Experiences

Cooperative learning applied to the evaluation of geological hazards

Giuseppe Arcangelo Bolettieri

Italy

High Secondary School

Science

Teaching in class, Laboratory, Extracurricular activity

Direct

Many students believe that Earth Science is a very difficult topic. The reason of these difficulties lie in the very different subjects that are used while teaching it, as Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. However, they help to better understand the natural phenomena.
These scientific challenges can be faced through laboratory experiments and a cooperative learning.
I applied a cooperative learning study for explaining some great natural events such as earthquakes, eruptions, floods and landslides. Some general aims that a teaching unit on Earth Science should achieve are the following:
- To promote an experimental approach to teach in a context of peer education and spread a “know how” method: observe, measure, formulate hypotheses and test them, acquire and process information, express and compare their ideas with others’ ones.
- To represent the complexity of the natural phenomena in different ways: drawings, oral and written descriptions, symbols, tables, diagrams, graphs, simple simulations, collected data, spidergrams, flow charts.
- To represent and project an explanatory mathematical models of phenomena through the acquired concepts and knowledge.
- To encourage interdisciplinary connections.
- To encourage the use of new technologies in teaching.
Students working in small groups, and according to defined roles, they develop some abilities to solve more complex problems than an individual approach. Their logical and cognitive abilities have been stimulated more in comparison to traditional method. Moreover, some students have also developed strategies for problem solving and they stimulate other members to adopt them.