WFE1 — Week 1 Pre-lecture reflection
Prompt: Reflect on: your previous learning experiences. Think about one particularly successful and one unsuccessful learning experience. Consider what were the conditions that made this experience successful or unsuccessful for you and what this tells you about your own preferred ways to learn.
My learning experiences have been largely positive, and I credit this to the fact that my learning environment has matched my learning style. I am an avid note-taker and try to keep my academic materials highly organized. This has held true since I was very young; in grade school we were given a planner which was checked weekly and contributed to our grade. I was always perplexed that so many of my peers missed the opportunity to gain such easy points by simply writing down their assignments! As I progressed through the US educational system, I came to realize that many highly intelligent and capable students do not rely on this type of organization to structure their learning, and that I am fortunate that my study habits match those which teachers think are best.
In 5th grade, my class had a year-long reading project, in which students would achieve a series of reading levels based on their comprehension of a set of books, read in increasing difficulty. I was an avid reader, and I enjoyed the types of questions that followed each story, so I quickly progressed through the series and was able to experience the higher-level material by the end of the year. The self-paced model of progressing through a series of challenges without a specific achievement goal was highly motivating for me. I was able to pursue an activity I enjoyed while being rewarded for my persistence. The reading levels were not made public to the class, so the knowledge of achievement was personal, which I believe to be more satisfying than if the levels had been posted.
In high school, I was in the International Baccalaureate program at my school. The program has a powerful mission statement of global citizenship and is structured to enable students to practice critical thinking about all academic topics. However, my school had only implemented the program a year before I joined, and it often felt that the teachers had not yet figured out an effective way to teach the courses or prepare for the required projects. In particular, the final project, called an Extended Essay, went quite poorly for me. The Extended Essay is intended as a capstone project that demonstrates the student’s ability to address a specific question by combining ideas from independent research into a coherent and in-depth exploration of a narrow topic. I chose to write my Extended Essay in the category of biology, answering the question “How do individual honeybees affect the actions and upkeep of the hive?” with the intent of exploring the emergent phenomena of social insects en masse. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the appropriate resources to make a compelling analysis of hive mentality and group dynamics, and so, in the end, my essay read like a day in the life of a honeybee.
I realized while I was writing the essay that I had chosen a poor topic for a research paper. I would have had a much better experience if my topic had been more highly focused, or if I had chosen a question for which I could put forth a hypothesis and contribute to the answer with my own laboratory research. With the hindsight afforded me by college biology courses, I can look back and see that the resources I used, mainly books about honeybees and very few primary sources, were outdated and only gave me the barest skeleton of knowledge about the topic. In fact, what I needed was access to current research journals for up-to-date primary articles. Perhaps my advisor was unable to direct me to these resources, or thought that they would be too advanced for a high school student, or perhaps the school was unable to provide access to online scientific journals. Without the experience of having done scientific research prior to this project, I had been unaware that the type of information I was looking for might be available in research article form, and I lacked the experience to devise a laboratory-based research question. My lack of clear direction and limited use of resources prevented me from performing the kind of directed critical thinking and synthesis of information that was prescribed by the project guidelines.
