The first article I read for this week was “Kids Take on ‘The Test’”, and I found it extremely interesting, but it raised some important concerns as well. I really enjoyed reading all the answers the students gave to the questions. It is always an amazing thing to really know that students are enjoying the learning experience and that can be found in any PBL project we have looked at as a class. Whether it be from the video or the articles. I also found it wonderful that test scores were raised from what they had previously been. However, throughout the article the PBL project and learning for the state test seems a little intense on an overall level. By intense, I mean, is there any time left for studying anything else but reading, English, and math. These are three very important subjects but what about science and social studies?

I know that in the school I am student teaching at as well as other schools in the area the amount of time given to social studies is not adequate in my opinion. It is important to remember that with social studies it is not only dealing with history. It is dealing with a broad number of social sciences: history, geography, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics. If three subjects are getting hours of attention both in class and outside of class, where does that leave social studies? I wish there were more time during school and during the year to teach but there isn’t and social studies is equally important to the other subjects. So, that would be my only concern. Time limitations.

The second article I read was “What Do Lepidopterists Do?”. I really liked this excerpt from the article: “Because lepidopterists (butterfly experts) themselves do not yet have answers to these questions, the students could not find the answers in the back of any textbook. So, taking on the roles and responsibilities of scientists involved in such a study, they set out to find the answers on their own. The unit was, in other words, problem-based”. I really liked this because too often we see students just turning to the glossary or index in the back of the book to find answers. But the way this PBL was done, it forced the students to look outside their book and that is really important. This way the students had to do research and that is a tool they will need to know for a lifetime.