Activitymania

In the Activitymania article, the authors compare and contrast science activities and true inquiry-based lessons. In activities, the working hypotheses are clearly defined by the teacher prior to experimentation and in inquiry it arises from the students’ questions.

Activities call for immediate product-oriented, right-answer assessments. In inquiry it requires long-term, process-oriented evaluations. Inquiry-based lessons ask for higher order cognitive skills that engage students, develop skills, encourage modification and extension, promote common experiences and allow students to demonstrate understanding of the concept.

I can see that inquiry-based lessons allow for deeper understandings. But I see why many teachers do “activity” lessons. In my second-grade class, my cooperating teacher asked me to set up her experiment under the weather standard. The students were going to look at air pressure with tubes, water and syringes. She said that she only wanted one set of materials because she had conducted the experiment it in the past with partners and it was total chaos. There was water everywhere and the students were unable to have a discussion and accurate observation of what was actually happening. She only has science every other day, and there have been days they have not gotten to it. (Bus drills, visits from the AEAs and other various lessons were wrapped up first.) In this experiment she wanted to ensure that all the students could hypothesis what was going to happen and then actually see what the intended learning target was suppose to address.

I think in the cases of younger elementary students there are times that a full-blown inquiry lesson that lasts for a 50-minute period would never get fully accomplished and should be adjusted. As long as students are allowed to develop their own questions and allowed to find out the answers these types of science lessons can be valuable. As teachers, most of us will not be working in schools in which large blocks of time are set aside for science. We will not have a classroom full of well-behaved students that can handle somewhat complex materials with somewhat messy results.

Inquiry-based lessons should be what we strive for but I can see how a more activity-based lesson may be necessary sometimes.