I’m not sure how I felt about the Rivero et al. article. A lot this study made me feel like they were kind of forcing their ideas on the subjects. I felt like they were saying “This is how students learn, and this is where you need to be at the end of the study.” They way they go about it makes it seem as if every student learns the same way and that they level they think that teachers need to be on is the only one that is desired. However, one good point was that they were very adamant about making sure that the activities revolved around helping students construct knowledge as opposed to the memorize and regurgitate method of teaching that often results in forgetfulness of the information. I think that it is important to allow students the opportunity to process information and figure some things out for themselves. It is not effective to just feed them a lot of information and not give them the opportunity to see how it applies and formulate their own ideas about it.
This idea that students need to be more actively engaged in learning seems to be a running theme in all of the articles. Especially the Rivero et al. and Park et al. articles, they seem to really emphasize the need for teachers to produce lesson plans and use teaching methods that allow students to be more actively involved in their learning experience. It is a very important aspect of teaching, I think. I think that students that are actively involved, as opposed to sitting and listening to lectures day in and day out, are more likely to learn and retain information. I know that I personally do not learn as much if I just sit and listen to someone talk at me. I tend to learn more if I am given the chance to discuss and formulate ideas on my own also.
Tags: DDU
The whole thing really just seemed more like a theoretical paper to me. The authors had some ideas about how they think learning happens and how teaching should happen, then they talk about a bunch of meaningless nonsense, and at the end they proudly hold up their results as confirmation. Ugh.
After reading the Lopes et al. article, this was definitely a step up. I agree with you that their methods are a little iffy at times. I thought they were actually having the students design a lesson plan to a specific topic and analyze that one. But then they analyzed a generic lesson plan that the students made. I was also confused with this N12 level that they didn’t mention in their methods section. At least they were pushing for a more student oriented classroom.