Page 267 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 11 How Can I Design, Implement, and Evaluate Instructional Activities? 239
studies curricula frequently fail to meet this criterion because they engage students in memorizing miscellaneous facts about a country instead of developing understanding and appreciation of how and why the country developed as it did and what some of its current trends and issues are.
Be sure that key ideas that provide the content bases for activities are represented accurately, so that the activities do not induce or reinforce misconceptions. Activities often are based on vague or somewhat incorrect definitions (e.g., products are things that we use). Others feature misleading rather than prototypical examples (e.g., cultural studies activities that encourage students to develop chauvinistic stereotypes rather than well- informed understandings: such as singing slaves’ spirituals or participating in “Indian pow wows”).
2. Appropriate level of difficulty. Each activity must be pitched within the optimal range of difficulty (i.e., the students’ zones of proximal development). It must be difficult enough to provide some challenge and extend learning, but not so difficult as to leave many students confused or frustrated. You can adjust difficulty levels either by adjusting the complexity of activities themselves or by adjusting the degree to which you structure and scaffold those activities for your students.
Structuring and scaffolding of an activity must be sufficient to enable students to accomplish its primary goal if the students invest reasonable effort in attempting to do so. If they cannot engage in the activity with enough understanding to be able to per- form its required tasks, or if these tasks are (in effect) performed for them by the teacher or by the structuring built into the materials, the activity’s value will be nullified.
Ordinarily, activities should not combine difficult new processes with difficult new content. Difficult new processes should be introduced in the context of applying easy or familiar content. When the main purpose is to get students to apply new content, activities should employ easy or familiar formats and processes. Violations of this principle can cause students to become so concerned about the procedural requirements of unfamiliar activities (such as role playing) that they fail to attend sufficiently to their content-related purposes (Blumenfeld, Mergendoller, & Swarthout, 1987).
3. Feasibility. Each activity must be feasible for implementation within the prevailing constraints (e.g., space and equipment, time, types of students). With feasibility of activity consider: space, equipment, time, and types of students. Some activities are difficult to implement because they require more noise or commotion than is feasible in most class- rooms. Others are difficult to justify because they involve significant risk to students’ emotional security or would be offensive to the community.
4. Cost effectiveness. The educational benefits expected to be derived from an activity must justify its anticipated costs (for both teacher and students) in time and trouble. Some activities are not worth the time and trouble it would take to implement them. Often this is the case for activities suggested as ways to generate interest in a new topic or to culminate curriculum units. Other examples include time-consuming construction of murals or dioramas and overly ambitious pageant-like simulations and games.
Activities should not be burdened with needless complications that may distract students from their primary goals. Simple worksheet activities that should only require circling, underlining, or writing in answers often call for coloring, cutting and pasting, or other modes of response that take up time and distract students from content-related purposes. Many activities are complicated in counterproductive ways by converting them into games that place more emphasis on speed of response than on thoughtful understand- ing or that focus students’ attention on winning a competition rather than on learning or applying content.
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