Forums

Teaching difficult topics that introduce terms that students have not seen before, or to English Language Learner’s that are not familiar enough with English yet can pose a challenge. The important thing to consider is what is important and what will help the students in the long run. Going through each term before the content takes too much time and is impractical in a course that is dense with content. (Nargund-Joshi and Bautista 25) What will benefit the students the most would be to teach them the content in a context that they can understand, and then introduce how the terms fit into the content. This will help the students in the long run because learning terms is essentially memorization, and memorization is at the bottom of blooms taxonomy. Learning the content shows a higher level of brain function and understanding, and it will also make it easier to learn the terms. I have taken a course that focused on essentially teaching students how to read chemistry. The biggest challenge that students face is the fact that a majority of the terms in chemistry are brand new because it is the first time that they are seeing them. What I got out of that class was to help students get the big picture before anything else. When students understand the big picture, the small details are easier to understand because there is an underlying base of knowledge that the students can refer to. Students often stress themselves over small details, and as a result do not have the time and/or energy to tackle big picture ideas. It is almost an identical issue as learning terms versus content. It may be nice that a student can memorize 10 terms per chapter, but it does nothing for the student if they can’t apply those terms to the content.

Nargund-Joshi, V., & Bautista, N. (2016). Which Comes First--Language or Content? The Science Teacher, 083(04), 24–30. doi: 10.2505/4/tst16_083_04_24

Hi Romeel,

I especially appreciated your comment, '...it does nothing for the student if...can't apply those terms to the content.'  So true!  I think about how I used to get all of the lab equipment out at the beginning of a school year and require my students to learn all of the names.(Some of the equipment they would not be using until January - if at all!)  Those students good at memorization had no problem with that delivery.  However, the majority of my middle schoolers DID have difficulty with so many terms at once. When I figured out that some terms shouldn't be introduced until point of need, it made learning science equipment a piece of cake - well, we call it chunking now :-).

I love the Frayer model as another strategy for learning a vocabulary term at point of need.  In The Science Teacher article, 'Reading to Learn Science as an Active Process' by V. Gillis and G. MacDougall, (2007), a sample Frayer Model is shared along with several other great ideas for helping students make sense of the vocabulary terms in the content they read. You can access this article at: https://common.nsta.org/resource/default?id=10.2505%2f4%2ftst07_074_05_45

Best wishes for a highly successful teaching career!

Best,

Prof. Mohr