Vol. 12 No. 2

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Higher Order Thinking Skills and Low-Achieving Students: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

Anat Zohar and Yehudit J. Dori

Fostering students' higher order thinking skills is considered an important educational goal. While learning theories see the development of students' thinking as an important goal for all students, teachers often believe that stimulating higher order thinking is appropriate only for high achieving students. According to this view, low achieving students are, by and large, unable to deal with tasks that require higher order thinking skills and should thus be spared the frustration generated by such tasks. Since this view may cause teachers to treat students in a non-egalitarian way, it is important to find out whether or not it is supported by empirical evidence. The goal of this study is to examine this issue in light of four different studies, by asking the following question: do low achieving students gain from teaching and learning processes that are designed to foster higher order thinking skills? Each of the four studies addressed a different project whose goal was to teach higher order thinking in science classrooms. Following a brief general description of each project, we provide an analysis of its effects on students with low and high achievements. The findings show that by the end of each of the four programs, students with high academic achievements gained higher thinking scores than their peers with low academic achievements. However, students of both sub-groups made a considerable progress with respect to their initial score. In one of the four studies the net gain of low achievers was significantly higher than for high achievers. Our findings strongly suggest that teachers should encourage students of all academic levels to engage in tasks that involve higher order thinking skills.


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An Expirimental Study of the Effects of Representational Guidance on Collaborative Learning Processes

Daniel D. Suthers and Christopher D. Hundhausen

The importance of both social processes and of representational aids for learning is well established, yet few experimental studies have addressed the combination of these factors. The research reported in this paper evaluates the influence of tools for constructing representations of evidential models on collaborative learning processes and outcomes. Pairs of participants worked with one of three representations (Graph, Matrix, Text) while investigating complex science and public health problems. Dependent measures included (a) the content of participants' utterances and representational actions and the timing of these utterances and actions with respect to the availability of information; (b) a multiple choice test of the ability to recall the data, hypotheses, and evidential relations explored; and (c) the contents of a written essay. The results show that representational notations can have significant effects on learners' interactions, and may differ in their influence on subsequent collaborative use of the knowledge being manipulated. For example, Graph and Matrix users elaborated on previously represented information more than Text users. Representation and discussion of evidential relations was quantitatively greatest for Matrix users as predicted, yet this came at the cost of excessive consideration and revision of unimportant relations. Graph users may have been more focused in their consideration of evidence, and the work done in the Graph representation had the greatest impact on the contents of the essays. Although limited to initial use of representations in a laboratory setting, the work demonstrates that representational guidance of collaborative learning is worthy of study, and suggests several lines of further investigation.


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Construction of Collective and Individual Knowledge in Argumentative Activity

Baruch B. Schwarz, Yair Neuman, Julia Gil, and Merav Ilya

In this paper, we elaborate methodologies to study construction of knowledge in argumentative activities. For this purpose, we report on a quasi-empirical study on construction of knowledge through successive argumentative activities on a controversial issue. 120 Grade 5 students participated in successive argumentative activities; some activities involved individuals and some, collectives. According to a first methodology, construction of knowledge was measured through arguments-outcomes produced. We developed tools for evaluating changes in individual and collective arguments. We showed in the study the generally beneficial effect of argumentative activities on collective and individual arguments-outcomes. The significant discrepancies between collective and individual arguments suggested that individual students only partly internalized the collectively constructed arguments. We developed a qualitative methodology to refine this hypothesis as well as other hypotheses concerning the interpretation of the quantitative study. The integration of the quantitative and qualitative methodologies for studying argumentation helped identifying several mechanisms of construction of knowledge in argumentative activities. In particular, it brought new light on the mediating role of representational tools such as Argumentative Maps or Pro-Con Tables.


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