Abstract of Dr. Chomcheun Siripunkaw
KWL as an Alternative Assignment for Biology Class during Disease Outbreak
Dr. Chomcheun Siripunkaw
Kamnoetvidya Science Academy, Wang Chan Valley, Rayong 21210, Thailand
Abstract
As we all are living in the situation of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, whenever the situation become out of control, school in Thailand are closed. The ordinary onsite teachings are forced to be an online one instead. The uncertainty creates the challenging circumstances for teacher to come up with appropriate assignments as needed in the formative assessment. In the twelfth grade’s biology class (first semester/academic year 2020), a learning strategy known as “KWL” was applied to the classroom to substitute quizzes, since quiz are more prone to cheating for online assessment. In KWL assignment, students must write the big concept that they already knew (K), write what did they want to know more? (W) and write what did they learn? (L) for every teaching topic. The KWL worksheets were assigned through an online platform every week. Feedbacks from students are varied, most of them think that the main advantages were that they got to get marks from making the L and the summaries were very useful in helping them prepare themselves for the midterm and the final examinations. Positive correlations were found in students making informative L and their exam scores. However, there are some students suggesting that KWLs were a lot of work, especially the part of K and W which are the parts that were least concerned by students. The KWL strategy will be optimized to reduce the amount of work in K and W parts but will still be informative enough to keep tracking students’ prior knowledge and engagement. It is hope that after the optimization, KWL will be an interesting alternative assignment for teaching online as well as teaching onsite.
Keywords: learning strategy, KWL, online assignment, COVID-19, biology class
