How Students Learn History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 397-420
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From page 397... ...
This emphasis on the scientific method was designed to provide insights into how scientists know. Much of this science instruction -- both the "what" and the "how" -- was inconsistent with the principles highlighted in How People Learn (see Chapter 1)
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They are also consis tent with the intent of the guidelines of the National Research Council3 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,4 as well as the principles of How People Learn. The authors of these chapters do indeed want to help students learn what scientists know and how they know, but they go about it in ways that are quite different from more traditional sci ence instruction.
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Other preconceptions, such as the idea that only shiny objects reflect light, require much more time and effort to help students change their ideas. It is important to remember that most preconceptions are reasonable based on students' everyday experiences.
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Conceptual Change How People Learn emphasizes that instruction in any subject matter that does not explicitly address students' everyday conceptions typically fails to help them refine or replace these conceptions with others that are scientifi cally more accurate. In fact, the pioneering research that signaled the tenac ity of everyday experience and the challenge of conceptual change was done in the area of science, especially physics.11 One of the pioneers was
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Minstrell notes that this experience raised fundamental questions in his mind, such as what good it is to have students know the quantitative relation or equation for gravitational force if they lack a qualitative understanding of force and concepts related to the nature of gravity and its effects. It became clear that simply teaching students about abstract principles of physics provided no bridge for changing their preconceptions.
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. Stu dents tend to look for or accept evidence that is consistent with their prior beliefs and either distort or fail to generate evidence that is incon sistent with these beliefs.
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Rarely do middle-school students realize the indetermi nacy of single instances, although high-school students may readily real ize it. Despite that, as covariant data accumulate, even high-school stu dents will infer a causal relation based on correlations.
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404 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: SCIENCE IN THECLASSROOM BOX 9-2 Diagnosing Preconceptions in Physics A computer-based DIAGNOSER program was designed to help teachers elicit and work with student preconceptions in physics.22 The program assesses students' beliefs about various physical phenomena and provides recommended activities that help students reinterpret phenomena from a physicist's perspective. The teacher uses the feedback from DIAGNOSER to guide instruction.
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Instead, students learn the content by actively engaging in processes of scientific inquiry. Students may still learn what others have discovered about a phenomenon (see Magnusson and Palincsar's discussions of helping students learn from "second-hand knowledge")
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We should think of it rather as a logically particular structure of justifi able beliefs about a Possible World -- a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life.27 The importance of creative processes in the conduct of science can also be understood by exploring the types of reasoning and investigative choices that have made some scientific investigations particularly productive and feasible. For example, Mendel's critical insight about the discrete nature of heredity was a consequence of his selecting peas for his experiment (see Box 9-4)
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From page 407... ...
Furthermore, they do so by creating classroom communities that simulate the important roles of scientific communities in actual scientific practice.29 This involves paying careful attention to the arguments of others, as well as learning the benefits of group interaction for advancing one's own thinking. PRINCIPLE #3: METACOGNITION The third principle of How People Learn emphasizes the importance of taking a metacognitive approach to instruction.
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408 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: SCIENCE IN THE CLASSROOM BOX 9-3 Evaluating the Methods Used in an Experiment Imagine being asked to evaluate the following experiment and conclusions: A group of biologists compare data from across the world and note that frogs seem to be disappearing in an alarming number of places. This deeply concerns them, because the frogs may well be an indicator species for environmental changes that could hurt us all.
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Learning about "the scientific method" in the abstract fails to help students grasp this important idea. An interesting side note is that people who have participated in the preceding demonstration have been asked whether they ever studied life cycles in school.
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For example, a scientific mindset suggests that the observation that shiny things reflect light needs to be explained, and this requires explaining why dull objects do not reflect light. As these issues are investigated, it becomes clear that the initial assumption was wrong and that dull objects do indeed reflect
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were guided in part by the opportunities these topics provide to help students think differently not only about the subject matter, but also about how they "know," and how their everyday approaches to knowing compare with those scientists have developed over the last few centuries. THE HOW PEOPLE LEARN FRAMEWORK As noted in Chapter 1, authors of the chapters in this volume were not asked to tie their discussion explicitly to the framework of How People Learn that suggests classrooms should be learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered.
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This was a written test in which students were asked to explain how they would investigate a specific research question: "What is the relationship between the weight of an object and the effect that sliding friction has on its motion? "35 Stu dents were instructed to propose competing hypotheses, design an ex
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SCIENTIFIC INQUIRYANDHOW PEOPLE LEARN 413 periment (on paper) to test the hypotheses, and pretend to carry out the experiment, making up data.
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Of particular importance, opportunities for inquiry are not simply tacked on to the content of a course; rather, they are the method for learning the content. This sets the stage for a number of important changes in science instruction.
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SCIENTIFIC INQUIRYANDHOW PEOPLE LEARN 415 Assessment-Centered The word "assessment" rarely appears in the three chapters that follow, but in fact the chapters are rich in assessment opportunities. Students are helped to assess the quality of their hypotheses and models, the adequacy of their methods and conclusions, and the effectiveness of their efforts as learners and collaborators.
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416 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: SCIENCE IN THECLASSROOM NOTES 1. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996.
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. Science education as conceptual change.
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National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment, Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
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Science Education, 61, 385-391. Wollman, W., and Lawson, A
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