Hierarchic: 4 Main Ideas

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INTEGRATIVE
Main idea Main idea

Integrative model is a teaching strategy designed to help students reach two interdependent learning goals by constructing a deep understanding of organized bodies of knowledge and developing critical thinking abilities.
Main idea Main idea

Planning

Implementing

Assessment

Motivation

Identify topics: can come from standards, textbooks, curriculum guides, etc. Specify learning goals: be very clear about the specific relationships you want students to identify, understand, and remember. Encourage students to identify patterns, generalizations, and form explanations and hypothesize in order to foster critical thinking skills. Prepare Data: typically organized in a matrix in order to help students understand generalizations. It is best to display information in the most factual way possible because it provides students opportunities to analyze the data and practice critical thinking. Specify questions: anticipate questions and incorporate these into lesson plan. The younger the students, the narrower the scope of the lesson.

Open-ended phase: students describe, compare, and search for patterns within the data; students are acquainted with the data and the process of analyzing it. May spend lots of time here if students are unfamiliar with open-ended questions; write down student observations. Causal phase: students offer explanations for similarities and possibilities, look for cause-and-effect relationships, avoid unexplainable comparisons. Hypothetical phase: Questions like What would happen if..., or What do you expect, provide opportunities for students to think more deeply about the new info and apply it to new situations. Closure and application: students generalize to form broad relationships and connections, summarize content, and then apply that to new situations.

Assessing student understanding in the Integrative Model is more complex than measuring understanding of single concepts or generalizations, as well as more demanding. To assess critical thinking skills, you will measure content knowledge in addition to the students ability to make or identify conclusions/connections/relationships that are supported by evidence. Many different forms or assessments may be used, such as short answer and multiple choice questions of various sophistication levels. Assessments can increase learning by having a discussion on feedback after getting a quiz returned. This can examine the evidence of supporting or detracting from a particular conclusion, therefore helping students develop their criticalthinking abilities and promotes a deeper level of comprehension.

Student motivation can be seen in several areas of the Integrative Model such as motivating effects of involvement, success, challenge, and on perceptions of increasing competence. Student participation is crucial to the motivational aspects of this model. The open-ended phase promotes success because it is not restricted to one specific answer. In the causal and hypothetical phase, students are challenged to form explanations and hypotheses. This gets students thinking about What if, questions and possibilities that they can take out of context and relate it back to their life. Groupwork also increases motivation from the cooperation that is required of it. Displaying the students efforts makes them feel more intrinsically motivated because they have a greater personal input to the information.

So what? What is important to understand about this?

The Integrative Model is designed to help students understand organized bodies of knowledge, topics that combine facts, concepts, generalizations, and the relationships and connections between them, as well as promote critical thinking skills.