Q. Is ‘doing’ the best way to learn science (and other subjects)?
Let us recollect that there are only four vehicles for learning – hearing (lectures), seeing (demonstration, pictures), doing (experiments, experiences) and reading. The general belief is that ‘doing’ is the best way to learn about anything. Many within the science education community also view practical work carried out by students as the most essential feature of science education.
What’s the final word on the importance of ‘doing’ in learning? Unfortunately, no one can pronounce the final verdict because we do not know enough about how we learn. However, there is an interesting research on the role of ‘doing’ in learning science to study the effectiveness of ‘learning by doing’ as the primary teaching and learning strategy.
It just so happens that India is very lucky to have experimented with the ‘pedagogical* power of doing’ for nearly three decades – a rare exception to the national character of near non-existent educational research. The experiment rightly brought out the unique strengths and weaknesses of learning by doing.
*Simply put, it implies teaching and learning methods.
The Hoshangabad Experiment or the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), as it was titled, introduced the ‘discovery’ approach to learning science in village schools in place of the textbook-centred ‘learning by rote’. It was a multi-lateral experiment with the best of credentials in terms of the participating organisations. The experiment was conducted in evolutionary versions for well over two decades in the classes VI -VIII of the government schools in Hoshangabad district of the state of Madhya Pradesh.
Special set of books and simple yet extensive experimental aides were used with children. Class X board exam results were used as a proxy for measuring the learning gains of the students. However, even after years of experiment, the performance of the students in the Hoshangabad district, specifically in science, was not among the top 10 districts of the state. It was also lower than its neighbouring districts. Learning by doing did not seem to be working for the better of all the students.
No less pertinently, it was also found that the literacy growth rate in 2001 (after over 2 decades of HSTP) showed the bordering districts of Hoshangabad registering well over 20% growth whereas literacy growth rate in Hoshangabad was under 20%. Another study explored the effectiveness of practical work by analysing a sample of 25 ‘typical’ science lessons involving practical work in English secondary schools.
It was found that teachers’ focus in these lessons were predominantly on developing students’ substantive scientific information, rather than on developing understanding of scientific enquiry procedures. Practical work was generally effective in getting students to do the intended work with physical objects, but much less effective in getting them to use the intended scientific ideas to guide their actions and reflect upon the data they collected.
The authors are of the opinion that learning by doing without the larger conceptual frameworks, conversations and reading will lack effectiveness. Learning by doing is a good supplementary educational tool, just as learning by seeing and listening is; reading is the most potent learning tool. Broadly ‘activity-based learning’ often ends up as good riddance from other kinds of classwork if it tends to ignore extensive reading and conversations around the activities.
Besides, the quality of learning by doing is critically dependent on the following:
- Conceiving the best possible design for doing practical activities.
- Implementing the design of the practical activities with clearly defined expectations in terms of learning.
- Strategies on helping students hypothesise about the practical activities based on their prior knowledge.
- Having explicit strategies on how to link observations to hypotheses.
- Helping students generalise from accepting or rejecting hypotheses.
To summarise, practical work has a key role in the teaching of science but only when the type of practical work is carefully selected with a clear purpose in mind and it is followed up to generalisations and re-experiments. This is a very tall order, next to impossible on a larger scale.
‘Learning by doing’ must be preceded and followed by extensive reading and conversations.
Q. What must be done to improve the teaching of maths?
Learning maths is more about sharpening logical thinking, there must be more preferred ways to structure the methods and milestones in the achievement of the learning goals in maths. The evidence on the ground – the poor performance of children in maths, across the world – also dictates that there must be some fundamental missteps in the teaching of maths. We may be teaching maths in ways which need to significantly change – the current ways of teaching maths is not the best.
We, the authors, have been specifically working on improving the teaching and learning of maths for over five years through several discreet and ‘whole school’ innovations. Sandeep, one of the authors, also developed unconventional ways of teaching maths to his ‘home educated’ daughter, who is fairly ‘comfortable with the language of maths’ and appeared in Class X International Maths examination of IGCSE as a private student.
Here are the more important suggestions to reinvent the teaching and learning of maths, as distilled over the past half a decade:
- Physical (and digital) objects till Class IV – All of maths must be seen, felt and be easily manipulated; the objects used in maths education must be part of everyday living and easily accessible for repeated usage and extension into new situations.
- Methods to be avoided till Class IV – All of maths should be the ‘long way’, e.g. addition without carry over; patterns must be apparent, numbers and operations must be visually possible.
- Mental math’ till Class IV – Children must be inculcated into thinking mathematically and to make it work, only up to two or three digit numbers may be used. Occasional worksheets may be used for holidays or weekends. Assessments should also be largely verbal.
- Homework content till Class IV – Maths homework may be mental maths, i.e., no written work at home except occasional worksheets. Reading ‘mathematical stories’ and writing mathematical solutions in mother tongue (or English) should be the major part of homework.
- Class V to be the bridge between mental and ‘method’ maths – Methods must be introduced as a matter of discovery out of the mental maths logic and not pronounced as given. Class V and VI are indeed the crucial years in learning maths.
- Homework, practice and class work – Homework for continued familiarisation is vital in maths; maths is not a socially important communicative language and needs distinct opportunities for practice and revision. It must be natural to expect wrong solutions in maths homework and homework should not involve tasks that may call for tutoring help. Classwork should involve exercises normally meant for homework to
enable maths teachers to observe each students’ work, every day. - Remedial in plain English – Remedial practice may be conducted in plain English, i.e., the solutions to the questions must be written in English words rather than mathematical signs; it works wonders in getting the thinking aligned.
- Reading mathematical books – There are a growing number of maths books without too many signs and formula. Ideally, maths textbooks should be ‘readable’ like science books, i.e., with lots of text in communicative level language.
- Conversations and stories in every period – The language content in maths classrooms has to significantly multiply. Math must be made to be discovered everywhere the way science is to be ‘seen’ in every day routine.
- Teaching, assessment, reporting, remedial and self-learning of maths to be around well delineated concepts. Maths is a rigidly hierarchal subject and it must be taught in a way that hierarchy is respected in teaching and learning by anchoring them around individual concepts.
- Class-less syllabus access – Students must be allowed and encouraged to dig deeper in domains/concept families of interest beyond their actual class syllabus. Maths and science are ‘logical subjects’ and cannot be sliced into rigid class-wise compartments.
It may be obvious that the 11-point agenda of change reads almost like the re-birth of maths education.
Reproduced by permission of Edupreneurs Foundation Imprint
copyright (c) 2015, Edupreneurs Foundation Imprint , Parent 3.0
