Thinking and Problem Solving, Coursework Example

Student Team Achievement Divisions (STAD)

Introduction: Through this lesson, students will get a chance to understand interdependence within ecosystems. They will gain a deeper understanding of salt water marshes that are important habitats and occur around the coast through out the world. As habitats for inter-related and interdependent plants and animals they are important for nature conservation interest. The students would be able to identify and describe important facts regarding salt water marsh plants and animals. Further, this exercise would enable the students to integrate information from all three areas of the salt marsh (tidal changes, plants, and animals) and incorporate new vocabulary words (salt marsh, tide, cordgrass, marsh hay, burrow, gills) by writing a paragraph with at least five integrated facts. The STAD cooperative learning strategy used here consists of 4 member heterogeneous groups and 4 step cycle of teach, team study, test and recognition. The heterogeneous group ensures similar pace of learning for all groups. It also ensures introduction of diverse varieties of perspectives while learning.

Prepare Worksheets in Advance: As a first step, the teacher will develop worksheets in advance that present questions, with answers, about the topic, explanations, clarification of terms, pictorial representations etc. Work sheet is a critical academic tool that helps students understand and integrate important concepts. The work sheets so prepared by the teacher would be comprehensive enough to include questions from all three areas of the salt marsh, that is, tidal changes, plants and animals. It would also include new vocabulary words. Here are the examples of some of the questions: (where will you find the salt shrub thicket zone and identify the vegetation found there? Give me an example of salt loving plant and what is interesting about this species? What is scat?)

Lecture-Discussion: The teacher introduces the topic. The students are told what is to be discussed. A lecture-discussion method of teaching would be more relevant for it involves participation of everyone. Team members cooperate in the process of learning as they go on to discuss new concepts. The teacher presents to the class the pictures of saltwater marsh plants and animals and describes each of them explaining why and how they adapt to the environment.

Group Work: This step involves intense group activities. Group members work together on worksheets provided by the teacher. The group task could involve solving matching type questions such as adaptations and types of animals and plants given in the worksheets. The students could also be asked to explain certain terms. They can be asked to list and describe what they found interesting about saltwater marsh environment. At the end of this exercise, the teacher may evaluate group performance.

Quiz: Each student will be administered a quiz at the end of the learning exercises. The quiz so designed will test the thinking, cognitive and comprehensive skills of students. The questions in quiz will contain different levels of difficulty. In other words, some questions will be fairly simple, while a fair share of questions would be of moderate difficulty level and some questions would be of extremely difficult level. The purpose of the quiz is to enable the teacher to recognize how far the students have been successful with their learning. The quiz taken at frequent intervals would also enable the teacher to know if the students are progressing over time. Besides, the heterogeneous grouping in terms of gender, background and academic abilities will ensure that students across the class over time are able to attain similar levels.

Assessment and Evaluation: There should be assessment and evaluation for both individual and group performance. Both scoring and evaluation, that is numerical value and remark should be used in judging individual as well as the group performance. The purpose of evaluation and assessment is enhancement of performance and assessment. The performance of students should be assessed not just against a set of pre-determined standards but also relative to the other students. Each student could be given grades from A to E based on pre-determined set of criteria. The purpose of this academic exercise is to enable students to develop a deeper understanding of interdependence within ecosystems by examining how plants and animals interrelate in a saltwater marsh, it is therefore expected that it is in the background of this goal that the quiz and evaluation criteria will be set.

While individuals would be recognized on the basis of their over all scores and grades along with grades on different skills, each of the teams could be recognized on the basis of average scores achieved by them in the quiz. The top three teams could be recognized as Good, Better and the Best teams or in any other manner at the discretion of the teacher, as for example, Good, Great and Super teams. It is advised that negative recognitions are avoided.