Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades K-6 (0522)

Answers

3. The best answer is A. Too much time is often spent supervising students in relation to personal needs and everyday housekeeping tasks, and interruptions for this purpose are a major source of discontinuity in academic activities. Teachers can minimize these problems by preparing the classroom and students to handle routine activities on their own.

4. The best answer is B. The method of teaching most often seen as the opposite of discovery teaching is expository teaching. Discovery learning allows students to explore material on their own and arrive at conclusions. In expository teaching, students are presented with subject matter organized by the teacher.

5. The best answer is B. Students are quick to learn classroom routines for work incentives and penalties, as the student's remark implies. No routine has been established to reward students who finish their work early.

6. The best answer is D. The most appropriate follow-up is one that motivates children toward continued expression. Displaying the essay serves as a form of publication and allows the children to reread the essay on their own terms. Reading in unison provides a nonthreatening way for the children to practice the language skills they have learned.

7. The best answer is C. This question asks you to identify an instructional strategy that provides the student with a clearly structured activity to keep him on task to reach the IEP objectives. The information provided about Dan tells you that the strategy the teacher chooses must help Dan in two ways: it must keep his attention from wandering and it must help him to follow what is going on in the lesson. In addition, the strategy needs to provide the teacher with assessment information to use in evaluating the student's progress.

8. The best answer is D. A grade-equivalent score is a score that compares the raw score attained on a test by the individual student to the raw score attained by the average student in the norm group for the particular test and then reports the grade and month level of that norm group comparison. In this case, Daryl's raw score was equivalent to the average raw score of all eighth graders in the second month of school who were part of the norm group.

9. The best answer is C. Constructivist teaching depends on the connection of new information to already learned information or understandings, whether or not they are accurate. The passage says, "The point of constructivist instruction is to have students reflect on their questions about new concepts in order to uncover their misconceptions. If a student cannot reason out the answer, this indicates a conceptual problem that the teacher needs to address." Thus, a consideration of barriers and/or misconceptions in response to the presentation of new material is an essential follow-up to a constructivist lesson.

10. The best answer is D. The second author maintains that students require teacher guidance and a direct expression of the teacher's expert content knowledge in order to learn most effectively. Choices A (avoiding lecturing), B (learning without teacher intervention), and C (de-emphasis on content knowledge) are not consistent with this approach to teaching. Direct guidance of students' thinking is consistent with the second author's approach.