> Robin writes:
> >I do believe that students learn better when they are actively engaged; the
> >problem is how to
> >define active engagement--and also how to gauge its presence or absence.
>
> I agree. This issue has been plaguing me for some time now with regard to
> young children. Rheta and I have been working for a couple of years with a
> first and second grade teacher who is wonderful. Every time we observe in her
> classroom, we are struck by the high degree of active engagement we see in the
> children. We want to study it--how she manages to set up the classroom to
> promote it, how she assists individual children in maintaining it, what sorts
> of activities encourage or retard it, etc, etc, etc. However, we keep coming
> back to a central problem. How do we define and measure it? Interest seems to
> be a part of it, but it isn't the whole thing. Does anyone have any leads we
> could pursue? We came across something called the Leuven Involvement Scale for
> Young Children (out of the Centre for Experimental Education in Belgium) but
> it didn't quite capture what we were looking for. The Leuven Scale was focused
> on individual children, and didn't allow for rating situations that were
> socially interactive. Yet often active engagement is highly social.
What about a really naive suggestion: is active engagement simply a matter
of inventing something new? Children (or anyone else) are participating
actively, if they do something, which isn't in every sense quided or told
to do by someone else.
But, this involves a big problem. If they invent something completely new,
which doesn't seem at all to be related to the situation, then they aren't
at all engaged?
Should we say then that children must *add* something new of their own
ivention to the teaching?
It doesn't matter, if 'the new' isn't invented by the children themselves,
but they invented to use it in the situatiuon?
It doesn't matter, how collective 'the new' is. Many inventions are
'social inventions', inventions how to work together.
virtanen
hvirtane who-is-at tukki.jyu.fi
>
> I realize that we seldom talk about young children on XMCA, but this issue has
> had me stumped for some time, and I would welcome anyone's suggestions,
> half-baked or otherwise.
>
> Betty Zan
> Regents' Center for Early Developmental Education
> University of Northern Iowa
> e-mail Betty.zan who-is-at uni.edu
>