Alan Cromer died in 2005. He was a Prof of Physics who regularly railed at
science teachers and science educators, although it seems that he provided
little evidence for his strong positivist views, in place of his strongly
expressed opinions. I can see many more like him in the professional
sciences community and I met many at the two RSC General Assemblies that I
have been to in the last two years :-(

Best wishes

John

On Feb 29 2008, Dr. Keith S. Taber wrote:

>If anyone knows Prof. Alan Cromer's book
>'Connected Knowledge: Science, philosophy, and
>education, they will know he rants at
>'constructivists' and 'constructivism' (although
>his real target seems discovery learning). Cromer
>claims that in the US science teachers and
>science educators are ignorant of science -
>strongly implying that such people would not be
>science graduates, which I find hard to believeŠ
>
>But anyway I was interested in his account of how
>middle school science teachers were on successive
>days given a 3 hour 'constructivist' workshop on
>floating and bouyancy, followed the next day by
>"a ninety-minute demonstration-discussion period
>, several hours of laboratory work, and an hour
>of final discussion" on the same topic. According
>to Cromer "the teachers were confused and angered
>by the constructivist's workshop".
>
>There are a range of interesting points here
>about the choice of sequencing of the workshops,
>the difference in duration of the two inputs, and
>how it is implicitly assumed by Cromer that
>"ninety-minute demonstration-discussionŠ, several
>hours of laboratory work, and an hour of final
>discussion" could not be a constructivist
>teaching approach!
>
>Anyway, given the implied criticism of the
>constructivist educator who kindly agreed to
>participate in Cromer's programme I wondered if
>anyone knows who this was. I would be very
>interested to hear the other side of the
>argument, as from my reading this person seems to
>have been set up, and I wonder if they were
>clearly warned of the context of this work.
>
>I would be rather reticent in involving myself in
>a programme with someone who has Cromer's low
>opinion of science educators and constructivists
>as having "no knowledge of science", being
>"ignorant" of science content, "ignorant of the
>theoretical structure of science. Š ignorant of
>the standard experimental techniques" etc.
>
>I'd very much like to hear from this brave soul.
>
>Keith
>
>

--
From John Oversby
Institute of Education
Reading University
Reading
RG6 1HY
Tel 0118 378 5906