E-portfolioSALASIYAS

REFLECTIONS- KERANGKA ALTERNATIF (ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS)

Constructivist teaching practices become the most emphasize topic by my lecturer especially when teacher seek or look for student’s alternative conceptions before start the lessons. The steps for eliciting student’s prior knowledge will be very useful in encouraging critical thinking and science process skills. Teacher need to ask students for their theories or what their understanding about certain concepts before sharing teacher’s understanding.

Alternative conception posed a very serious problem to students since they can hold wrong ideas or alternative concept for a very long time and they will apply it in their daily life as well as shared the wrong concept with their friends. More shocking facts are that graduate students also hold alternative concept carried from their childhood learning. Even teacher themselves need to check whether they also hold alternative concept or not since they are the one that responsible in teaching and guide the students from having alternative conceptions in basic theories specifically in science.

Three steps in 3E Model or basis of constructivist teaching practice was Engage, Empower and Enhance. My lecturer always emphasizes the importance to engage students cognitively with interesting ideas in eliciting student’s existing ideas. Students states their own ideas about the topic discussed and then teacher were responsible in correcting any wrong concept about their ideas. It is important to note that how we project questions to students is very important to elicit alternative concept since wrong techniques in questioning gives you incorrect answer.  

*Picture above showing our experiment of global warming  using Data Logger 

In the Empowering phase, teacher need to come up with interesting experiments to facilitates construction of scientific ideas. We capitalized the advance technology in science using Data Logger to get better understanding of scientific experiment and science concept. Through Data Logger, students able to carried out innovative experiments and have more accurate measurements because it read information from sensors and transferred the reading to computers. It also will enhanced computer literacy in students and create greater interest to students in doing practical work compared to outdated experimental method.

Last step is Enhance where students can apply the scientific concept that they gains from engaging and test out their understanding in empowering steps. Teacher provides the opportunity to the students to used constructed ideas in variety of situations especially in daily life situations. Teacher were advice to gives questions, projects and  portfolios related to student’s daily life in order to strengthen the understanding of students in particular science topic. After followed the steps thoroughly, teacher need to guides the students to reflect on their ideas before and after teaching. This step was very crucial in giving the student time to see their progress of learning or what they have learnt and experience before.

For me, using Data Logger for the first time was very exciting and interesting experience since it will give the opportunity to students in exploring different features in Data Logger. Moreover, the experiment can be repeated and stopped at any time. More than one sensor can be used simultaneously allowing students to do the experiments easily at the same time. Features such as real time logging and graphs presented simultaneously with data collection method were very helpful and allow the students to compare the result with others and ask question to teachers. Graph and raw data that were generated also help the students to write a report easily and short time was needed to complete the report.