish the letters from one another, and to develop categories by grouping letters that have many, but not all, attributes in common. The students will learn to see the alphabet in terms of similarities and differences. They will also find those letters in words, and when they have made categories of letters with the same shape (as putting a half- dozen Bs together), they will learn the names of those letters. The letters will be placed on charts in the classroom along with words that contain them. In the case of the Latin American countries, the stu-dents will classify the countries according to the demographic data provided in the set, moving from single- attribute categories such as population and per capita income to multiple- attribute categories such as determining whether variables like education levels, fertility, and income are related. They will be able to see Latin America in terms of those categories, a step toward the con-ceptual control that will emerge as they add more data to their set and develop advanced categories, gaining metacontrol by developing hierarchies of con-cepts to gain further mastery of the domain.
The third guideline is converting conceptual understanding to skill. In the case of the alphabet, this is exploring letter– sound relationships and how to use them in reading and spelling, where recognition evolves to conscious appli-cation in word identifiappli-cation. In the case of the Latin American countries, the skills are in the development of multiple- attribute categories and generating and testing hypotheses (such as studying whether per capita income is related to fertility rates or education levels).
All aspects of the learning environment play important roles, from the development of the learning community, the creation of the data sets, and the
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learning tasks— classification, reclassification, and development of hypothe-ses. Also, the teacher observes the students and scaffolds their inquiry by help-ing them elaborate and extend their concepts. In the alphabet example, tasks like “which letters are most like the ‘A’ and are most likely to be confused with it?” would be generated. In the Latin American example, tasks like
“what other variables might be correlated with levels of literacy?” would be generated.
As the students learn to build and extend categories (concepts), they take on increased responsibility for the process. For example, they learn to build data sets that are relevant to the domains being studied. Our kindergarten/
first- grade students use their word charts to develop data sets, at first with explicit guidance (“Here are three words that begin the same. Can you add to my list?”) and later by looking at the list and sorting the words independently according to how they begin and end. Our young scholars on Latin America learn to add variables to the data base using statistical sources and expository sources like encyclopedias. As their study of nations proceeds, they will be able to create data sets that enable them to compare and contrast entire regions.
The inductive model leads students to collect information and examine it closely, organize the information into concepts, and manipulate those concepts.
Used regularly, this strategy increases students’ abilities to form concepts effi-ciently and increases the range of perspectives from which they can view information.
| I ntellectual, Social, and PerSonal Growth
Learning to inquire inductively enhances the inborn ability to categorize (Klauer & Phye, 2008). Students construct knowledge (see Vygotsky, 1986) and teachers facilitate (scaffold) their inquiry. As students learn to develop con-cepts, the learning of information, concon-cepts, and skills are enhanced. Conceptual level— the ability to gather information and integrate it— is enhanced as well (see Hunt & Sullivan, 1974; Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2009).
Aristotle had it right. Humans can learn through disciplined inquiry.
When curriculum and instruction capitalize on the inborn ability to study the environment, organize information, and conduct investigations, increased cognitive ability occurs. Other models and other families of models are also effective and reach some of the same goals, and we need those in our reper-toire as well.
Students learn to collect data when studying a topic or solving a problem.
They learn to organize the data and study its nature— the attributes of the information they are collecting. They further organize the data into
categories and develop names for those categories, then build hypotheses and test them, often seeking more data to enrich their inquiry. None of these tasks are complex, but they have to be learned. Superficial classification does not further inquiry and can actually impede it. Even at the K– 1 level many worthwhile concepts have multiple attributes, as we can see in Lisa Mueller’s first- grade inquiry.
The differences between inductive inquiry in the primary grades and in high school and beyond is more in the complexity of the material being studied and the maturity of the students than in the process. Asking first- grade stu-dents to classify nations is not feasible. Classifying vegetation in their environ-ment is well within their capacity, as is their ability to classify words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, we do not want to underestimate our students.
First- and second- grade students can enter the world of global information by comparing their neighborhood with a neighborhood in another country using data from the web and later from informants found in those countries. In the previous scenario, in which students classified seeds, bulbs, and tubers, the students connected to a first- grade class in a school in Delhi, India. The stu-dents in both settings collected information about life in each other’s cultures to make sense of what they learned.