13.1 Appendix b: deciding for yourself about the research  (Page 3/20)

The initiative used constructivist principles in a number of ways. For example, it challenged learners to make decisions about what their particular manual should “teach”. The decision-making required learners constantly to monitor their own knowledge and learning—engage in metacognition—in order to insure that the content was complete, accurate, and important to learn. It also grouped students into teams, so that they could, to some extent, teach each other whatever they needed to learn, including helping each other to sense whether they actually were learning from their research.

Questions

References

Onslow, M., Menzies, R.,&Packman, A. (2001). An operant intervention for early stuttering. Behavior modification 25 (1), 116-139.

Goldman, J. (2006). Web-based designed activities for young people in health education: A constructivist approach. Health Education Journal 65 (1), 14-27.

Student development: schools and the obesity epidemic

Childhood obesity leads not just to teasing by peers, but eventually also to a variety of serious medical problems, ranging from back pain to heart disease and diabetes. That is why medical experts are quite concerned that obesity in children has increased markedly since the 1950s, to the point of being considered a genuine health “epidemic” (Ogden, et al., 2002). Recent projections suggest that fully one-third of all children born in 2000 will eventually develop diabetes as a side-effect of being overweight (Narayan, et al., 2003).

Why have these changes happened? One factor is probably the vast increase in individuals’ consumption of sugar especially “disguised” forms like corn syrup (Bawa, 2005). Another is a more sedentary, “stay-inside” lifestyle than in the past. The latter has happened, among other reasons, because of population shifts: cities and towns have increased in population and size, while rural areas have decreased in population, causing more people to rely on car travel more than ever before. The changes have also led residents in many areas of many cities to consider their neighborhoods less safe than in the past, causing them to respond with inactivity: either they stay inside more or they rely even more on cars to get around.

Even schools have contributed to the trend toward obesity. “Junk food” drinks and snacks are widely available in many schools through commercial vending machines—each one giving a student an extra 150 and 300 unneeded calories per day. More insidiously, perhaps, is the effect of the trend toward high-stakes testing: because of them, many schools tend to strengthen courses and special programs that prepare students in the “basic” subjects that they know will be tested, and to trim programs (like physical education, but also the arts) that will not be tested.