Samantha asked her teacher, Why do some things float and others sink? How could Samantha's teacher best answer the question so that the principles of constructivism are used?
A) Set up a demonstration on why things float and have the class discuss it.
B) Encourage Samantha to do design and try an investigation to determine for herself why things float.
C) Tell Samantha the answer and have her obtain more information on the topic and report back to the rest of the class.
D) Have Samantha look up the answer in her science book.
E) Just make up something because Samantha will never know anyway.
Question 2...Upon entering the science classroom, the third grade students found the following item at their workstations: a capped two-liter bottle filled with water with a medicine (eye) dropper floating inside. Printed instructions asked the students to squeeze the sides of the bottles and observe the effects; the dropper sank deeper in the water the harder the children squeezed the bottle. A constructivist science educator would ask which question of the students as they were squeezing the bottle?
A) Why does the dropper sink?
B) What physical processes are taking place inside the bottle?
C) What do you observe happening in the bottle?
D) What scientific principle is involved in this demonstration?
E) Why do the droppers sink and rise as you adjust the pressure on the bottles?
Question 3...Which of the following teachers best demonstrates Constructivist Teaching Strategies?
A) Mrs. Smith read the story The Giving Tree to her fourth grade students and had them share their feelings about the story. They then engaged in an exploratory activity of making paper by recycling used paper they had been saving in their classroom. After the exploration the teacher, with the student's help, constructed the concept: Used paper can be recycled to make new paper. The students then engaged in another activity which was a letter writing campaign using, the newly made paper, to encourage policy makers in their community to urge all citizens to recycle. Mrs. Smith evaluated her students based on the their ability to demonstrate to her how to make paper from recycled paper, and on the quality of the arguments the students used in their letters to local policy makers.
B) Mrs. Carlson spent several days with her third grade students reading to them about the life cycle of various insects. She then had them go outdoors and each collect 10 insects. They were given a grade on how well the identified and displayed each insect.
C) Mr. Cortez took his sixth grade students to the local museum of natural history to study dinosaurs. While going through the dinosaur displays each student was required to answer questions on a worksheet concerning the dinosaurs. The students were to check one another's answers in the bus on the way home. The next day Mr. Cortez gave the students a quiz on the information they learned from the field trip.
D) Ms. Kelly's first grade course of study identified magnetism as a concept to be taught. To meet this objective Ms. Kelly presented a lesson on magnetism to her first graders. She had one magnet that she used to demonstrate how magnets can pick up objects. After her demonstration she gave each child a handout page with pictures of objects like a key, a baseball, a can, etc...on it. She asked each child to circle which objects will be attracted to a magnet. The next day her science lesson was on plants.
E) Mr. Strong's lesson about rocks and minerals to his fifth grade students started with a lecture on what would happen to anyone if they were caught throwing any of the rocks in his classroom. After that lecture he called upon different students to read the pages from the textbook out loud. When the students came to an activity in the chapter Mr. Strong stopped and talked about what would happen if they were to do the activity. After his brief explanation he continued calling on students until they reached the end of the chapter. Mr. Strong then assigned the questions at the end of the chapter with a warning that all of the questions were to be completed by the end of class as the students were going to be tested on that information the next day.
Question 4...All of the following techniques have been found promising in the treatment of conduct disorders except:
A. Functional family therapy.
B. Community-based treatment.
C. Parent training in management skills.
D. Cognitive-behavioral training.
E. Individual psychotherapy.
Question 5...Jamie once witnessed a discrepant event in which the teacher had placed some raisins into a glass of 7-up and the teacher pretended the raisins, which were moving up and down in the pop, were sewer lice. Jamie and his peers were to determine if the sewer lice were indeed living since they showed movement. On the day the students did the experiment Jamie was absent. By the time he returned to school the teacher had moved on to teach other characteristics of living things. Jamie never did get the message that there were no such things as sewer lice. The biggest danger of leaving Jamie with this misconception is that:
A) He will think that anything that is brown and moves up and down is sewer lice.
B) He is not likely to believe anyone who tells him that sewer lice do not exist, even when they share evidence that proves it, since the evidence Jamie has constructed contradicts their own. C) Jamie will never eat raisins again.
D) He will not be able to list all of the characteristics of living things.
E) There is no danger. Eventually he will discover that sewer lice don't exist.
Question 6...Predisposing factors associated with later conduct and behavior problems include all of the following except:
A. High intelligence level.
B. Early temperament and bonding difficulties.
C. Family history of antisocial behavior.
D. Parent-child interaction difficulties.
E. Father with alcohol dependence.
Question 7...Which of the following is true of constructivism?
A) It is a synthesis of several dominant perspectives on learning.
B) In this theory the learner re-invents the wheel, yet retains information better with a deeper understanding.
C) A downside is that students may construct misconceptions and the teacher needs to identify and correct those.
D) It assumes that knowledge is a construction of reality.
E) All of the above.
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