Active Learning Techniques
Keith Ross, Liz Lakin, Janet McKechnie, Jim Baker · 2015
This chapter looks at ways to make reading a more active process for pupils. Scientific texts are not the same as the narrative of novels, which can be read from cover to cover as the story unfolds. The aim of active learning techniques is to allow pupils to translate the ideas they receive into ideas that they own, ideas that are theirs and that they can use. Techniques that give pupils the opportunity to interact with the text they are reading are called Directed activities related to texts (DARTs). The commonest examples are cloze procedures where gaps are left in the text, but more demanding are scrambled texts that have to have their paragraphs re-ordered, diagram labelling, annotations and many more. There are various formulae which attempt to measure the readability of texts, the simplest of which is the Simplified Measure Of Gobbledygook (SMOG) test.