POE technique can be seen as part of ‘constructivist’ pedagogy since it uses a teaching technique which involves students’ thinking. Cognitive thinking is the use of mental activities and skills to perform tasks such as learning, reasoning, understanding, remembering, paying attention, and more.
One of the thinking strategies for teaching science is POE technique where
P stands for Predict
O – observe
E- Explain
It was developed by Gunstone and White in 1992.
Steps
- Teacher poses a problem and students need to hypothesise and predict the expected outcome.
- Teacher performs the experiment.
- If the hypothesis is correct, students give the reasons. If not, they correct their hypothesis and give reasons why they went wrong.
This process gets the students involved in the process and making hypothesis and testing it. The teacher will also get an idea about their thinking process.
To illustrate: Predict : Whether a diet Pepsi floats or sinks when immersed in a jar of water.
Observe: Demo shows a diet Pepsi floats but the regular one does not.
Explanation : The diet Pepsi is less dense hence it floats.
If you want to know more about such techniques, refer to my book From Chalk to Talk The Art of Teaching, chapter 5. Available on Amazon.in