Total Student Involvement in Learning Science

Abstract

The under believe that science must be learned through active involvement of students in the construction of meanings of concepts a vast number of studies have been carried out. In line with these studies a number of instructional models have been developed. These models were mainly constructivist in nature in which students were expected to be physically and mentally active in the efforts to develop their own understandings of the studied concepts. Instructional models of this type have been extensively implemented and it was expected that the results were positive in terms of improvement of student learning process and result. However, reports so far published indicated that not all of the models taken into the trials gave satisfactorily results. Among the possible reasons of these poor results was the incomplete involvement of the students in the whole process of learning. The students were only partially involved mainly in the execution phase of learning activities. Effective learning suggests a total involvement of students in the whole process, from being aware of the goals of learning to taking advantage from the knowledge of evaluation processes. This paper suggests a more comprehensive model of learning in which total involvement of students is pursued in the whole process of learning, from the beginning to the end, from the determination of the goals, planning the strategy of learning to the evaluation stages of the learning process.