A science teacher mandates an investigation where students measure local air…

Concept

Methods of teaching are classified by where the intellectual work of reaching the knowledge is placed. In an experience-based, heuristic or discovery method that work sits with the learner, who works out the procedure and the apparatus and gathers the evidence at first hand, so that the learning is meant to grow out of the learner's own investigation, while the teacher sets the problem and thereafter acts only as a facilitator. In the programmed family of methods the content, its sequence and the expected responses are settled in advance by a designer or a demonstrator, and the learner moves through material that has already been laid out.

Application

Read the classroom description against that test.

1. The task set is an investigation of local air-quality factors, so the knowledge is to come from evidence the class itself collects, not from a text or a display.

2. The measuring instruments are designed by the students themselves, so the procedure and the apparatus are the learner's own product rather than something supplied ready-made.

3. Nothing in the task is supplied ready-made: neither the instruments nor the readings reach the class from a teacher, a text or a display, so the entire evidence base for this learning is the students' own field work, which is the signature of the heuristic (discovery) method.

Contrast

Result

The experience-based method being emphasised is therefore the heuristic (discovery) method, in which the pupil works as an investigator. The three programmed alternatives all keep the procedure and the expected outcome in the hands of the designer or the teacher.