ENGAGING STUDENTS IN SCIENCE AND LEARNING; LEARNER-CENTERED TECHNIQUES/TOOLS THAT WORKED

We have developed a course in planetary geology for high school students where our primary goals are to help students learn how to learn, encourage them to develop an interest in STEM fields, and to reduce the fear/anxiety associated with learning about science and math. Our emphasis in this course is on active learning in a learner-centered environment. The course was taught in Hawai‘i’s Upward Bound Programs on O‘ahu for the past three summers, 2008 -2010. Students enrolled in these programs are predominantly from low-income families in which neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree, and are of Native Hawaiian and/or Pacific Islander heritage.

The six-week course is divided into units, and each unit is composed of several lessons/activities that relate to the theme of that unit in a spiral fashion. We begin the course by giving the students a VARK learning questionnaire to help them self assess their learning styles. We follow this up by discussing different techniques of studying and learning for each learning style preference. We have also created knowledge surveys (KS) for each unit that we give before and after the unit. The KS have several benefits, one of which is to help the students understand the level of comprehension expected/needed for the course and serve as a metric for learning progression.

Learner-centered techniques we employ are think-pair-share with iclickers usually accompanying a PowerPoint lecture, and kinesthetic activities/experiments that are done in small groups. Both techniques involve working collaboratively in small groups to solve questions. The questions can be more complex because the students are working together, and the social interactions and discussions that occur at these times encourage learning. It gives the students time to work through a problem for themselves rather than simply being told what the answer is, which promotes greater comprehension and lasting cognition. Think-pair-share questions using the iclickers have the added benefit of giving immediate feed back on comprehension of a topic.

A good correlation was found between the post-KS and the final exam – no student scored significantly higher on the post-KS than on the exams. Student evaluations showed that eight out of thirty students showed an increased interest in STEM fields as a result of this course.