Think like a scientist with Stairway’s new lessons in physics and biology
Written by Anne Sørensen, Content and Learning Lead at Stairway
As you may already know, Stairway recently launched 200 new lessons to help you study physics and biology. We are working very hard on getting the rest of the lessons out as soon as possible, so you can study the whole curriculum on Stairway.
We are particularly excited about these new lessons!
In short, these new lessons make learning as active as possible. They make you work out the new information for yourself through questions, instead of forcing you to read through long paragraphs of text.
The lessons will ask you to work things out based on examples or by eliminating options you know cannot be right. Sometimes the lessons simply ask you to use your general knowledge of how the world works to help you answer the question.
We have written our new lessons like this for 3 reasons
- We have learnt from other students that they find this method more entertaining.
- We are convinced that it will help you learn better and faster.
- Our learning mission at Stairway is to help students learn how to think like scientists.
Thinking like a scientist takes curiosity, persistence and tonnes and tonnes of guts!
Why does it take guts? Because science is all about finding answers to things no one yet has an answer for. It essentially means that scientists are constantly coming up with educated guesses, and then they experiment to see if they were right.
Now, scientists will only get better and cleverer, if they accept that sometimes their educated guesses will in fact turn out to be wrong. Good scientists, however, don’t get defeated by their mistakes. They stay determined to learn from them, until they have learnt enough that one day their educated guesses turn out to be right.
So in Stairway’s new lessons…
We make you take on the scientist’s mind-set. We present new information in question-form as much as possible. This means that you have to think for yourself about what the correct information might be. We then follow that up with explanations, so that you understand why your guess was correct if it was correct, or why it was wrong if it was wrong.
We hope you will enjoy these lessons!
We look forward to learning as much as we can from you about what you enjoy, what you don’t enjoy, and what we can do to make these lessons even more helpful for you.
You can give us your feedback at the end of each lesson and by emailing support@stairwaylearning.com.
So please stay in touch!
Written by Anne Sørensen, Content and Learning Lead at Stairway
