Ashley Egan

            ED PSYCH

Lesson Plan Eval

Evaluation of Characteristics of Mammals Lesson

This lesson was designed to teach 2nd grade students the characteristics of mammals. The main idea was to give the students a few pictures of mammals and non-mammals. The children would get into groups and divide them into 2 categories of their choosing and tell the class why they divided them that way. After that was done, the characteristics of mammals were shared with the students and then the students were to re-group their pictures and turn them into mammals and non-mammals. After this was done each student was given a piece of drawing paper to draw their own mammal and had to list at least one of the characteristics of a mammal. 

This lesson hit on a few big topics in education psychology. First it is important to reflect on the children’s age. In 2nd grade students are generally 7 or 8 which would put them in Piaget’s concrete operational stage. In this stage children are able to form relationships (among other things) but that is limited to familiar situations. This lesson is right on target for its intended age group because the students are able to form relationships between the animals, and all the animals used are familiar animals such as a duck or a cow. This lesson also pushes the skill of class inclusion, the students mist think about the whole class of animals and make relationships between those that are mammals and those that are not. 

In addition to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, this lesson also uses principles laid out by Vygotsky. Although they both describe development, and agree that learning is a constructive process and cannot be simply handed to the student, they differ in how they believe development happens. For Piaget, development must proceed understanding. That is, there is no way to make the learning process go any faster because it is dependant on the development of the child. With Vygotsky, he believes that learning can proceed development and therefore learning can be pushed somewhat to speed up development. In this lesson the teacher is using the zone of proximal development and aiding the students with a concept they could not master with aid from their instructor.  The children have not yet learned what defines a mammal, but they are certainly capable of understanding the characteristics that separate them from other animals. With the teacher helping them organize the information, they are being aided into understanding the concept at hand. In addition to the teacher being an aid, the cooperative learning that takes places also helps students help each other through their zones of proximal development. Vygotsky feels that social interaction is a great way to provide models and also insight to another’s thinking process. By having the children work in groups during this lesson all of those benefits are taking place simultaneously.

            Now that cognitive development has been discussed, the most important part of the lesson is really the information processing that takes place. After all, if the students do not process the information and remember it, the lesson is really a waste of time. In order for our efforts to be worthwhile, the students must process, store, and retrieve the information presented to them. This lesson does a good job in making those three things possible. The sensory memory picks up all the stimuli in the environment and then passes it to the short-term memory if it focused on enough. By having the students work on the project and not just telling them the information they have to think for themselves and focusing on the information more than if the teacher was just saying it. The information is then passed into long-term memory where it is stored for retrieval. We do know that the brain likes repetition, information presented in a variety of ways, and an application to the learner’s personal reality and this lesson possess all 3 of those qualities. Finally at the end of the lesson the students were asked to retrieve the information they had just learned by drawing a picture of their own mammal and writing down one characteristic of the mammal. I feel that was a great way to end the lesson, but I do think an exercise like that would be beneficial the next day to repeat the information even more because they could forget over the evening, but if they can recall it the next day it’s more likely to be retrieved later.

            Finally this lesson does a great job of following the constructivist views of learning. The students are giving defining attributes to apply to each animal to determine if it is a mammal, they are not just told which animals are mammals. The lesson does start with them separating the animals into groups, then they are given defining attributes of mammals, and then have to give the example of what an mammal is this is an example of deductive learning. The students are given the rule and then are coming up with examples. If the lesson was adapted and the students were told these animals are mammals, and asked what do all of these have in common?  Then it would be inductive learning because they are given examples in order to come up with the rule. This lesson is also not a problem based exercise, but could be adapted into one by not giving the students the characteristics of mammals and having them find the information by using different information sources.

            Based on what we’ve learned in class I found this lesson to be well constructed and over all I would predict that it is effective.  To find this lesson visit http://www.eduref.org/Virtual/Lessons/Science/Animals/ANM0206.html