Thinking Hard in Science

by Richard Crawshay,
Teacher of Science

‘Memory is the residue of thought’ is the premise of ‘ThinkingHard’ strategies that we have been employing in science. One such approach seeks to combine creativity & memory recall by finding appropriate scientific processes and getting students to create contemporaneous notes using only pictures they must draw themselves whilst the information is read aloud to them. Teaching a Year 9 main band class about the dangers and uses of Electromagnetic waves seemed like an excellent opportunity to employ this new strategy.

I paired up each student and gave them a coloured sheet of A4 paper (I wanted this to be noticeably different so used bright yellow paper) between them. I asked one student to be ‘the artist’ and the other to be the ‘scribe’. I then explained that I would read out the information twice during which ‘the artist’ could draw as many pictures as they liked without using numbers or letters. Once the second reading was completed ‘the scribe’ then had to work with the artist to write out the information in words in an effort to recall as much information as possible. The results were mixed across the class but several pairs managed to reproduce nearly all the information and every pair managed to recall at least half of the facts that were read out. This ‘movie making’, as the terminology describes it, is different, interesting & effective in getting students to think independently. It is not suitable for all parts of the science syllabus but I employ it now where appropriate across the ability spectrum.

Marking student’s books can conjure feelings of ‘deja vu’ as you see your own lesson notes reproduced faithfully but sometimes copying down verbatim doesn’t always embed the learning for every student. ‘ThinkingHard’ suggests a simple strategy to create the conditions for students to ‘translate’ lesson notes into their own ‘words & language’ such that their ability to recall the relevant facts is enhanced. ‘Reduce it’ at its simplest is showing a slide (hopefully a very busy slide) with a lot of information and then setting a word and time limit for students to attempt. I have used this approach with a Year 10 Main Band class as well as a Year 9 Top set.

The main band were given 2 paragraphs, each containing about 50 words, and tasked with writing 2 sentences of no more than 15 words each to ‘capture’ the key fact from each paragraph. Most students managed to complete the task although some simply copied down one sentence from each paragraph (I made a mental note to exclude that option for the next time I employed the strategy). One student produced one sentence of 21 words for both paragraphs.

For the Year 9 Top set I presented a slide with 160 words and set the task to write notes using a maximum of 80 words but fewer if they chose. Results here were much more impressive with all students managing to complete the task. One student opted to use bullet points (again I hadn’t precluded such an approach and believe that it should be allowed as some students prefer to make notes in bullet point form). I like this strategy as it worked across the ability spectrum and can be incorporated into most lessons.