I feel that community collaboration can be a wonderful experience for everyone involved. Students have the opportunity to apply what they've learned in the classroom to real life situations. Most of the comments here have been about having people in the community come and speak to students. While I think it's a wonderful opportunity for students to met and interact with professionals and to hear why what we're trying to get them to learn is important, I don't think we can ignore the relevance of collaborative projects.
I think that allowing students to collect their own real world data is invaluable to their understanding of the scientific process. As James mentioned in his post, being able to dissect an owl pellet that you found is even better because you found it yourself. Being able to share the data you collected with other students allows students to feel connected to a larger community beyond their own class or school. Even if it's just to the high school across town, the connections formed help broaden their horizons.
However with any data found on the internet, data will need to be reviewed before used in any larger projects or before students draw conclusions based on it. But the need to review the data found online, can also provide a chance for students to learn about checking data, so perhaps it's not a drawback.
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Students will surely be able to learn from when they collect their data. However, I agree with you that internet data could be used without checking the validity. I actually planned a lesson with one of the collaboration sites online. It would be helpful if the teacher checks all the sources before students use them or give them the guidelines with options on which sites to go, just like webquests.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your second paragraph, precisely because that's what science is. Most of the science we know about science was because someone collected data and provided an explanation for it. By allowing the students to do this themselves, they will undoubtedly better remember the information (if you let them find out for themselves objects they've found float and sink, they will probably better understand the concept of density than if they just saw it on a power point).
ReplyDeleteWhat I've just said doesn't really have anything to do with outside collaboration
But is still relevant to science education, Ashley! :p
ReplyDeleteI think you made a really good point, Kate. The hands on experience is invaluable. Just like with labs, I know there were many times when I didn't understand a topic completely until I collected the data myself. One example of this is when I was in 6th grade and we had to work with fulcrums and pulleys and we could change how much weight we could lift or pull by changing the location of the fulcrum or pulley. This blew my mind and it didn't make sense until I saw it happen.
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