IDE Week 3: Learning Theories

PART 1:

The learning theory that has always appealed to me is constructivism. This theory is particularly appropriate for the course I am designing because I want to teach my students higher order thinking skills via active learning strategies. I believe in the constructivist principle that states learning happens when students are able to create meaning from experiences. The Cooperstein and Kocevar-Weidinger article states "In order to make knowledge useful in a new situation, students must make a deliberate effort to make sense of the information that comes to them. [...] They must manipulate, discover, and create knowledge to fit their belief systems." My goal for this set of activities is for the students to construct their own meaning around the concept: authority is constructed and contextual (ACRL Framework for Information Literacy). I will scaffold my activities to get the students to think about authority of resources, and using an authoritative resource to make a claim. 

Learning outcome: Students will be able to evaluate (Bloom's Taxonomy) online resources in the debate about the justification of the Iraq War in order to determine credible sources on the subject. 

Activity 1:
Students will be divided into groups. Each group will be given two articles to evaluate. These articles will not be about any specific topic or related to the Iraq War. They will look at the author, the facts in the article, the source of the article, and so on. They will need to determine if one, both, or neither are credible articles. Note: The instructor will not tell the student what makes an article credible. The students must decide on their own, and ask questions if they are unsure. The students will report out on their findings. The groups will teach each other what is credible, why something is credible, etc. 

Activity 2:
Then the students will use knowledge from activity 1 individually find credible sources of their own. The goal of this activity is to have students discover that scholarly articles about the Iraq War are not necessarily available on the Internet. First, the students will perform a Google Search. We'll discuss their results. The goal of this activity is to show that students may find credible sources on the Internet, but they may also find biased or unreliable sources, as well. We will have a discussion about what makes the sources credible, and why.

Next, the instructor will tell the students they must find scholarly articles, not news or opinion pieces. This will hopefully also spark questions about how to get to a scholarly article, and will lead us to a commercial database. Once we are in the commercial database, I will point out features such as full text and peer review. This will also lead us to a discussion on authority of authors whose works appear in a commercial database, why these articles are considered scholarly, and so on. 

Activity 3:
Students will apply what we discussed in the previous two activities and participate in a debate about the Iraq War. Students will be divided up into teams. Each team must find, evaluate, and critically think about resources about the Iraq War. The teams will provide a list of resources, and must add justification for their use in a blog post. Then the teams will come together and each will debate the war, and why or why not they believe it is justified. 

PART 2:

After reading the "motivation" article, I am really interested in the idea of incorporating the ARCs Model of Motivational Design into my teaching. I like the idea of using something novel to grab the students' attention at the beginning of class, and keeping them interested by showing them how this particular lesson is relevant to them or matching the instruction to the student's motives. For example, instead of having a "traditional" debate in activity three, I could design the assignment so that students can present their ideas in a way that is comfortable to them. They could present their ideas orally, in a video, or in a paper. 

Another important motivating factor is confidence. I think for activity two, students should be reminded that they may become frustrated or overwhelmed when they are doing their research, and that this is normal. I can reassure them that librarians are available should they have issues.