Running head: CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 1

Content Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Content

Dylaney Dalton

Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 496 Field Experience ePortfolio, Spring 2019

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 2

Introduction

During the course of an average school day, students are taught many different

subject areas with growing expectations of their masteries in each discipline. Many

educators and researchers have noted that students often are not given enough exposure

to the content and have difficulty reaching higher levels of understandings in their

content and grasping deeper connections. According to Caine and Caine (1994), students

need interdisciplinary connections to help them gain a better understanding of the

subjects they are learning and provide them with more support.

Artifact Rationale

During my first student teaching placement at Tallwood Elementary School with

fifth grade, I noticed that there were a small percentage of students- in a gifted class as

well as an inclusive class- that were struggling with metric conversions. Both classrooms

had been taught that to convert metric units, they would have to multiply or divide by ten

for every unit they converted, as well as given images for why the division and

multiplication was necessary. Many were able to quickly apply this knowledge and pick

up on the pattern of moving the decimal place over one for every time they converted a

unit while others struggled greatly with grasping the concepts.

The students that did not get this understanding were pulled into small groups,

where I noted that they had difficulties seeing when they should divide or multiply.

While I made several efforts to show them that the left held numbers that were smaller

than the right, these students still managed to become jumbled. After much struggling, I

gave several students the analogy of picking up a pet and taking it wherever they went

which led to progress in student’s understandings. The next day, I introduced these
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 3

students to a book I had created to solidify and adapt parts of the analogy I had made the

day before. This book reviewed the concepts, as well as provided students with clues and

reasoning as to what to do when there was no digit in the ones or past the tenths digit to

allow students to continue to move the decimal place over. The idea of a dog digging a

hole to get to the next spot greatly helped students to understand that there was a zero

acting as a place holder that they could utilize. Students seemed entertained by the book

and many revisited sections of it in order to ensure they fully understood how they could

move the decimal to get the correct value.

While the book does not rely on mathematical thinking, it still allows for students

to think in the right direction, and many of the students could identify the right answer,

then went back to check their work using fraction conversions. This addition of language

helped create a cue for students in knowing how to solve the problems they were asked,

which led to a better understanding of metric conversions. This aligns well with VDOE’s

English SOL, 5.5a, which states that students will use fictional and narrative nonfiction

“texts to describe the relationship between text and previously read material…” By

allowing student to connect dots from their prior learning in math, students gain a better

and more thorough understanding of how to approach metric problems.

McCarthy (1987) states that at the time of her writing, schools tended to only try

to reach students in mathematics and science through use of analytics, what she

categorizes as “Type 2 Learners”. She then goes on to state that 70% of learners during

her experiments were not Type 2 Learners and fell under imaginative, common sense

(practical), and dynamic learners. While percentages may have changed since then, there

is still a great emphasis on analytical thinking, which means that other types of learners
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 4

were incapable of being taught math from an analytical perspective. It was only when I

gave them the opportunity to think creatively about the content and provide them with a

resource from another content area as support that they were able to obtain the mastery

they needed in order to succeed. These thinkers benefit best from writing, reading, and

artistic expression when learning. The students were not incapable of learning the

material, they just needed to approach it from a different angle or content area.

My second artifact for interdisciplinary content was done during the fifth-grade

class’s light unit. During this unit, the VDOE Science SOL’s (5.3.d) state that students

will investigate and understand reflection of light sources. During this unit, I

demonstrated how light reflection worked, as well as challenged students to make

connections to a mathematics SOL on angles they had touched on at the beginning of the

year.

For this artifact, I made sure that students had a working knowledge of the

definitions for the terms “reflection” and “refraction” by allowing them experiences with

them through stations that bent prism light, as well as reflecting through metals. Once I

noted that they had a firm enough understanding and could compare the two terms, I

challenged students to use their prior knowledge of angles to reflect light to specific areas

of the room, as well as view a few optical illusions and observe how perspectives and

angles could change the ways the image was presented.

In practicing reflection and bending the light, I had set up a cardboard cut out and

had angled a flashlight to shine onto the cardboard. My goal was for students to move the

light from the cardboard to another marked area without moving the source of the light.

Many students knew that they would need the light to reflect at a 90 degree angle to reach
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 5

the designated area and selected items that would help the light reflect, as well as set up

the reflective object so that the light would shine where it needed to. Students were then

given a few more angles to work with to help fully develop their understanding on the

relationships between the two.

Allowing students to view optical illusions and students helped them to break

apart the misunderstanding that light travels in only one path in order to be seen. Students

were then able to come to the understanding that light travels first from the light source to

an object, where the light is then reflected and absorbed by the object to be seen to the

human eye. By allowing these two exploratory tasks, students gained a better

understanding of reflection and misconceptions, as well as got to apply their prior

knowledge of angles in a new way.

Reflection on Theory and Practice

According to Bergin and Bergin (2015), students are in constant need of making

connections if they are to have strengthened cognitive ability. This creates a

responsibility for educators to foster an environment for these connections to be made

possible, as well as help to develop the synapses that will allow the connections to stick

longer. Caine and Caine (1994) agree, stating that educators of the time rarely sought to

help students make connections to other content areas and that students needed ample

experience with a subject in a diverse number of ways to understand it. The two note that,

“This translates into the search for common patterns and relationships… Currently

literature, mathematics, history, and science are often seen as separate disciplines

unrelated to the life of the learner… this is mistakenly accepted in modern classrooms…”
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 6

(p 4), to emphasize how important it is for students to see their studies as interdisciplinary

rather than linear.

Not only is interdisciplinary education important for the sake of helping students

develop stronger and enduring connections to their learning, it also allows for students of

different intelligences to make connections they might not otherwise have the ability to

obtain. As stated by Shearer (2009), students have diverse learning needs and to only

approach a content area from one direction greatly limits that the excelling and struggling

student can make, because they are not given ample room to succeed in other areas as

well. When instructing students, we must ensure as educators that we are doing all we

can to provide students with the experiences and exposing them to material through

multiple content sections in order to help them gain the best clarity on the content.
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 7

Reference:

Bergin, C. & Bergin, D. (2015). Child and adolescent development in your classroom (2nd

ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Caine, R. & Caine, G. (1994). Making connections: teaching and the human brain. Menlo

Park, CA: Innovative Learning Publications of Addison-Wesley.

McCarthy, B. (1987). The 4MAT system: teaching to learning styles with right/left mode

techniques. Barrington, IL: EXCEL, Inc.

Shearer, B. (2009). Intelligence: in theory, in daily life, and in the brain. New York, NY:

Teachers College Press.