A learning activity is any task that students do as part of their school-related work. It can be
an exercise that students complete in one class period, or an extended project that takes
place both in and outside of school.
Students have shared responsibility for their work, and the
learning activity is designed in a way that requires students to make substantive decisions
together. These features help students learn the important collaboration skills of
negotiation, conflict resolution, agreement on what must be done, distribution of tasks,
listening to the ideas of others, and integration of ideas into a coherent whole. The strongest
learning activities are designed so that student work is interdependent, requiring all students
to contribute in order for the team to succeed. This trend makes it more innovative and enjoyable learning.
Many school activities require students to learn and reproduce information they are given.
Certainly it is essential for students to master the important content of a domain. But
memorization alone does not give students the critical thinking and reasoning skills that they
will need for success in higher academics and in knowledge-based organizations. With
information so readily available through the Internet and other sources, employees must be
able to integrate and evaluate information in order to use it productively in their work.
Increasingly, most living-wage jobs also demand higher levels of expertise than in the past,
and the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and new problems.
Am happy that here this topic looks at
students’ opportunities to build deep knowledge that they can transfer and apply in practice.
Knowledge construction activities require students to generate ideas and understandings
that are new to them. Students can do this through interpretation, analysis, synthesis, or
evaluation. In stronger activities, knowledge construction is the main requirement of the
learning activity.
The strongest activities require students to apply the knowledge they constructed in a
different context, helping them to deepen their understanding further, and to connect
information and ideas from two or more academic disciplines (for example, integrating
learning from both science and literature).
Am able to understand that Knowledge construction happens when students do more than reproduce what they have
learned: they go beyond knowledge reproduction to generate ideas and understandings that
are new to them. The skills of knowledge construction are often considered “critical
thinking.” Activities that require knowledge construction ask students to interpret, analyse,
synthesize, or evaluate information or ideas.
am able to reflect on the following ideas
Interpretation means drawing inferences beyond the literal meaning. For example,
students might read a description of a historical period and infer why people who
lived then behaved the way they did.
Analysis means identifying the parts of a whole and their relationships to each other.
For example, students might investigate local environmental factors to determine
which are most likely to affect migrating birds.
Synthesis means identifying the relationships between two or more ideas. For
example, students might be required to compare and contrast perspectives from
multiple sources.
Evaluation means judging the quality, credibility, or importance of data, ideas, or
events. For example, students might read different accounts of an historical event and
determine which ones they find most credible.
I have learnt that ICT supports knowledge construction when:
Students use ICT directly for the knowledge-construction part of a learning activity.
For example, students use a computer to analyze scientific information.
Students use ICT to indirectly support knowledge construction, by using ICT to
complete one step of an activity, and then using information from that step in the
knowledge-construction part of the activity. For example, students might search for
terms related to current events on Twitter and then analyse people’s responses
offline. The information they found on Twitter supported their analysis, so we say
that ICT use supported knowledge construction.
posted by;
Niwamanya Gilbert
