Re: Nature of Science (NOS)

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 9:40 -0500 9/4/02, Joseph Bellina wrote:

> I am trying to break those connections by teaching eled majors physics
> by guided inquiry...with no mention of method at all.  It certainly
> doesn't appear to be authoritarian to the students.  Now I have to
> convince them that this is real science.

I would be leery of not mentioning method at all. I think the guided
inquiry method is a good one, but why not do some guided inquiry into
the methodology of science, as well? I don't think that an
appreciation for what science is comes through all by itself,
especially to people who will not be earning their living at it. Elem
Teachers, who seem not to have much affinity for science and take
those courses only because they are required, may get through their
courses by learning only that "science" is a set of activities
(guided or otherwise) that they can pull out of the file cabinet
whenever needed, and never understand how the whole thing hangs
together. Or that the big ideas and well-established theories are
supported by lines of evidence from many disparate sources.

To understand what makes an activity *science,* students have to be
shown how any given activity fits into the "big picture." A few years
ago, Sheila Tobias wrote a book called "They're Not Dumb, They're
Different," in which she examined the reasons why many bright
students who started in science majors in college left those areas to
major in other fields, often with great success. Her conclusion was
that their disillusion with science (mostly physics and chemistry)
came because they were never able to glean any kind of overview of
their subjects from their courses or texts, and they came away with
the impression that science was just an accumulation of facts.

My recollection of my freshman physics course is much the same. But I
enjoyed the facts, and thought it was fun to learn them. The big
picture was not important to me until later. That seemed to be the
prevalent thought among my colleagues in physics as well. We weren't
interested (we thought) in "the nature of science" because we thought
we understood it. Of course we didn't. In some ways, those who left
science for other majors may well have been more perceptive that we,
or at least had a more mature outlook on the field, since they were
looking for the things that tie science together with the rest of
society, and when they didn't get it in their science courses they
left for other fields.

So I think that keeping the students aware of how whatever little
thing they are doing at the moment fits in to the overall structure
of science, including how what they are doing at least mimics the
methodology of science, is important, and needs to be explicitly
stressed. After all elem. ed. teachers will be responsible for
teaching the next generation of pre-pubescent physicists and other
scientists, as well as creating a populace that understands what
science is, and what it can and cannot do.

If we had such a populace we might hear fewer people asking such
inanities as "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they cure
cancer?"

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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