Week 3: Learning Theory

I'm a little late posting for week three because I spent the weekend prepping for a Sociology one-shot I taught this morning; I had the luxury of having 70 minutes (not 50!) and incorporated some "active learning" that I'd intended to bridge the students from "where they were" (Google, Wikipedia) to where I (and the faculty member) wanted them to be (peer-reviewed articles). The students have a 10-12 page research paper due in December. I think the approach that I took falls into the "constructivist" area, because I was asking students to apply prior knowledge to the task and raise questions as they encountered them.

The class activity (after some general introduction) was for students to work with a partner, and look at a list of the top ten Google results for a particular search (I'd printed out a screenshot of one in advance, so they'd all have the same results). They were to label the results as media sources, academic sources, or Internet/"Wildcard" sources (I'd earlier related Internet sources to "Wildcards" - I had the luxury of two Bay Area baseball teams recently participating in wild card playoff games so I was able to tie that concept to the idea that you don't know what you're going to get when you find something on Google). They worked in pairs identifying the source types. Once done, I asked them to take it a step further, and for those that they identified as Internet/Wildcard sources, I had them create lists of Pros and Cons for each source (there were three) of why they should use them for their research paper and why they shouldn't use them. After working with their partners, the class discussed the pros and cons as a larger group with myself and the faculty member chiming in as needed.  The students brought their own previous experience with sources to the discussion and had the opportunity to apply what they'd just learned by exploring some sources with their partner.

The students were incredibly engaged, and were asking questions about where they could find "true" scholarly sources (peer reviewed articles) since they weren't in the Google results.  This segued into the rest of the session, which was still collaborative with students as many of the students had some experience with scholarly research and were able to volunteer and share that information with their peers while the faculty member and I took more of a "guide on the side" approach.  It was super fun to teach and I'm going to think of ways to tweak it to have it be even more effective in the future - as well as develop assessments so that I can confirm what I think I observed in the classroom and learn more about which areas of the activity can be improved.