Philippine Basic Education

Inquiry-based learning is of course the foundation of doctoral work. One learns strategies not just content as one formulates new and important questions, collects data and makes observations to answer these questions, and in the process, advances human knowledge. For this reason, success in graduate school is weakly correlated with an undergraduate's academic record or scores in standardized exams. Inquiry-based learning requires a great deal of motivation, discipline and independence. Obviously, inquiry-based learning when mentioned as part of basic education is not exactly how a doctoral student works on his or her dissertation. Nonetheless, inquiry-based learning in either elementary or secondary education still requires motivation, discipline and independence. And similar to graduate school, one would expect that doing well in inquiry based-learning is often not correlated with a child's current academic performance. Inquiry-based instruction is often found as a common m...

Do we really learn from mistakes or does failure eventually teach us to avoid the challenge and simply give up? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a team of cognitive neuroscientists, Stefano Palminteri, Mehdi Khamassi, Mateus Joffily, and Giorgio Coricelli found that given the chance to reflect on our mistakes, we can turn a failure into a positive rewarding experience. Their work published in the journal Nature   showed that when an individual who made a mistake was given enough information to contextualize the choices he or she had made, the brain started to switch from an avoidance circuit into the positive reward-based track for learning. With this recent finding in mind, one can look at a study published more than a year ago by Manu Kapur, head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore, in the journal Cognitive Science   with a fresh perspective.   The study entitled  Productive Failure in Learning Math ...

Math is now taught quite differently in elementary schools in the United States so parents are often confused if not frustrated when they look at their children's homework. There is emphasis on using different strategies. Overall, rote learning has taken a backseat while drawing or creating representations of arithmetic operations has become a staple activity. Take for instance, dividing 50 by 4. When I was an elementary school student, I would divide 50 by 2. That would be 25 and I would then divide this answer again by 2. The final answer would then be 12 and a half. Nowadays, a student may be asked to represent this operation and one way to do so is to use fifty sticks for 50 and four circles for 4. Next, the sticks are then distributed over the four circles. Some children get upset when forced to use multiple strategies to solve an arithmetic problem especially when they can arrive at the answer in one way they prefer and with very little work. Dr. Wendy Bradshaw, a pu...

The Department of Education in the Philippines touts its K to 12 science as a curriculum that makes use of the following: multi/interdisciplinary approach, science-technology-society approach, contextual learning, problem/issue-based learning, and inquiry-based approach . At first glance, these approaches sound attractive, but the difficulty in implementing any one of these is often underestimated and unappreciated. What each one of these approaches requires is frequently taken for granted. Worse, these approaches are oftentimes not fully understood. For example, an inquiry-based approach is often contrasted to "traditional" instruction. The comparison is usually done incorrectly when "traditional" instruction is defined merely as students sitting passively or quietly as a teacher carries a monologue in front of the entire class. Right off the bat, there is a presumption that "traditional instructors" do not even attempt to engage their students. On the...

Some educators do express an aversion to spoon-feeding because the process somehow implies that a student is provided with so much help that there is no room left for thinking. Perhaps, there is indeed no more need to think, but educators must remind themselves that learning is different from thinking. Thinking requires expertise or experience. Learning, on the other hand, oftentimes starts from scratch. Providing steps to students is necessary. This guidance acts as a scaffold to support learning. Inquiry in the hands of a novice can be easily unsuccessful if the learner is not provided with anything. What is important is to figure out the amount and type of support that is needed. One may appreciate this with IKEA manuals . Assembling a child's chair like the one below does not need multiple pages: But assembling the following cabinet from more than a hundred pieces obviously requires looking at a multi-page manual: Learning chemistry is no different from being able to a...

Orangutan females give birth only about once every eight years. One reason is that a young orangutan is very much dependent on the mother. Nursing takes up to about six years and in addition, the rain forest where these apes live is so rich and diverse in plant life that a mother orangutan must teach her young what food to eat and where to find the food. It is therefore not an easy task to return orangutans that have been orphaned and raised in a sanctuary back into the wild. The Smithsonian National Zoo's Think Tank looks closely at orangutans, examining how these remarkable apes organize memory and make decisions. The National Zoo's full grown orangutan male named Kiko Teaching is remarkably important in the life of orangutans. This is the only way adult orangutans are able to pass their knowledge of the rain forest to their young. Otherwise, orangutans may have to take decades to repeat rediscovering their surroundings without older generations passing their knowledg...

Pupils in elementary schools can certainly collect data. Children can both observe and measure. Science education requires these skills. In this area, the method of inquiry is indeed powerful especially when children are allowed hands-on experience. It is the peak of engagement. Science, however, does not end with data collection. Science may indeed be empirical, but it really goes much farther than just making and collecting observations. Science is supposed to make sense. The following is an example: The above displays the measured amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above Mauna Loa. Of course, the measured numbers are already presented here in an organized manner. In this particular case, the measured values are shown in a graph. Values of carbon dioxide levels at plotted against the time of the year these were measured. This illustrates the second part of what science does, data analysis. Data analysis, however, is still not the last part. It still has not made sense. ...

Lions sometimes hunt elephants. The deadliest animal in the world is the mosquito. After all, the female Anopheles mosquito is the vector of one of the world's deadliest disease, malaria. These are few examples of facts that bring astonishment to my son's young mind. These carry an element of surprise because even at an early age, a child is already developing a library of information in his mind. Psychologists would characterize a child's way of thinking as mostly "experiential". It is fast. It relies mostly on memory. Learning or being exposed to something new that seems to be out of place in that small library inside a human mind challenges human thinking. It is at this point when the human mind must make an adjustment. It is the beginning of what psychologists refer to as "analytic" processing.

My son is left-handed so it has been challenging to teach him tasks done by hands. The challenge comes from the fact that I could not show him how to do things properly with my left hand since I am right-handed. It is less challenging when it comes to tasks that do not require fine motor skills. My son can learn about animals and can retain information quite well in this area. Elaine of LittleSheep Learning posted an article, " Learning Styles: An Introduction " about a year ago. In the article, she wrote: Children learn in a variety of ways and knowing the way your child learns can make it a lot easier to teach them – the different ways that people learn are called learning styles.   The simplest way of demonstrating is by using an example – if you get a new gadget; to learn how to use it do you: read the instructions? get someone else to tell you how to use it? or do you push and press the buttons until it all works? These are all valid ways of learning how to...

Sitting still inside a classroom while trying to listen attentively to an instructor for consecutive 50-minute blocks with only ten minutes to go from one classroom to the next could be challenging to an adolescent. Most of us remember our high school years as days when we really began learning more about ourselves and our relations to others. In high school, there seems to be a growing need to become more active learners inside a classroom. At the same time, there is now a desire to become more social. Science laboratory classes seem cool when done in groups and students work side by side on a given task. It is more active. It is much more engaging. Besides, we can then chat about things other than the subject we are trying to learn. A high school classroom in the Philippines, crowded yet full of energy

While the Department of Education in the Philippines continues with a basic education curriculum that does not have a formal subject of Science in the first two grades, a team from the Museum of Science in Boston has been working hard for the past ten years developing engineering lessons for young children as early as kindergarten. The program called " Engineering is Elementary " introduces activities that connect engineering concepts with science topics currently taught in elementary classrooms in the United States. These activities make use of readily available materials. The theme covers the cyclic process in engineering, which consists of the following steps; Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create and Improve. There are currently twenty units: Visit  http://www.eie.org/the-20-units  to view the above units Each unit took 3000 hours of staff time to develop. Each one was based on research and extensive pilot studies. There are four lessons in each unit with the following flow...

Program: PBS NewsHour Episode: School District Uses Project Based Learning Over Testing A public school district in Danville, Ky., has turned its emphasis away from traditional testing in order to encourage creativity and let students learn by doing. NewsHour special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on "deep learning," and how it requires commitment from educators, students and parents. Watch School District Uses Project Based Learning Over Testing on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Susan R. Singer and William B. Bonvillian recently wrote an editorial in the journal Science. The article, " Two Revolutions in Learning ", suggests ways in which online learning and research in science education can work together to produce transformative outcomes in education. Researchers in education can inform the online learning community with what works and what does not work while the online community can provide researchers with opportunities of quickly collecting vast data on learning. It is true that the online platform provides an additional arena to test and explore ideas on teaching and learning. It is easier to scale and it does have the appeal of being able to reach a broader population for subjects. Since online courses also carry the objective of making students learn, these courses need to be informed and guided by research in education. Lofty ideas always look good on paper. When one gets into the details, things can get messy pretty quick. There are nume...