At 05:54 +0000 14/10/06, cestsi04 wrote:
Š
>And it looks to me that Keith is heading in the
>same sort of direction. Of course like most
>sensible educators, but not all incidentally*,
>he distances himself from relativism but still
>he seems to equate constructivism merely with an
>opposition to positivism. I think this is a
>mistake Keith.

To clarify my own position ("one of our problems
is trying to shift science education practice so
that students do not develop a simplistic naive
positivist impression that learning science is
about being told out about the things that
science has proved to be the case"), I see these
as somewhat different issues. The type of
constructivism that I (and I think most UK
science educators) would strongly associate
themselves with is basically a theoretical
perspective on learning which suggests that
effective teaching needs to take learners'
current thinking into account if we are to shift
them towards understandings of science that
better match the target knowledge as represented
in the curriculum. This in itself says nothing
about the status of scientific knowledge as truth
etc. (although it implicitly assumes that there
is some form of objective reality that can be
explored in terms of learners' current
understandings!) Of course we must recognise that
some of the methods that may be used to explore
student thinking are likely to change and channel
that thinking: so there is a real possibility
that some of the results of 'our' science are
somewhat co-constructions by student and
researcher, and that a different researcher would
not find exactly the same thing. We cannot
'measure' cognitive structures without changing
them, and the more detailed a picture we want,
the more invasive the form of enquiry, the less
'objective' the findings. In that sense, the
outcomes of detailed investigations of learning
may well be somewhat relative to the observer,
because that observer is certainly very much
entangled in the phenomenon being investigated.
(This of course may sound very familiar from
quantum physics!)

However, if we ask whether science educators (in
the UK) encourage science teachers to present
scientific knowledge in the classroom as a
culturally relative product, that does not
progress in any meaningful way but just reflects
current social fads...then I doubt you would find
one that does.

My point was that the reality (sic) in English
schools has been that many students tend to see
science lessons as accounts of the products of
science, which are things proved by science, or
things that scientists currently think, but which
they are waiting to prove. This type of proof is
often imagined to follow some kind of
Baconian-style induction, so that given a well
planned and executed experiment, we get evidence
that unproblematically allows us to claim
knowledge. I have no special position that allows
me to represent colleagues here, but I think it
is fair to say that UK science educators are
concerned to encourage teachers to present an
image of science that makes it seem much less
positivist in a foundational empiricist sense:
that we 'know' all these things in the science
curriculum with absolute certainty because
scientists have proved them. This is not a leap
to relativism, but an acknowledgement that a
great deal of twentieth century scholarship
(Popper, Lakatos, Toulmin, Ziman etc as well as
Kuhn, Feyerabend) provides less simplistic, but
more realistic (sic) descriptions of how science
proceeds, and develops provisional, but
increasingly sophisticated and well-supported,
models of the world.

It is of course possible for individuals to hold
various positions on these issues:
views about how teaching can best bring about
effective learning of the science in the
curriculum;
the choice of techniques used to collect
information about learners' understanding
(relatively non-invasive, but limited in depth;
vs. in-depth but involving interaction likely to
channel and scaffold thinking)*;
their personal views about the extent to which
scientific knowledge can be considered objective
knowledge of an underlying reality.
Unfortunately, different uses of the term
'constructivist' are associated with each of
these dimensions, which - if not orthogonal - are
certainly distinct.

Personally I am strongly a constructivist on the
first dimension; see a need for a complementary
variety of studies on the second (in depth
studies of individual learners, supported by
large-scale surveys to test out the
generalisability of findings from more
'invasive'/interactive studies); and believe that
although science is inevitably historically and
culturally contingent, its self-correction
processes allow it over time to move towards
models of the world which (to all intents and
purposes) better represent an objective reality.
So I am strongly constructivist in pedagogic
terms, admit the need for constructivist
methodology (alongside more 'objective'
techniques) in my research; but adhere to a
post-positivist view of how science, including
educational research in science education,
proceeds.

I expect many UK colleagues would take similar positions.

Keith


* Researchers are usually interested in the
relatively stable aspects of students' cognitive
structure/conceptual frameworks; but we can only
get indirect evidence of that level by eliciting
thinking (that in part draws upon that) in some
contexts.


At 05:54 +0000 14/10/06, cestsi04 wrote:

As I recently mentioned the current issue of
Foundations of Chemistry is a special issue
devoted to Chemical Education and Constructivism.
It includes a very interesting article by
Keith Taber.

Talking of different senses of 'constructivism' I
attended a talk at the most recent ACS
meeting in San Francisco in which a young woman
speaker seemed to have a very strange
notion of what the term means.

She informed the audience of how she was planning
to conduct a questionnaire with her
students and that she expected them to respond
that science progresses via scientists first
performing experiments and then arriving at
theories. She then paused significantly for
audience approval which she of course obtained
given that most chemical educators in the US have
been brainwashed into thinking that this is what
distinguishes a constructivist
from a non-constructivist.

Non constructivists and other objectionable
people according to this mistaken view,
believe in induction. They believe that
objective experiments come first and then one
arrives at theories and laws.

A constructivists according to this mistaken view
is anybody who objects to a positivist
approach to such a positivist approach to science.
But Popper objected to positivism and you
certainly would not call him a constructivist
given the criticism he poured on Kuhn one of the
architects of true constructivism,
meaning the view scientific knowledge is
constructed not discovered and that social
factors dictate theory choice rather than an
independently existing world accessible
through experiments.


And it looks to me that Keith is heading in the
same sort of direction. Of course like most
sensible educators, but not all incidentally*, he
distances himself from relativism but still
he seems to equate constructivism merely with an
opposition to positivism. I think this is
a mistake Keith.

*An example of a constructivist chemical educator
who is even happy to count himself as a
relativist is George Bodner, a much cited author
in this field and in my view also
thoroughly confused and philosophically naive.


Eric Scerri,
UCLA
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Scerri's, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, OUP, 2006.
(due to appear in the UK on Nov 1st)
------------------------------------------------------------------



On Oct 13, 2006, at 12:28 PM, Dr. Keith S. Taber wrote:

At 21:50 -0700 12/10/06, Eric Scerri wrote:

Š
For example chemical education in the US is
completely dominated by constructivists.


It is always interesting to read Eric's comments
on this, from his experience in a US
context. In the UK, science education academics
also tend to be almost exclusively
constructivists. However this means something
rather different here, as it refers to
teaching science informed by our current best
understanding of learning processes. * I
strongly doubt that there are more than a handful
of science teachers trained here who
would be considered relativists. Indeed, one of
our problems is trying to shift science
education practice so that students do not
develop a simplistic naive positivist impression
that learning science is about being told out
about the things that science has proved to
be the case. In recent years, under a limited
vision of the nature of science in the
curriculum, any kind of open-ended investigative
work has all but vanished to be replaced
by straightforward 'fair-testing' in contexts
where the students should know the outcomes
in advance. ** The 14-16 curriculum has just
changed - to a chorus of reactionary
disapproval from those who feel it is a shift
from solid conceptual learning to soft
discussion. Supporters tend to see it as a move
from the learning of many given facts, to a
chance to explore the evidence behind scientific
ideas. Only time will tell which view is
closer to the mark. I obviously hope the latter.

Keith

.


--
Dr. Keith S. Taber
http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/staff/taber.html
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kst24/
University Senior Lecturer in Science Education
Convener, Science Education Academic Group
Programme Manager, Part-time Ph.D. in Education
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education
184 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 2PQ
United Kingdom


to join an electronic discussion list on
learning in science
please visit
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/learning-science-concepts

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]