At the end of January, I used the tool of concept mapping within my G11 classes. Did it work? Was it successful? Perhaps it is a little too early to judge, however we have witnessed a shift of focus within students’ work from regurgitating key studies to explanations of concepts using research to support this. But a few one-off activities does not necessarily mean that they are thinking conceptually.
This week I attended a professional development session on Concept Based Teaching and Learning to gain a greater insight into the background theory of conceptual learning. Afterwards, I left with a large array of thoughts and ideas and I thought it would be helpful to dedicate a post to my reflection on the fundamental points I have taken away. I will then explore each key aspect at a later date in more depth and what this means for teaching and learning in Psychology to help encourage a long-term development plan to incorporating concept based curriculum and instruction into my everyday practise.
- Psychology can be considered in terms of Structure of Knowledge and Structure of Process
As a humanities subject, Psychology is often construed as a high content course with many facts that students are required to ‘know’ or arguably ‘memorise’. However, when looking into Erickson (1995) and Lanning (2012), Psychology is a direct simultaneous use of both these structures.
2. ‘Telling’ as a strategy is widely debated with its use in Concept Based Teaching and Learning.
Whilst we often have a temptation of ‘Telling’ students the over-arching concepts to assist with them organising their knowledge as suggested by Ausbel, this may contradict the purpose and opportunity in which students are able to make these connections themselves.
3. Psychology makes use of Inductive and Abductive Inferences to develop conclusions
In Psychology, the conclusions that we develop are tentative so abductive inferences are made. This means that we lead away from the evidence by asking questions to create a judgement about behaviour. Arguably, Psychology also applies inductive logic through attempting to establish cause and effect relationships between two variables to explain behaviour.
References:
Triple A Plus Learning (2018). East Leadership Team with Stuart MacAlpine, EAST Campus UWCSEA and SKY SCHOOL.
Lanning, L. (2016). What you need to know about the structure of process [online]. Available from: http://corwin-connect.com/2016/11/need-know-structure-process/ (02/05/18).
#conceptbasedteachingandlearning #conceptbasedcurriculum
Dear Sarah,
Always wonderful to see how CBT&L applies to the different subjects. I am most interested in how best to bring abductive inferences in class discussions. Would love to hear some updates on specific class engagements that you felt were most successful.
🙂 Vanessa
Thanks Vanessa. Yes I find it really helpful to hear from other subject areas too – what strategies are you currently using for abductive inferences in your subject? In Psychology, we feel that a good starting point for CBTL are to establish strong Conceptual Understandings so that will be our focus for the units at the moment.
Hey Sarah,
I’ve started teaching TOK this year and my interest was piqued by your third point here (although my question wanders a little from the title of this post). Which type of reasoning do you think is most commonly used in psychology and do you ever explore the strengths and weaknesses of these types of reasoning? I ask because I know little about the methodology of the human sciences and would love to hear from an ‘expert’!
Cheers
Hi Ollie,
Great question and happy to help out!
One aspect that we look at the types of reasoning specifically is when conducting Cross-Cultural Research to explore human behaviour in Psychology.
We look at ‘Etic’ Approaches which take a top down/deductive style of processing; the findings from one culture is used as a lens to study another culture in attempt to find universal behaviour that can be applied worldwide. As a result, we establish that this reasoning leads to standardisation, easy replication and global application of research findings. But also that this processing is inherent to many personal and cultural biases and is ‘ethnocentric’. Researchers may fail to understand why the differences between cultures occur.
Alternatively, we consider ‘Emic’ Approaches which take a bottom-up/inductive style of processing; here the researcher immerses themselves within the culture to develop an understanding of a culturally-specific behaviour. The findings can be directly applied to that culture and their is a great sense of trust, detail and truth to this method. But it can be a challenge for studies to be truly etic, how much can we truly become part of a culture that is not originally our own? This really can only be achieved with long-term interaction.
It would be great if in your TOK lessons you can ask the students to draw on these approaches and give examples of research which demonstrate this!