Page 263 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 11 How Can I Design, Implement, and Evaluate Instructional Activities? 235
Our work on activities began with a critique of two elementary social studies series (Brophy & Alleman, 1992). This work reaffirmed frequently voiced complaints about the activities components of these series, such as that too many of the activities were fill-in-the-blank worksheets or involved practicing skills independently of the content developed in a unit (instead of using the skills to apply that content in natu- ral ways). Our analyses also pointed to several additional problems: activities often were built around peripheral content rather than key ideas, were built around misre- presentations of content, were too cumbersome or time-consuming to justify the trouble it would take to implement them, or ostensibly provided for integration across subjects but in reality did not promote progress toward significant goals in either subject. In subsequent work, we developed a framework for thinking about learning activities.
The Nature and Functions of Learning Activities
Our position on learning activities has been influenced by the ideas outlined in earlier chapters; the work of John Dewey, Hilda Taba, Ralph Tyler, and other major curriculum theorists; and the work of other authors who have been influenced by them. Zais (1976), for example, stated that the primary standard for the selection of learning activities should be how well the activities contribute to students’ attainment of curricular goals. Other criteria for good activities were that they provide for the attainment of multiple goals, engage students in active forms of learning, help them to develop values and critical thinking capacities, are built around important content, and are well matched to students’ abilities and interests.
Fraenkel (1980) similarly suggested that good activities feature justifiability (serve goal-related purposes); multiple foci (further progress toward multiple goals such as knowledge, thinking, skills, and attitudes); open-endedness (encourage a variety of responses rather than just retrieval of answers to closed questions); potential for increasing self-confidence in ability to learn (encourage students to inquire, think for themselves, or solve problems); sequential structure (build on what came before and prepare for what will come later); transferability of acquired knowledge (enable students to apply what they have learned to new or different situations); and variety (suitable mixture of intake, organi- zation, demonstration, and expression/creation activities).
Raths (1971) suggested that activities should provide opportunities for students to make informed choices about how to carry out tasks and to reflect on the consequences of their choices later; play active rather than passive roles as learners; engage in inquiry into key ideas, apply important intellectual processes, or address personal or social policy problems rather than just learn factual information; work with actual objects rather than just read about them or view pictures of them; examine or apply a previously learned idea in a new setting; examine topics or issues that citizens in our society do not normally examine; take intellectual risks; rewrite, rehearse, or polish initial efforts; share the planning or carrying out of an activity with peers; address their own expressed purposes; or assess their work using criteria drawn from relevant disciplines. He also suggested that an activity would be more worth- while to the extent that it could be accomplished successfully by children operating at different levels of ability.
We have built on these lists and other writings on activities in four ways. We have: (1) expanded them to include additional principles; (2) grouped the principles according to priority levels; (3) distinguished principles that apply to each individual activity from principles that apply only to groups of activities considered as sets; and
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