POGIL

An Introduction to Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning for Those Who Wish to Empower Learners

Shawn R. Simonson, Shawn R. Simonson

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781620365465
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is a pedagogy that is based on research on how people learn and has been shown to lead to better student outcomes in many contexts and in a variety of academic disciplines. Beyond facilitating students' mastery of a discipline, it promotes vital educational outcomes such as communication skills and critical thinking. Its active international community of practitioners provides accessible educational development and support for anyone developing related courses.Having started as a process developed by a group of chemistry professors focused on helping their students better grasp the concepts of general chemistry, The POGIL Project has grown into a dynamic organization of committed instructors who help each other transform classrooms and improve student success, develop curricular materials to assist this process, conduct research expanding what is known about learning and teaching, and provide professional development and collegiality from elementary teachers to college professors. As a pedagogy it has been shown to be effective in a variety of content areas and at different educational levels. This is an introduction to the process and the community.Every POGIL classroom is different and is a reflection of the uniqueness of the particular context – the institution, department, physical space, student body, and instructor – but follows a common structure in which students work cooperatively in self-managed small groups of three or four. The group work is focused on activities that are carefully designed and scaffolded to enable students to develop important concepts or to deepen and refine their understanding of those ideas or concepts for themselves, based entirely on data provided in class, not on prior reading of the textbook or other introduction to the topic. The learning environment is structured to support the development of process skills –– such as teamwork, effective communication, information processing, problem solving, and critical thinking. The instructor's role is to facilitate the development of student concepts and process skills, not to simply deliver content to the students. The first part of this book introduces the theoretical and philosophical foundations of POGIL pedagogy and summarizes the literature demonstrating its efficacy. The second part of the book focusses on implementing POGIL, covering the formation and effective management of student teams, offering guidance on the selection and writing of POGIL activities, as well as on facilitation, teaching large classes, and assessment. The book concludes with examples of implementation in STEM and non-STEM disciplines as well as guidance on how to get started. Appendices provide additional resources and information about The POGIL Project.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

1

NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA, POGIL HAS A THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

Christopher F. Bauer, Patrick L. Daubenmire, and Vicky Minderhout

It’s not about me, it’s about the student. What is best for their learning?

—A POGIL practitioner of 11 years

The idea that classroom activities should align to how people learn is not new. It should be an obvious approach to what we do in educational institutions. Where we defaulted, though, the lecture model, is not an effective strategy for promoting learning. Learning is a constructive process. It occurs regardless of what instructors do in the classroom or in their courses. When instructors better understand the cognitive bases for how people learn and align activities to those processes, knowledge construction can be greatly facilitated in their classrooms. POGIL is one such approach that aligns to these ideas.

The POGIL approach is supported by theories that are grounded in the idea that knowledge and skills are constructed and developed by the learner. Knowledge simply cannot be transferred from an expert’s mind to a learner’s mind. Theories that explain how we learn pertain to cognition (the information-processing model), to pedagogic structure (the learning cycle), and to change theory (process education). In POGIL, these theories are melded together in a team environment that is consistent with a social constructivist epistemology as well as research conclusions on cooperative learning practices.

In a visit to a classroom implementing POGIL, one will find a discussion environment where students in small teams are engaged with each other while working on some task. The facilitator is moving among the teams to observe and occasionally interact. One might see a team report to another team or be prompted by the facilitator to report to the whole class. Comments are summarized by teams or the facilitator to emphasize important concepts. Then, students set upon the next task and a similar cycle ensues. Students spend much more of their time talking and interacting in this environment compared with a traditional lecture, where the instructor does nearly all the talking.

In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to the theoretical foundations for POGIL to make the case that POGIL is an instructional model that aligns to students’ learning and goes beyond what a traditional lecture classroom can accomplish.

Knowledge Is Constructed, Not Transferred

The GI in POGIL stands for guided inquiry. This word meld represents both a pedagogical strategy (guidance) and a mind-set (inquiry). “Guidance” suggests that a knowledgeable, experienced, and watchful guide will lead novice learners through a learning environment that is likely unfamiliar to them. “Inquiry” suggests that this environment is to be explored, and novices can and should ask questions to learn something about the new territory. Together, “guided inquiry” further suggests that novices may not know what to look for or what questions to ask, and they may not see the deeper structure and nuances of the landscape. The guide must direct attention and thinking so that novices eventually undergo a change in perspective and can see the landscape. The idea that education should lead to seeing the world differently has been a motivator for incorporating inquiry into classroom instruction for a long time. Though this chapter is not an exhaustive treatment of the origins of the idea of inquiry as a principle of learning, it is important to establish that POGIL is grounded in a literature base that encompasses philosophical, pedagogical, cognitive, and neurological perspectives.

The interest in inquiry as a guiding pedagogical principle is not new. The philosophical concept “to inquire” can be traced all the way back to Plato if one feels the need to go there for justification. Sticking to more modern times, DeBoer (1991) provides a detailed historical development, following the movement of the idea of inquiry and its implications for learning in the nineteenth century through Huxley, Spencer, Rousseau, and others. For example, Pestalozzi (2012) espoused active learning, hands-on experimentation, and higher-order thinking as classroom goals, while adopting the viewpoint of teacher as guide and motivator. Herbart promoted a constructivist epistemology and a mode of teaching very much like the learning cycle described in this book (Steffe & Gale, 1992). It should be noted that the arguments being made in the nineteenth century regarding the way in which science was being taught and its importance for an educated citizenry are curiously parallel to educational arguments being made now (National Research Council, 2000, 2012).

That nineteenth-century position regarding inquiry and experiential learning continued to have strong support into the twentieth century, notably through the leadership of John Dewey (1938). Although these ideas about science education ebbed and flowed through most of the twentieth century, DeBoer (1991) and Cuban (1993) describe how they barely caused a ripple in traditional teaching practices. Scant scientific evidence existed to support the claim that learning by inquiry was the way to go. This situation began to change around the mid-twentieth century when interest in experimental research in psychology and social psychology began to grow. These fields advanced and tested ideas concerning human cognitive development and the social enterprise of science. This was the beginning of the cognitive revolution in psychology, and the products of this revolution have had a significant impact for education (Bruer, 1993; Penner, Batsche, Knoff, & Nelson, 1993).

Several lines of work within this tradition are part of the theoretical heritage of POGIL, including cognitive processing and conceptual development. Festinger (1957) described a theory of cognitive dissonance—being confronted with new information that is contrary to existing beliefs, knowledge, or values—which has implications as a driver for learning. Newell and Simon (1972) built their theory of human problem-solving and how it involves the functions of memory, goal setting, search space, analogy, and visual representation. Piaget and Inhelder (1969; see also Wadsworth, 1989) demonstrated that the learning of mathematical and scientific ideas by children is a process of development of personal models to explain concepts, such as number and conservation of properties, and reasoning abilities, such as control of variables, proportional reasoning, and combinatorial thinking. Driver, Guesne, and Tiberghien (1985) reported on evidence for the evolution of student conceptions of the physical world. These conceptions are not merely assimilations of what students are told; rather, they incorporate both school learning and personal evidence into models that may be strange to scientists but that nevertheless “explain things” for students. Driver’s research spawned many investigations through the 1980s and 1990s regarding socalled student misconceptions that exist from kindergarten age through adulthood, in general science as well as within specific scientific disciplines (Wandersee, Mintzes, & Novak, 1994). Altogether, the notion that learners may encounter conceptual roadblocks is an important design consideration for POGIL class activities. Well-designed POGIL activities focus repeated attention on these challenging ideas.

Concurrent with this experimental work, a general epistemological model for learning called constructivism was gaining traction in psychology and education in the mid-twentieth century. The idea is that knowledge and understanding must be constructed in the mind of each individual learner. To quote Treagust, Duit, and Fraser (1996),

The constructivist view has become the leading theoretical position in education and has become a most powerful driving force in science and mathematics education. . . . It provides a plausible, functional framework for understanding and interpreting experiences of learning and teaching; in this way constructivism acts as a powerful theoretical referent “to build a classroom that maximizes student learning.” (p. 3)

Learners will construct understanding regardless of the type of classroom, although instruction designed to facilitate knowledge construction has a better chance of being efficient and successful at assisting learners in doing this work (Fosnot, 1989, 1996; Glynn, Yeany, & Britton, 1991; Tobin, 1993).

A parallel line of thought emanates from the work of Ausubel, as described by Novak (1977), via the idea of meaningful learning. Learners already know something, or have some existing experiences in their cognitive structures. New experiences or ideas encountered in the classroom may or may not have meaning for the learner. Ideas learned meaningfully are incorporated into a cognitive structure that makes them memorable and recallable because they are highly connected to other cognitive structures. This contrasts with the notion of rote learning or inert knowledge, which eschews the need for making other cognitive connections. Without cognitive connections, the idea is much less likely to be recallable and may even be lost.

One additional consideration has also come to dominate the thinking about learning: Vygotsky’s idea that development and knowledge construction happen in a sociocultural context (Moll, 1990; Vygotsky, 1934/1986, 1978). One central idea concerns the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which suggests that learning is most effective when the task is a cognitive reach yet still an obtainable goal. Instructors should be aware of this zone when developing learning tasks. When instructors facilitate POGIL activities, one important observation is to identify places in the activities where students get stuck. That point likely represents something outside the zone. The instructor at this point steps in to facilitate and help students extend their reach for understanding. The ZPD may be different for individual students, but learning in a group, such as in POGIL, may expand the working zone. Since the discovery and translation of Vygotsky’s Russian-language work in the 1960s, numerous lines of research have demonstrated that communication in the classroom, between peers or between learners and instructors, is critical to the development of understanding (Bruner & Haste, 1990). The POGIL classroom structure necessarily requires these types of communication.

This notion of the social construction of knowledge for the individual applies equally to how science develops. Concurrent with the revolution in psychological theories and methods, a number of other authors were exploring the nature of science as a social enterprise. For example, Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic. Other significant authors include Popper, LaTour, Lakatos, and Laudan. Giere (1988) summarizes the evolution of philosophical arguments and provides a synthesis that brings the philosophical and cognitive together. Scientists construct models concerning the external world and, over time, these models become more detailed...