On this week our MMSEL class was taught by Mr. Daen, Ms. Vanny, Ms. Vya and Ms. Ulfah. They were teaching us about Instructional Variables: Developing interest in learning activities. These are Introductory focus: Attracting students’ attention, Personalization: Links to students’ lives, Involvement: Increasing Intrinsic interest, Feedback: Meeting the need to understand, Assessment and Learning: using feedback to increase interest and self-efficacy, and learning context: increasing motivation in urban classroom. As usual, to learn these topics we were divided into 4 groups and I got a group that discussed about feedback and assessment. The method that we use to learn these topics was jigsaw. From the discussion in home group and expert group, introductory focus: attracting students’ attention is a lesson beginning that attracts students’ attention and provides a conceptual framework for the lesson (Marzaro, 2003b). It attempts to capitalize on the effects of curiosity and novelty, which are characteristics of intrinsically motivating activities (Broophy, 2004). It is the way how teacher starts the class with unique, eye-catching, and interest one. Actually I found this application on our class this week, our lecture brought abi big bag to the class that filled by material that we will learn that day. It did take our attention.
After teacher can get students’ attention, teacher can proceed to another attracting ways which are asking paradoxical question (e.g. Indonesia is country that rich of natural resources, but why it categorized as poor country?) and by using demonstrations with seemingly contradictory results (e.g. dropping two balls of different weights and seeing that they hit the floor at the same time.
Personalization: Link to students’ lives is how we use our students as the learning tools (engaged students more) so that the material concept will be understandable by students. It also help students to increase their self-autonomy because they being the object of learning it-self. For example, math class that learn about statistics topic, teacher can use the color of students’ eye, shoe size and students’ interest as statistics data.
Involvement: increasing intrinsic interest is the extent to which students’ are actively participating in learning, result in increased interest and learning (Hidi, 2002; Lutz, Guthrie &Davis, 2006). There are two strategies for increasing student involvement, first is open-ended questioning and hands-on activities. Open-ended question is for which all answer are acceptable; for example “what do you think about cuboid?”. Hands-on activities are another way of promoting involvement and students’ interest (Zahonk, 1996). Hands-on activities add variety to learning activities, which increases learner interest (M.E. Perry et al., 2006). The example of hands-on activities in math class for probability topic is toss a coin or the using of a die, in biology class is frog experiment or teacher can use game in their teaching and learning. And from our class this week our lecture held “guessing body language game” that really increasing students’ involvement.
Feedback: meeting the need. Feedback help to understand why on perform the way she or he do, which attribution theory considers an important needs. It gives us information about progress toward goals, and when they are met, our self-efficacy increases. If they are not met, we can then increase our effort or strategies. There are two types of feedback, first is descriptive feedback, which is specific and detail information in the form of written comments or conversations that help students understand what they needs to do in order to make improvement. (e.g. your calculating step is clear, your next step might be to add reasoning sentence that support your calculation”. Second is evaluative feedback is a summary for the learner of how well he or she has performed on a particular task. This feedback is often in the form of letter, grades, numbers, check marks, symbols and / or general comments.
Assessment, Buttler and McMunn (2010) said that assessment is the act of collecting information about individuals or groups of individuals in order to better understand them. The purposes of assessment are to provide feedback to the students, and to serve as a diagnostic and monitoring tool for instruction that assess our understanding on these topics.
Learning context: increasing motivation in urban classrooms, there are two subtopics in learning contexts, first is the impact of teachers toward caring, order and safety, involvement and challenge task that we have learned one week before. Second is a student with achievement problems. For example, students who are uninterested or alienated, students who are low-achieving and have low expectations for success, students with high anxiety, students who are perfectionist, students who are procrastinated, and students who protect their self-worth by avoiding failure.
Well, I think that is all from me. Thank you.
Richa Fatimah
For MMSEL class