There is great importance in eliciting learners’ ideas and basing instruction on them, both for students and for teachers. As a first step in any learning process, learners need to clarify for themselves what they already know and where there are “gaps” or even internal contradictions in their understanding. Exposing learners’ ideas can help teachers guide instruction and adapt it to learners at the individual, group, and classroom levels. It should be noted that it is not always easy to understand the ways others think. Scaffolds for externalizing thinking can help students reveal and examine their ideas in order to enable connections with new ideas. Such exposure can help teachers gain deeper insight into their students’ thinking and expand support when needed. Ongoing interaction of this kind is important for the development of meaningful understanding.
For example, a scaffold of “cognitive conflict” can be created by presenting evidence that contradicts intuition, thereby encouraging students to examine ideas in diverse contexts, deepen their understanding, and expand their knowledge. The elicitation and exposure of learners’ ideas are particularly important in the process of scientific inquiry because they encourage students to become aware of biases resulting from prior conceptions, attitudes, or beliefs.
Some citizen science projects rely on the specific expertise of volunteers. For example, in projects such as, “Landmarks for Accessible Environment”, familiarity with the environment being mapped by volunteers constitutes a form of expertise. In such cases, this principle also has practical significance. For example, in this project, eliciting students’ ideas and knowledge can help determine which area should be mapped.
Deepening and Expansion ▼
Inquiry-based approaches versus direct instruction
Chinn and Duncan (2021), in their introduction to the International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning, point to a long-standing debate regarding the effectiveness and value of direct instruction (sometimes referred to as frontal instruction) versus inquiry-based instruction (which draws on constructivist ideas about knowledge construction). Advocates of direct instruction argue that inquiry-based learning creates a heavy cognitive load on learners and therefore poses an obstacle to learning. Supporters of inquiry-based approaches agree that such learning requires substantial memory resources, but argue that the use of scaffolds “frees space” in learners’ working memory, enabling them to develop more advanced ideas and internalize complex concepts and processes. Empirical studies comparing direct instruction with inquiry-based approaches have pointed to deeper learning through inquiry-based methods such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Guided Discovery.
Creating cognitive conflict as a scaffold for teaching around learners’ ideas
Orion and Kali (2005) made extensive use of this approach in an Earth science curriculum described in their article. Each chapter in the curriculum begins with such a conflict: students are asked to propose a hypothesis regarding a phenomenon they are studying, and then conduct a short inquiry process that often leads to results different from what they initially expected. In contexts such as these, the role of the teacher is to support students in coping with the contradiction between their initial conceptions and the findings that emerge from the inquiry. For example, an observation in which students examine two rock samples that appear very different from each other but are found to have the same composition later leads to deeper exploration of the processes through which rocks are formed from magma.
Integrating knowledge around learners’ ideas
Linn and Eylon (2011) describe learning as a process of combining existing ideas with new knowledge, referred to as knowledge integration. Based on decades of research on learning and teaching in science education, they explain that meaningful learning involves four main processes. The first of these is eliciting and exposing learners’ ideas: learners bring with them multiple ideas about the topics studied in class. These ideas may be confusing and sometimes contradictory. Students are not always aware of the variety of their own ideas and benefit from expressing and making them explicit. For this reason, it is important to encourage students to reveal their prior knowledge, conceptions, and beliefs and to examine how these connect with the lesson content. Eliciting learners’ ideas and addressing them in instruction provide the basis for three additional processes in knowledge integration: adding new key ideas, supporting the development of ways to evaluate ideas, and sorting ideas by linking them with prior knowledge.
Biases resulting from prior beliefs and conceptions
Kali and Ronen (2008) demonstrate in their article on peer assessment that students’ prior beliefs and conceptions may influence their ability to evaluate the work of others. The article describes a study that examined different ways of integrating peer assessment into instruction. The approach presented by Kali and Ronen treats peer assessment as a learning activity. During the study, the researchers found that when topics involved value-based, cultural, or social aspects, students had difficulty separating their prior opinions about the topic from the quality of the work they were evaluating. One effective way to address such biases was to add a question to the task regarding the evaluators’ own conceptions about the topic. Bringing students’ personal perspectives to the surface before they were asked to evaluate their peers’ work enabled them to distinguish between their personal views and their assessment of their peers’ products. The example presented in the article describes an assignment in which groups of students presented their vision of an “ideal school.” Students who were asked to evaluate their peers’ presentations tended to give negative feedback to presentations reflecting worldviews different from their own, regardless of the quality of the presentations. However, when the evaluation task was preceded by a stage in which students articulated their own perspectives, far fewer biases were found in the feedback they provided.
Additional Resources:
“An Autonomous Classroom – When the Teacher Shepherds the Students,” Dr. Shlomi Tubiak, from: It’s Time for Education.
Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age (Part III – Autonomous Learning), editors: Dr. Uzi Melamed and Dr. Ulzhen Goldstein, read in “Kotar” – Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age
Eureka, Issue 20 – Science and Technology through Enjoyment and Motivation
References ▼
Chinn, C. A., & Duncan, R. G. (2021). Inquiry and Learning. In International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning (pp. 1-14). Routledge.
Kali, Y., (2006). Collaborative knowledge-building using the Design Principles Database. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(2), 187-201.
Kali, Y., & Ronen, M. (2008). Assessing the assessors: Added value in web-based multi-cycle peer assessment in higher education. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 03(01), 3–32.
Linn, M. C., & Eylon, B. S. (2011). Science learning and instruction: Taking advantage of technology to promote knowledge integration. Routledge.
Orion, N., & Kali, Y. (2005). The effect of an earth-science learning program on students' scientific thinking skills. Journal of Geoscience Education, 53(4), 387-393.