MicroscopyEducation
Figure 8 : Who’s looking at whom? Two nested loupes give 10× views.
Dusty Miller and compare it to fur. She might ask herself: “If the surface of this leaf reminds me of fur, I wonder if it might function or act like a kind of fur for the survival of the plant? How could it help the leaf/plant survive to have a kind of fur? And how would I test that?” Increased magnification . The magnification journey begins at 5×; but two loupes may be nested for 10× ( Figure 8 ). Fresh details emerge. Students delight in the shift from 5× to 10× and begin to experience what scale means, both physically and conceptually. If there are hidden wonders at 5× and 10×, think what awaits at 50×, 100×, and10,000×. As students incrementally change the scale, they make new analogies, becoming more and more intimate with the world—the first step to falling in love with the world. Note that a 5× loupe makes the world strange, but not too strange. Beginning the journey at 50× or 100× is simply too abstract for most students, even in high school and college. But starting close to human scale, adding person- alized metaphors and similes along the way, it is easy to relate to the world fifty times bigger in the compound lab microscope. Continue this habit and students can leap to an interest in worlds thousands of times larger. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of loupe-viewed objects helps students extend the journey, which is why a gallery of SEM images by microscopist Dennis Kunkel is included in the book The Private Eye — (5 × ) Looking/Thinking by Analogy . Writing . Back in the classroom, the fi ſt h-graders from Cascade Locks elaborate on their lists. Each student writes a “sandwich poem,” an easy form where the title and the last line are the same. T e middle of “the sandwich” is fi lled with favorite lines from a loupe-list. One girl hunches over her notebook and writes:
Fern A green fountain. T e leaves are swords, the edges like teeth. T ere are hairs like rusty wires. And on the back, armies of tiny buttons. Fern
The students will use their starter loupe-list for extended nature journaling, for investigative essaying, or for setting
2015 May •
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Figure 9 : Loupe-drawing develops attention to detail, pattern sensitivity, and a sense of scale, even for those who think they cannot draw.
up hypotheses. What are those “buttons” on the back? Why are they in rows? What do they do? Why do the tiny parts of the leaves look the same as the whole leaf? How can we test our ideas?
Drawing . Soon the students begin to loupe-draw a leaf, a fallen pinecone, or a mossy twig. T ey move between loupe- studying the object and drawing a section of the object. It’s the same with fi rst-graders, high schoolers, or adults—the drawing process is absorbing. T e loupe gives such intense visual feedback that even those who think they can’t draw discover they can ( Figure 9 )! T e activity develops pattern sensitivity, attention to detail, and a personal sense of what scale means ( Figure 10 ). Furthermore, education research strongly supports the role of non-linguistic representation as a necessary component of conceptual development.
Research on Learning T e basis of T e Private Eye’s instructional strategy was already in place in the 1960s and 1970s (for example, Piaget [ 5 ]; Brownowski [ 6 ]). T is early work has been underscored by more recent neurocognitive and educational research, including the work of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who broadly makes the case for analogy as “the core of cognition” [ 7 ]. When teachers and students move through T e Private Eye’s steps for writing, drawing, and hypothesizing, they engage in each of the nine most eff ective instructional strategies for raising student achievement noted by Marzano et al. [ 8 ]. Two examples of these nine strategies are: (a) identifying similarities and diff erences and (b) nonlinguistic representation.
Similarities and diff erences . If students develop a habit of identifying similarities and diff erences, achievement rises by a whopping 45% [ 8 ]. Students build this habit as they write their analogy lists while loupe-studying an object, as they repeatedly notice and discuss similarities and diff erences between an object and whatever else it reminds them of. T ere is even some recent work that points to identifying similarities as the subset of abstract reasoning accounting for the rise in IQ scores noted over the years [ 9 ].
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