Learning Strategies – Science and Mathematics

Learning Journal 3

Learning Strategies – Science and Mathematics

Introduction

The journal that I have read for this week is called “Making it real”: Exploring the potential of Augmented Reality for teaching Primary school Science. The authors are Kerawalla, L., Luckin, R., Seljeflot, S. and Woolard, A. This learning journal will also begin with the gist of reading, then connections with my experience based on the journal, some confusions and conflicts found in the journal and some considerations and conclusions to end my learning journal entry.

(An example of Augmented Reality (AR) in Education)

Gist of Reading (Content)

This journal depicts the usage of Augmented Reality (AR) in formal education by introducing the technology use in traditional teaching ways. It is said that AR is useful in teaching as it allows students to see and visualise in 3D space that students were not likely to experience in the real world.  The participants were 133 children of Year 5 (aged 9 – 10 years) and their teachers were from five London schools. Then the average class size of five sessions were 27 and the total length of lesson (session) was 2 hours. The science subject showed in this article was on the relationships of earth, sun, and moon (e.g. rotation of the Earth and day and night). This journal focused on a comparison of the dialogue used by teachers’ engagement in teaching about the earth, sun and moon using either AR or more traditional methods (e.g. books and role-play). So, there were video recordings of teaching sessions and there were audio recordings of interviews with teachers. The results showed that it was successful in using AR to formal education that it was supporting and evidencing. Students were able to understand how the Earth and sun gives day and night by viewing in a 3D space. Also it was found that students were able to manipulate and explore which leads to promoting inquiry-based learning.

Despite there were some benefits and positive consequences usage of AR in the classroom, there were some limitations to it. Firstly, it was found that using AR to teach in classroom, students were less engaged than during one of the traditional teaching of role-play activity. During role-play, students were to create and control the roles of the actors whereas during class teaching using AR, students were to watch an AR animation and describe it. So teachers had more questions to ask rather students to tell their understanding during using AR teaching. In this consideration, using traditional method teaching was more engaging that teaching in AR method. Secondly, teacher wanted AR teaching method to be more flexible and controllable. They were not able to add and remove separate elements, and change animation sequences such as slowing down or stopping it.

Connection

For this week Learning Journal, there were two journals but I was more interested to read this journal than the other journal. This is because this journal had consist of one of my favourite learning during science class in primary. When I was growing up, after having class in primary on the relationship of rotation between the sun and earth, and day and night, I have been always recalling back the way my teacher taught those relations. This is because, the way of teaching was impressive as I was able to understand the relations very well without needing further explanations. Having these always recalling memories of teaching method on this topic, the content of this journal interest me to read. 

The way how I learned for the topic was through the traditional method that the journal had used. The traditional method in the journal includes firstly by book (to build prior knowledge to students) and then moved on to role-play session. During my learning through role-play, there were three students that acted as the Moon, Earth and Sun. The Moon were turning around while orbiting the Earth, the Earth was turning around with having orbiting Moon while orbiting the Sun. I can still remember this because I was really having fun and interest during this activity as all my classmates were verbally and phycially active, it was really funny to see my classmates (actors) bumping each other while orbiting together, and the fact being able to visualise and understand at once how the relationship between the Moon, Earth, Sun, the rotations, and day and night worked together.

I believe I was able to remember this teaching method and the relationship of Moon, Earth and Sun is because I am a bit like kinaesthetic and visual learner. The movement of acting, seeing how the moon and earth rotate while orbiting enabled me to picture and understand the topic very well. So I believe the traditional teaching was not bad as I had learned very well.

Confusion & Conflict

There were some confusions while I was reading this journal. I was unable to understand clearly on the key terms used even though there were explanations about them. I did not understand the concept of Virtual Reality, inquiry-based learning, head-mounted displays, and etc. I was mostly blur on the differences with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality but after my peers’ presentation of this topic, I understood it better as they gave different examples.

In my opinion, there are some limitations of using AR in classroom. Firstly, the tools for AR are very expensive which not many schools will have chance to stall it in the classroom. Secondly, due to expensiveness, not everyone will have the knowledge of how AR is used and functions. Thirdly, if the classroom provides AR and later one of the device of AR break or gets problems, who will be the one fixing/repairing it? There will be not so much people who can help out as not so many people will know about it. Furthermore, how can the teacher make sure that AR will able to access students’ understanding of AR and whether they use it correctly or not? Lastly, it may be useful to subjects such as Science (biology and physics), or geography but there are limitations using of AR to some subjects such as in English, Mathematics, History and etc.

Consideration and Conclusion

In this highly developing technology industry today, I believe when I become a teacher, there will be some AR usage in teaching such as science or geography or physics. Due to this circumstances, I would apply AR in my teaching as it is provided and because, although there are some limitations seen in this journal, it reports that AR is useful in students’ understanding. Students will be able to visualise it from different perspectives which will also corrects some misconceptions and able to build some new right understandings. Moreover, AR would be useful to visual-oriented learner as AR consist of a lot of visualisations whereby the objects of a particular topic shows in 3D spaces and explains it.

Therefore, if there were AR system in my classroom, I would consider AR into my teaching but I will not use only AR. I will first teach through traditional methods and then use AR. So, I will teach students to gain prior knowledge from the text book and also, give students a chance to imagine about the topic in their head first. After that, based on their imaginations and understandings, they will do some traditional activities. Finally, students can correct their understanding or further/increase their understanding through doing AR system in class. I believe these approach will enable students to have long-term memory on the learning topic and gain strong correct fundamental basics which will help them to develop their understandings in the future learnings. 

Reflecting on My Teaching Experience

Learning Journal 2 - Week 9

Reflecting on My Teaching Experience

Introduction

A Training Programme was given to all of students (Year 1, 2, and 3) in School of Education. This Training Programme duration is four weeks which was held in a Tamil Primary School called Skeolah Jenis Kebangsaan (Tamil) Ladang Semenyih. Our given project theme was “Environment” and the objectives were to help Primary 6 students to improve reading skills, writing skills and students’ confidence in speaking. Other than achieving the objectives of this project, there was another requirement given. Students were to present on the last week (Week 4) of what they had learn during the three weeks. Consideration of this requirements, we chose our topic as “Saving the Environment” and our group planned for the students to do a short Drama performance on the Week 4 which their presentation will be to send message of how Environment could be saved. Having this view, we planned our lesson on Week 2 to read about Saving the Environment and on Week 3 will tell the students to write about the script for short Drama performance.

For this teaching training programme, most lessons’ activities were based on Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic (VAK) teaching styles and some consideration of Multiple Intelligence (MI) and Experiential Learning will be provided under the results and discussion parts.

VAK Learning Styles & Application

There were about 70 students and were divided into three groups; so there were 23 students in our group. Each group consisted about 8 teachers which were Year 1, 2, and 3 students. In our group, there were two Year 3 students, two Year 1 students and four Year 2 students (including me). The four weeks are on the Fridays; 4^th October (Week 1), 11^th October (Week 2), 18^th October (Week 3) and 25^th October (Week 4). So, Week 1, 2, and 3 are teaching weeks and Week 4 is Presentation day.

Before our lessons start, our group had always met earlier to plan a lesson plan. Our lessons were mostly based on VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) teaching and learning styles.

Week 1 (Introductory Lesson)

For the first week, it was an introductory lesson where we had applied a lot of mixture activities of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic. These providing VAK activities enabled my students to become active in class whereby one activity of this week lesson actually included the three learning styles. The activity is called “Sad and Happy Face Earth”. So, here a ‘Sad Face Earth’ (picture) will be shown to students and question them “why do Earth has a Sad Face?” Students were required to write their answers in Memo Pads and stick it on to the board. In addition, the same happening for ‘Happy Face Earth’; the question would be “How to make Happy Face Earth?” Therefore, by looking at this activity, this application, students write their answers through visualising the Sad-Face and Happy-Face Earth and students will be able to listen to teachers’ explanations by looking at the Earth Faces. Finally, this week’s activities include a lot of kinaesthetic activities but the main activity was Deborah’s Game. Deborah’s game purpose is to learn each other’s names. So it includes movements from one student to another student by calling out the names of the students. Students were able to learn each other names quickly during kinaesthetic activity (Deborah’s game); in fact I also learned students’ names by playing this game. Therefore, applying VAK teaching styles allowed students to experience somewhat VAK learning activities which enabled them to learn effectively.

Before our group started to teach the students of this Week 1, we had planned to observe at the students’ learning abilities (performances in class). So, based on this Week 1 activities’ observation of students’ performances, we were able to acknowledge and address issues with learner differences when designing and carrying out our classroom activities for future.

Week 2 (Reading Lesson)

According to students’ learning ability observed from Week 1, we had divided the students into three groups of learning abilities; high, average and lower ability groups. For this week, we did not include so much of kinaesthetic teaching styles as Week 2’s main purpose was to read about environmental issues in the world and gain information/ideas for their presentation (Week 4). There were only two hours for this week, so teachers in each group prepared their lesson with pre-teach vocabulary session, before reading session, reading questions session, reading article and answering the questions provided in the worksheet. Each group will have different topic and level of articles and the worksheets. In this two hours, students will be applied with mostly on visual and auditory learning styles. Students will visualise the mah-jong papers written of the pre-teach vocabularies and learn those words. In addition, some teachers will be showing a real concrete example of the vocabularies so that they will have longer memory on the learning vocabularies. Furthermore, auditory teaching styles will occur during Feedback session which is when teachers discuss the answer of worksheets with the students. Teachers gave feedback about whether the students are wrong or right; if the students’ answer was wrong, then the teacher will teach mostly by verbally. 

Week 3 (Writing Week)

The activities in this week was mainly to watch a movie, Wall-E, in order to make students visualise the concept of characters and roles, and to think and write a full script of a scenarios for their Drama performance on the Week 4 (Presentation). So, here we have used visual and auditory style to begin with students’ script writing by watching a movie. The application of visual and auditory resulted a successful flow of lesson as students learned the concepts of characters and roles and students were able to give out ideas and discussed effectively for their performances later. By the end of the lesson, we were able to write the whole script for the drama and had a little time to practice for a while. The association with the learning styles and our lesson planning was effective again.

Results

In my group, the overall objectives were met. We did try our best to improve our student’s reading skills by dividing them according to their similar learning abilities, and did work on to improve their writing skills by making them visualise the whole before start writing. Lastly, during the Presentation on Week 4, I could see that our students were more confident in speaking when I first met them.

For the three weeks, our group’s teaching was guided with experiential learning where the three weeks’ teaching were to reinforce students on what they have learned and perform on Week 4. This planning accordingly did end up well that students had performed it greatly!

Discussion

Multiple Intelligence (MI) was firstly proposed in 1983 by Howard Gardner which had been developing over the years; whereby he mentioned that there are 9 multiple intelligences: Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Musical, Spatial, Bodily-kinaesthetic, Naturalistic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Existential. Over the years, MI has affected hugely on educational fields. MI allows educators to distinguish students' weakness and strength intelligence which helps the teachers to focus on specific areas for their students.

Our group did not apply Multiple Intelligence (MI) into three lessons. It was not a necessary or a need to apply to get a better results or something. It was actually not so effective for the three weeks. So, my stance on Multiple Intelligence (MI) is neutral. I think to propose this area of theory had given great improvements on the fields of teaching and beliefs of learning. In my opinion, as a future teacher, being aware of my students’ intelligences is an important aspect in teaching. However, I believe it is not a necessary to tell students that they are in this particular intelligent. In my belief, as a teacher it is important to varify their teachings according to students' intelligence. 

Despite having my stands on MI in neutral, based on my teaching experience for three weeks and having performance on Week 4, I had felt some critiques on Multiple Intelligences (MI). Firstly, MI did not have much impact on our lessons; I felt that MI was unnecessary. The classes went smoothly without having to categorise students’ intelligences. Secondly, it was difficult to find each students’ MI as there were only three days. The three days had also only focused to enhance English proficiency (reading, writing and speaking) so the lessons did not have any areas of mathematics or science to divide them accordingly which was difficult to judge who student had bodily-kinaesthetic, or logical-mathematic, or interpersonal and etc. Lastly, my teaching experience enable me to be aware that what’s going on in real life is more complex and the theories does not real fit in real life.

Conclusion

This field teaching training programme did enriched my understanding of the content of the module where I had my on stand on each learning styles (VAK, MI and Experiential learning). In my point of view, the application of VAK teaching styles for teachers in class would be great as it enables students to learn in variety ways. In addition, if teachers were to apply MI into the class, in my belief, teachers should know it in their heart and not tell the students, and unconsciously use the MI into the teaching. This is because I think students should have multiple intelligences not only focusing on one intelligence and also let students find their own strong intelligence to improve on it by themselves. The experiential learning was effective as it as associable with our three weeks teaching and final Presentation (Week 4). So the three week teaching enabled students to enhance their English proficiency which was shown by performing on Week 4. Overall, through this opportunity with applying on the theories, I learned a lot and it was really meaningful as it was my first time teaching in School. 

Learning Styles: VAK (Visual, Auditory & Kinaesthetic)

Learning Journal 1 - Week 4

Learning Styles

Introduction

Our lesson started with introducing Learning Styles and Strategies to us. We were required to read three Journals until now; (i) Learning Styles: A Review of Theory, Application, and Best Practices, (ii) Some unexpected results of a learning styles intervention? and (iii) The trouble with VAK. There were activities and explanations between which helped us to gain more understanding on the reading Journals.

Gist of Reading (content)

The three Journals reveal that over the years there has been lots of research going on about Students’ Learning styles (which also includes VAK learning style). Firstly, there were some relations between students’ learning styles and teachers’ teaching styles. Teachers knowing students’ learning styles can develop their educational experiences. But if teacher’s teaching style mismatches with students’ learning styles, it then may encourage students to challenge and expand their academic capabilities. However, in this modern days, teachers are encouraged to teach in a multi-style fashion since the number of students are getting larger and internationalised. 

Second journal was about VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) learning styles. VAK theories are hugely popular in Primary Schools. Alistair Smith & Neil D. Fleming came out with VAK learning styles and they used the instruments from Dunn et al. Learning Style Inventory (LSI), Smith & Call (2001) Learning Style Questionnaire and others on more commercial in nature. There was research about VAK test on boys and girls which resulted that boys and girls prefers more to kinaesthetic activity and believe it helps in their learning. Here, this research helped teachers to encourage more variety lessons which they should consider variety teaching strategies as well. This way would make students to keep them on the task. 

Despite having this positive view on VAK learning styles, there are some critics shown on Journals about VAK theories. It is said that there is no research that has properly proved VAK theories. The VAK theories practitioners rely mostly on "second hand" information. This means that it is usually passed from the curriculum or head teachers or deputy heads and etc. which is not from teachers. Furthermore, this theory lacked reliability of questionnaires. There were only 15 questions (e.g. "I like music when I do my homework.") and with in 15 questions, how do those question results be in anything of any pedagogical value? Lastly, this theory is pseudoscience; it is a scientific myth. Years later, he himself admitted that he was wrong. He did fell out of context when he was interpreting and applying neuroscientific information.

Connection

Years of being educated in International schools, I believe that each individuals has their own preferred learning styles. In my International schools, they provide various teaching in each class and also can view different learning styles in students. While I was reading the first Journal, I totally agreed on the point where if teacher’s teaching style mismatches with student’s learning style, encourage them to challenge it. This is because I was one of the student who actually was in challenge and eventually expanded my academic capabilities. Basically, when I was in primary school, I always believed that I was a weak and hardworking student. Although I believed that I was a weak student, I would always end up my final exam papers with high or upper average grades. Reasonably, I would have studied hard for my final exams but through this Journal, I could see myself that I did have challenge myself and broaden my academic capabilities as well. Due to challenging these years, I was more confident on my studies during my Secondary school. In fact when I first came to University of Nottingham, the modules in Foundation itself was mismatching with my learning styles. However, (I don’t know how but) I managed it. :-)

Another Journals made me think again that the results were similar to my learning styles and my experiences in school. When I think back, I could see that everyone (boys & girls) in my classes (Primary and Secondary) liked kinaesthetic activities during lessons. They were never denied that they would not do it. Also in my opinion, during my primary school, our teacher did provide various lessons that includes VAK learning styles. Although our teacher would not tend to follow VAK learning style, we had lots of mind-map/concept-map, pictures, charts, cards of keywords, etc. during explanations by our teacher. Using these activities to make our classmates understand, I really liked our school. Furthermore, our primary school always had Assembly every Fridays and each Year (Grade) had to perform at least once or twice in a month. So, we get to choose what to perform. We usually performed two major section; Music and Drama. One Friday, we played recorders and another Friday, we performed Drama. While we are practising, we had to visualise the demonstrations shown by our teacher and listen to the used phrase tone. We also had to memorise our lines. Everyone in our classroom had to perform and I believe this rule helped students to improve on their weak learning style. 

Confusion & Conflict

I did have some confusion while reading the two Journals on VAK before going to class. This would be because encountering this topic was something new to me. I am weak at learning new things at once, rather I take time to “get absorbed” into my brain. However, after the class today, I kind of understood about VAK theories and its conflicts. Although the research has conflicts and not even been properly proved, due to Smith there were more developments on teaching lessons or styles and teachers were more considering at students’ views.

I do have a belief about learning styles also. I believe that everyone has their own learning style just like having different personalities. However, when I was reading, I thought that Smith’s model of accelerated learning in primary schools (ALPS) and No LIMIT (key element of Accelerated Learning) goes against my belief. ALPS is letting students know how the knowledge functions which can lead them to achieve beyond what they thought they could not. In certain extent, I do agree; but I do not belief in it. My belief about being able to achieve higher and beyond is their interest, passion, eagerness and the willingness. This would let anyone to achieve beyond than they would have expected in the future. And I am sure because my belief and my experience (living) is happening right now.

Conclusion & Consideration

Reading and learning new theory of VAK and learning style was interesting. This opportunity has actually given me to have an idea about my future teaching lesson plans. In my future practice teaching, I would use VAK teaching styles rather than learning styles. So, I should plan various teaching lessons to give students to enhance their academic learning. This will help them to encounter and face different learning styles. Moreover, this could be helpful to my Tamil school project experience. This is because we, our group, have planned to perform a short three scene drama at the end of the week. Drama considers kinaesthetic, auditory and visual skills. We, teachers, could (at a very least) enhance these three skills in the students.