Hawar Khalandi
Article Topic: LC2
Submitted: 10/10/2006 1:00:05 PM
Lawson, A. E.2001. Using the Learning Cycle to Teach Biology Concepts and Reasoning Patterns, Journal of Biological Education, 35, 1-8.
Summary: This article covered a lot of important information about the learning cycle. According to this article, the learning cycle is a three stage investigation approach made up of exploration term introduction, and concept application. During the exploration stage, the students explore and investigate new ideas and learn thorough their own actions. The exploration stage will help with raising questions that will force the students to explore and investigate. During the term introduction stage, the students are encouraged to find new terms to help them explain their results. Also, the teacher can introduce new terms in lecture format to help the students understand the complex material better. During the concept application stage, the students apply the new terms learned or discovered to additional contexts. This stage is necessary to extend the range of applicability of new concepts. In order to be successful while teaching a learning cycle lesson, you must: • Raise questions in class that forces students to create predictions based on prior beliefs or knowledge. • Those predictions then lead to results that are contradicted or unclear or both. This forces the students to argue and reflect on their prior beliefs. • Then you can suggest the alternative beliefs or the more effective procedure. • Alternative beliefs or the more effective procedures should now be used to make new predictions that allow either the change of the beliefs or the construction of new beliefs. Bottom line is that lessons that allow students to examine the sufficiently of their prior belief forces them to argue and test those beliefs and this helps students understand the new material better. This article also points out that there are three types of learning cycles. Those are descriptive, empirical-abductive, and hypothetical-predictive. During descriptive learning cycles, students discover and describe a pattern (exploration). The teacher gives it a name (term introduction), and the pattern is then identified in additional contexts (concept application). During empirical-abductive learning cycles, students discover and describe an empirical pattern (exploration), and then they generate possible causes (term introduction). This requires the use of abduction or analogical reasoning. With the teacher's guidance, the students then sort through the data gathered during exploration to see if the hypotheses are consistent with those data (application). During the hypothetical-predictive learning cycles, the teacher will raise a causal question, to which students then generate alternative causal hypotheses. Then the students will design tests for their hypotheses and carry out those tests (exploration). The analysis of observed results then allows for some hypotheses to be rejected, some to be retained and for new terms to be introduced (term introduction). Finally the relevant concepts and reasoning patterns may be applied in other contexts (application).
Reaction: I enjoyed this article a lot. There was a lot of important information covered in this article. I recommend this article to all teachers and I personally will use its technique in my classroom.