Field Experience Observation Report - Essay Example

They use this method to gauge their understanding of what they are reading. I heard one student asked himself “okay, so this is what it means” as he was trying to understand the meaning of a statement he had just read. This method is usually effective during studies because it offers many ways through which they can gain knowledge. Students are able to come up with conclusions to the information they are reading, the outcomes, goals, and the meaning of the content. In the learning process, it is usually up to the learners to come up with ways to understand, retain, and use the information they learn as skills in problem solving and answering questions. As a result, students learn by generating and completing explanations through coming up with self explanations of what they are reading. I observed that using this self-explanation technique students were able to generate inferences to make up for some information that is missing about a theory or a skill. This method provides students with ways of justifying their understanding especially in cases where they have prior knowledge of the topic. The fact that students can take on instructional activities that they think will benefit them in their bit to succeed in their learning goals (Bassok, 2009). There are ways that, as a teacher, one can encourage students to devise more self-explanation methods to enhance their understanding. I can help students to develop their self-explanation skills by giving them worked out examples. The questions they will ask themselves as well as the explanations they will give will improve their gaining of problem solving skills. Explicitly prompting self-explanation in the case of teaching declarative knowledge that comes from a suppository text is significantly effective. This is because students will be exposed to more ways of self-explaining thus enhancing their skills and understanding. This method works best when students have prior knowledge to the topic in question because the more the knowledge the students have about the topic, the more the self-explaining they do, thus the greater the understanding. Reasoning and argumentation are also another practice I am observing in my classroom that reflects on the topics in the module. This method involves engaging students in argumentative discussions that will prompt them to develop ideas about the topic. During an active argumentation, students express their ideas about the topic, defend their ideas, and come up with counterarguments to other students ideas that are different from theirs. Argumentation helps students to understand the topic and makes them more interested and motivated. It also improves their problem solving skills as well as their argumentation skills. Collaborative reasoning, on the other hand, involves discussing texts that aim at promoting the critical and creative skills involved in thinking by students while personally engaging all the participants (Walton, 2000). When students engage discussions, collaborative reasoning and argumentations are the most effective ways of enhancing the learning process. According to Walton (2000), whenever a student has to present his or her idea, the first thing they do is to rate how relevant the idea is to the discussion, and in so doing, they are able to evaluate their understanding of the topic. During these discussions, students get together after Read More