Page 103 - International Journal of Process Educaiton (Special Issue)

own; you have professors and instructors who
act as coaches to facilitate your growth and
improvement. But the bottom line is that just as
no one else can exercise for a runner, no one else
can do your training for you.
Relevance of Learning Activities
One of the lessons of active learning is that meaningful
learning requires active engagement on the part of a
learner. If a learner is curious about and interested in a
topic, he or she is motivated to learn and is that much more
active and engaged. Learning becomes enjoyable and
meaningful. Who among us does not recall approaching a
learning situation with skepticism, feeling that this is what
others want us to learn, for their own reasons, with little
regard for our interests or other demands on our time?
“Why should I bother?” or “What’s in it for me?” are fair,
if not terribly polite questions. The key is relevance. If a
topic is relevant to a learner, it matters. As educators, we
know that what we teach does matter, but knowing this is
not enough if we want active and engaged learners. We
have to show them that relevance. We have to show why
they should bother and what’s in it for them.
Why?
The first step of the Learning Process Methodology is to
consider the question of why the learning is relevant; a
learner should begin by identifying and explaining their
reasons for learning. The Learning Process Methodology
informs the Activity Design Methodology (because a
learning activity is useless unless it supports the learning
process), and Step 4 of that methodology is, “Create the
‘Why’ for the activity” (Leise, Beyerlein, & Apple, 2007).
As explained in the Activity Design Handbook (Pacific
Crest, 2008),
This section should put the activity in context for
the learner by addressing three questions:
• What will the student learn? (clarifies the title
and further defines the content of the activity)
• Why is it relevant to the subject? (defines
the general importance of the activity and
describes how it fits into the course)
• Why is it relevant to the learner? (provides
justification for the activity from the
perspective of the individual learner)
While all Process Education learning activities contain a
“Why?” statement, an interesting variation on this practice
is found in Foundations of Organic Chemistry (Bucholtz,
2015), where, instead of a prompt of “Why?”, that section
is titled, “Who Gives a Darn?” Ehren Bucholtz, the book’s
author, explains:
International Journal of Process Education (February 2016, Volume 8 Issue 1) 101
Students often see the material of a typical day
to be esoteric, and don’t really understand why
this material is useful to learn. Therefore, the start
of each activity in the workbook presents a new
problem; presented as a “Who Gives a Darn?”
question. Students then work through an activity
that is based on POGIL principles that addresses
the learning objectives of the day. At the end of
the activity, the “Who Gives a Darn?” question
is presented once again, and students are guided
through the thinking to solve the problem using
the knowledge and skills gained in the activity.
See Figures 1 and 2 for an example.
Real-World Problems and Problem-Based Learning
In addition to a compelling “Why?” statement, the use
of real-world problems and problem-based learning
(instructional methodology that challenges students to
seek solutions to real-world problems; Duncan-Hewitt,
2007) are other strategies to make learning more relevant.
Reviewing Figures 1 and 2, we see that they comprise an
excellent example of using a real-world problem. Not only
is global warming seemingly omnipresent in the media, it
is as much a real-world a problem as it is possible to have in
that the potential impacts will be noticed by and will affect
everyone. Solving Real Problems in Chemistry (Goodwin,
Slusher, Gilbert & Hanson, 2009) is another example of
curriculum that is designed to use real-world problems to
increase student performance in solving problems. Various
activities challenge students to
• Determine whether a homeopathic medicine is a
placebo
• Calculate the fuel value, cost, economic value, and
environmental value of various fuels (wood, coal,
liquid propane gas)
• Determine the time of death for a corpse found at the
side of the road
• Calculate where to build an aluminum plant based on
the average residential price for energy
• Predict the useful lifetime for instrumentation used
on Mars
While neither Foundations of Organic Chemistry nor
Solving Real Problem with Chemistry use Problem-
Based Learning in its strictest definition (i.e., students
are not asked to develop a problem statement nor must
they determine the information and resources they will
need to solve the problem), they do share with PBL that,
“appropriately designed, the problems engage students’
curiosity so that they are motivated to explore the subject
beyond simple solutions” (Duncan-Hewitt, 2007).