Knowing and Learning Online Journal

Engage Daniel Pink addresses the nature of motivation in humans towards tasks. In his talk, he addresses how intrinsic motivations are far more effective than extrinsic motivations. He focused on how businesses could use intrinsic motivations to make workers efficient. We can apply these ideas to STEM education with encouraging students to think on the own and become autonomous learners. Our goal in STEM education is to help students develop the ability to take the knowledge they already know and apply it to new situations. Currently, the education system tends to focus on small tasks and worksheets. As Pink mentioned in his talk, in these small tasks rewards (grades) can be very effective. However in the long run, if we want these students to be able to tackle more complex tasks and problems with the same toolset, we need to encourage them to think on their own.  To do this, we could generate a larger problem and work with the students to solve the problem. This proble...

Engage What defines the culture of thinking in chemistry is observations of the physical world and making hypotheses about the unseen. Most chemistry is trying to explain changes and reactions that happen on an atomic level. As in any science subject, the culture fosters the chance to make observations and challenge themselves to explain what they observed, supported by experiments. Explore The essential elements of mathematical and scientific thinking are finding connections and using prior knowledge to learn. While this can be applied to all subjects, it is especially prevalent in math and science in order to create a suitable curriculum in schools that help students towards success. External representations give a visual for students and teachers to see the connections. Instead of simply talking about connections and making predictions about how each thing relates, the external representations allows for teachers to see what connections the students are seeing....

Engage Perhaps it is because it has been a long time since my last math class but Peterson's visual approach examples were very hard for me to understand. While learning math, I always cared about the how and the why, which seemed to be lacking in the modeling, at least the small demonstrations that were shown in the video. I believe in order to solve the large struggle with science and mathematics concepts, there needs to be more than a visual approach. An organized and easily understood verbal explanation to accompany the model. This way the students can make more connections between the model and the intended topics. Explore Extend The similiarites between indigenous practices of teaching and western practices is their focus on using modeling as a visual for the students to interact with and study. Also similar to western teaching lectures is the oral transmission of the indigenous people. Some differences are how the indigenous people interact with the children. Largel...