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?  As teachers we know that engaged students learn more than passive students, so we need to construct learning experiences in ways that lead students to discover a concept by drawing their own conclusions rather than directly teaching them the concept.  Here are a few ways a directly taught concept can be modified with digital content 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:  In this StarrMatica activity, students conduct a probability experiment 10 times and 100 times and then compare the results to draw a conclusion. (You must be a StarrMatica member to access this content.)

http://www.starrmatica.com/lessons/direct.php?l=probability&id=4586

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

Student Discovery of that Concept:  In this StarrMatica activity, students sort 2-D shapes into categories and then compare shapes in those categories to draw a conclusion.  (You must be a StarrMatica member to access this content.)

http://www.starrmatica.com/lessons/direct.php?l=2dshapes&id=4248

Directly Taught Concept:  The commutative property of multiplication tells us that factors can be multiplied in any order and the product remains the same.

Student Discovery of that Concept:  Students create multiplication arrays for multiplication pairs (ie:  6 x 5 and 5 x 6) and draw a conclusion about the relationship between the factors and the product.

http://staff.argyll.epsb.ca/jreed/math9/strand1/multiply_arrays.swf

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

Student Discovery of that Concept:  In this StarrMatica K-2 activity, students use footsteps of different sizes to measure around a garden.

http://www.starrmatica.com/lessons/k2/index.php?lesson=123&id=1032

In this StarrMatica 3-6 activity, students use fish of different lengths to measure the length of a blue whale.

http://www.starrmatica.com/lessons/direct.php?l=usmeasurement&id=4656

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.  (You must be a StarrMatica member to access both pieces of content.)

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