Identifying Questions to Investigate A Research Question Should Spark Students' Ideas About the Answer Namsoo Shin & Steven McGee What is sparking ideas about the answer? The wording of the research question needs to connect with students’ current level of understanding. This will help even the youngest students use ideas they already have about the topic. These ideas serve as good starting points for the investigation. As students progress through the investigation, these ideas should be challenged with the analyses they conduct. Researchers call this process activating prior knowledge. Students use their prior knowledge to make sense of new information and solve problems (Anderson, 1990; Machiels-Bongaerts & Schmidt, 1995). Activation of the prior knowledge occurs when students face new experience. They search long-term memory to find similar experiences and retrieve those experiences into short-term memory (Goss, 1999; Harris & Hodges, 1995; Cunningham, Moore, Cunningham, & Moore, 1995). Why is sparking students’ ideas important?
How does a designer spark students’ ideas about the answer?
References Anderson, J. R. (1990). Meaning-based knowledge representations. In Cognitive psychology and its implications (pp. 112-145). New York: Freeman. Anderson, R. C., & Pichert, J. W. (1978). Recall of previously unrecallable information following a shift in perspective. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 1-12. Anderson, R. C., Reynolds, R. E., Schallert, D. L., & Goetz, E. T. (1977). Frameworks for comprehending discourse. American Educational Research Journal, 14, 367-381. Anderson, R. C., Spiro, R. J., & Anderson, M. C. (1978). Schemata as scaffolding for the representation of information in connected discourse. American Educational Research Journal, 3, 433-440. Baillet, S.D., & Keenan, J.M. (1986). The role of encoding and retrieval processes in the recall of text. Discourse Processes, 9, 247-268 Cunningham, P. M., Moore, S. A., Cunningham, J. W., & Moore, D. W. (1995). Reading and writing in elementary classrooms: Strategies and observations (3rd ed.). New York: Longman. Dochy, F. J. R. C., & Bouwens, M. R. J. (1990). Schema theories as a base for the structural representation of the knowledge state. Open University, Netherlands (ED 387 489). Goss, G. (1999, August). Improving reading comprehension strategies using student-produced CDs combined with more traditional activities. Paper presented at the European Conference on Reading, Stavanger, Norway. Harris, T. L., & Hodges, R. E. (Eds.) (1995). The literacy dictionary: The vocabulary of reading and writing. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Machiels-Bongaerts, M., & Schmidt, H. G. (1995, April). The relation between the nature of prior knowledge activated and information processing: To elaborate or to infer? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco. (ED 392 831). Minstrell, J. (2000). Student thinking and related assessment: Creating a facet-based learning environment. In Committee on the Evaluation of National and State Assessments of Educational Progress. N. S. Raju, J. W. Pellegrino, M. W. Bertenthal, K. J. Mitchell, and L. R. Jones (Eds.), Grading the nation’s report card: Research from the evaluation of NAEP (pp. 44-73). Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Pearson, P. D., Roehler, L. R., Dole, J. A., & Duffy, G. G. (1992). Developing expertise in reading comprehension. In Samuels, S. J., & Farstrup, A. E., What research has to say about reading instruction (2nd ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Richards, J. C., & Gipe, J. P. (1992). Activating background knowledge: Strategies for beginning and poor readers. The Reading Teacher, 45(6), 474-476. Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, & W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rumelhart, D. E., & Norman, D. A. (1978). Accretion, tuning, and restructuring: Three modes of learning. In J. W. Cotton and R. L. Klatzky (Eds.), Semantic factors in cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. |
|
|