Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock identifies 9 categories of instructional strategies that have been shown through research to be effective in the classroom. They base their conclusions on meta-analyses done by researchers at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. It is important to realize that there is much overlap in the strategies and the good techniques in one strategy are often used to advantage to enhance the learning effectiveness of other strategies. Below we list the strategies employed in this web activity. The strategies are listed in order of effectiveness as rated by the average effect size (achievement in standard deviation units).
Identifying Similarities and Differences: The basis of this activity is that astronauts in the International Space Station experience "weightlessness" in a manner very similar to someone falling freely towards the earth. It is best to say the astronauts are in freefall as they orbit the Earth. The major differences in the two cases are that the astronauts are far from the surface of the Earth and that they are orbiting the Earth. However, the similarity that they are falling freely towards the Earth's surface in both cases is very strong. The students study freefall in an elevator near the surface of the Earth. The observations and analysis help them understand why astronauts feel "weightless" in the International Space Station using the effective strategy of Indentifying Similarities and Differences. The students are challenged to come up with differences to help them better understand the comparison. It is important they learn that, even though there are differences, the similarities are stronger and the same explanation works in both cases. Learning to identify what is the most important in a situation is a valuable lesson. You can download two versions of tables in MSWord to help students get started with their comparisons: version 2 has more information filled in to guide students who need more support that those who could get by with version 1.
Summarizing and Notetaking: Students are asked to take notes (download a useful scheme in MSWord for taking notes) throughout the activity for a range of purposes from recalling relevant past experiences to recording data. In the explorations, students are asked to summarize their findings and discuss them with others. This would be a good time to get the class together and have the collaborative groups give a summary report based on their notes. An effective note taking structure is to use the left side for notes in text, perhaps an outline, and the right hand sides for drawings and other graphical aids that help organize and clarify their observations. Finally, a summary can be written along the bottom as the groundwork that holds the structure together. For the most effective use of this technique, have your students discuss and compare their notes and summaries.
Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition: The students are provided reinforcement for plotting data in the Squeak project accessed through the Plotting button. They are commended for good work when they determine that an acceleration of 10 m/s/s will make Norbert and Zot weightless. The very best reinforcement and recognition will come from parents, teachers, and other students.
Homework and Practice: You could assign parts of the activity as homework, but this activity mostly provides valuable practice in observing, recording, plotting, analyzing, and problem solving. Since the practice occurs naturally in solving the problem, the students should be more motivated to practice and their learning more valuable.
Nonlinguistic Representations: This activity is replete with nonlinguistic representations such as graphics, animations, and student driven simulationed experiments. The natural integration of these representations enhances the learning experience.
Cooperative Learning: Setting up cooperative learning groups is the recommended way to maximize student learning in this activity. Five defining elements of cooperative learning are: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing. Reciprocal Teaching is a research-based strategy that can be used effectively with cooperative groups. The four phases are summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. After the group has played with the elevator, you could designate a group leader who would engage the children in summarizing what the learned. They should all contribute, including the leader, to get as comprehensive a summary. The group members could take notes (see note taking above) to help them arrive at a summary. Once they have a summary, the leader should get them to ask questions where they are confused and they can all take part in the clarifying phase helping each other learn. Finally, they can predict what acceleration will make Norbert and Zot weightless. If they have already done that, they could predict the shape of the graph of Apparent Weight plotted against Acceleration as a prelude to the first exploration in the web book. As a teacher or parent, you should certainly guide your students and give them feedback when they are off-track, but keep the process under their control.
Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback: Objectives that are set shouldn't be too narrowly focused or learners tend to miss too much related material. For this activity a good objective would be to understand how forces govern our state of motion and feeling of weight. Feedback on exams or projects has been shown to enhance learning and the best form is an explanation as opposed to just being given the correct answer. In several places it is suggested that students offer feedback to other students through discussions explaining what they observed. If you give your students a test on the activity, research shows that the optimal time is one day after exposure to the material.
Generating and Testing Hypotheses: Both inductive (abstracting a principle from a set of specific observations) and deductive (using a principle to predict a specific result) reasoning can be used to advantage to promote learning. Deductive reasoning activities have been shown to be more effective, but it depends on the circumstance. The division into inductive and deductive is often blurred and the concepts are most valuable when considered as two extremes of reasoning. You should encourage your students to predict what value of acceleration will make Norbert and Zot weightless (download this guide to help organize the student's solution of the problem) and ask them to refine their predictions as they make more observations and discuss them with their group members. Thus they would progress from a more deductive approach to a more inductive approach. It has also been shown valuable for students to explain their hypotheses and predictions. Of the five methods identified in the above reference where Generating and Testing Hypotheses is used, two are featured in the activity (problem solving and experimentation).
Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers: These strategies all take advantage of students' prior knowledge and are good ways to start a lesson. As you give cues and ask questions, keep in mind that higher-order questions are more effective and students are more interested in things they already know something about. For example, a good starting question would be "Why do astronauts float in the International Space Station?" Remember that it is important to wait after asking your questions to give the students time to collect their thoughts before they respond - you will have a much better discussion. Advance organizers are a way of giving your students a brief "heads up" before starting a topic - they aren't outlines or summaries. Research shows the most effective advanced organizers are expository, followed closely by skimming. In this case a brief definition of position, velocity, acceleration, force, mass, and gravity could be effective. Also see version 1 and version 2 of the MSWord tables mentioned above as advanced organizers to start the students comparing. Finally, you could download the following concept map in MSWord to help students see the "big picture" relationship between force and motion.
