How many times have you taught a concept only to have to re-teach it the next day because your students don’t remember what you taught the day before?  We know that engaged students learn more than passive students, so we need to be masters at constructing learning experiences in ways that lead students to discover a concept by drawing their own conclusions rather than directly teaching them the concept.  Here a few easy ways a directly taught concept can be modified with digital content from StarrMatica to encourage students to draw their own conclusions.

Directly Taught Concept:  The more times an experiment is conducted, the closer the results will be to the theoretical probabilities.

Student Discovery of that Concept:  Students conduct a probability experiment 10 times and 100 times and then compare the results to draw a conclusion.

Directly Taught Concept:  All parallelograms are quadrilaterals, but not all quadrilaterals are parallelograms.

Student Discovery of that Concept:  Students sort 2-D shapes into categories and then compare shapes in those categories to draw a conclusion.

Directly Taught Concept:  We need to use a standard measuring tool for accuracy when communicating measurements to others.

Student Discovery of that Concept:  Students use footsteps of different sizes to measure around a garden.  Students use fish of different lengths to measure the length of a blue whale. In both activities, students use the information that non-standard measuring tools result in different measurements to draw a conclusion about the need for a standard measuring tool.

How do you lead students to draw conclusions in your classroom?