Student research

I've had an interesting couple of lessons with my January starters class, this week. We are still at the start of the radioactivity topic, thinking about isotopes and leading to the 3 kinds of radioactivity, alpha, beta and gamma.

I decided to try a different approach and after a discussion about what made isotopes different from each other, asked the students to imagine we were the ones making discoveries of new atoms and radioactivity. Going back in time and taking the place of Marie Curie, so to speak.

So I asked what properties we should investigate if we had a jar containing a new and unkown element in front of us. To be honest, I thought it might be asking too much of the students, but they coped surprisingly well. M, typically leapt in immediately, suggesting we should find the mass of the atom. This wasn't too surprising as we had been looking at the masses of atoms in the periodic table, but he then said that if the mass was small, we could assume that the number of protons and neutrons (constituent parts of an atom) would be equal as he had spotted that was the case with the smaller atoms.

Wow! That showed a depth to his thinking that I had not been aware of. The rest of the class joined in then and although M was by far the biggest contributor, with the best ideas, I was able to elicit a fair amount of conversation from the others as well. They all worked hard to consider the ideas and were engaged in the task throughout. We managed to revise earlier work on electrical charges as a bonus, during the discussion.

After this success, I tried to push my luck further by setting them individual tasks today. I asked each to do their own research, giving each a different type of radioactivity to find out about and report back to the group. As there are 4 students now and only 3 types of radioactivity to investigate, I gave the 4th student the task of investigating background radiation.

Time is short now and exams are looming, so we only had one lesson for this. The students were given just 20 minutes for their research so they chose to read their textbooks, instead of going to the computer suites or library. I'd given hints on the back of their instruction cards and directed them to find some specific properties, but not too many, I hope.

The tasks were done fairly well, with a few misunderstandings as expected. It did show me that they are still finding it hard to access a textbook written for English-speaking students and that I need to continue to support their vocabulary to a large extent. I asked them to write, on the IWB, the most important points (in their opinion), which we can compare with the information I want them to learn and remember in the next lesson!

I hope that these lessons will have helped them to take ownership of the topic and will make the 3 kinds of radioactivity more easily understood and remembered. Anything else is a bonus really, but I've certainly enjoyed this approach much more that the traditional delivery of facts by teacher to student.