Strategies for Science Teaching

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The field of education has been becoming quite diverse and expanding with students, technology, and teaching techniques. In Secondary Education, there are content areas such as English, Science, and Social Studies, and an educator that teaches any of these content areas and more, must be able to utilize varied techniques or practices in order to meet students’ needs and learning styles. In regards to Science teaching in particular, not only does the teacher must be able to know and teach the concepts of the content area effectively, but he/she must be able to convey to the students the applications and vocabulary with those scientific concepts. Although there is an abundant of array of effective practices in Science teaching available for a teacher to use in his/her instruction, there are three strategies that are well-known and greatly documented to have improved student learning, vocabulary, and developing student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions. These effective practices are: Cooperative Learning, Word Games (Vocabulary Strategies), and Graphic Organizers.
Cooperative learning involves the students to work together in order to accomplish a goal or task. The students rely more on each other and less on the teacher (Alvermann, D. E., Gillis, V. R., & Phelps, S. F., 2013). Such practice is beneficial in Science especially in regards to the laboratory setting. With experiments, the students have to be able to work with their lab partner or groups in order to obtain accurate results. It has been shown that “humans learn best when they collaborate with others and actively process personally meaningful information” (Lin, Emily 2006). An example of a well-known cooperative learning technique that can be utilize...

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...the outcome of the students learning, recall of the material, and social interactions as they move further in their education. Although these practices have been known to work well in the classroom, a teacher should still assess each practice as they are being utilized in order to know which practices benefited the students greatly and which practices did not help the students or may need improvements since every student does learn and retain information on a different level. These effective practices along with numerous other practices are important for incorporating a diverse learning environment, positive interactions, and lifelong learning, but it is how the teacher implements each practice that makes the difference in obtaining the results needed and making such practices effective and useful in not just the Science classroom, but any content area classroom.

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