Student Thinking and Learning in Science

Perspectives on the Nature and Development of Learners' Ideas

Keith S. Taber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136620843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

This readable and informative survey of key ideas about students' thinking in science builds a bridge between theory and practice by offering clear accounts from research, and showing how they relate to actual examples of students talking about widely taught science topics.

Focused on secondary students and drawing on perspectives found in the international research literature, the goal is not to offer a comprehensive account of the vast literature, but rather to provide an overview of the current state of the field suitable for those who need an understanding of core thinking about learners' ideas in science, including science education students in teacher preparation and higher degree programs, and classroom teachers, especially those working with middle school, high school, or college level students. Such understanding can inform and enrich science teaching in ways which are more satisfying for teachers, less confusing and frustrating for learners, and so ultimately can lead to both greater scientific literacy and more positive attitudes to science.

Section 1
Student Conceptions and Science

Introduction

The Things Students Say: Learners’ Ideas About Science Topics

A Book About Student Thinking …

This book is about the way learners think and learn about science topics. There is now a good deal of research into these topics (for example, reviewed in Taber, 2013), although much of it is reported in technical literature that is not readily available to classroom teachers and others working directly with young learners (Duit, 2009). This book draws on that research literature, with a particular focus on informing those, such as teachers, supporting the learning of students. In particular, this book is intended to help teachers and others when they seek to make sense of students’ thinking by interpreting what students say (and write) about science topics.

… To Inform Teaching

There was a time when in some educational systems a science lesson would comprise largely of the teacher presenting information for students to learn, interspersed with occasional tests which would allow the teacher to see which students had learnt most of the set material, and which students had learnt less. Often it was accepted that some students were ‘brighter’ than others, or some had more of a ‘bent’ or aptitude for science, and the familiar experience of many teachers was that a fair proportion of students in many classes seemed to fail to learn (and by implication perhaps failed to make much sense of) a lot of what they were ‘taught’.

Such a situation was perhaps seen acceptable if school science was understood to be part of a system to select the best science students for university courses and ultimately careers in science, technology, and engineering. That notion of curriculum designed as a kind of filter to identify an intellectual elite is now—rightly—recognised as being unacceptable, and today science education is considered centrally important to all young people (Millar & Osborne, 1998; Reiss, 2007)—both as part of their own education and for the benefit of the technologically advanced societies in which they will become consumers and voters.

Perhaps there still are contexts where science teaching is based on the idea of the transmission of the teacher’s notes to the student’s notes—as it is sometimes said, without bothering the minds of either—with the expectation that ‘good’ students will then learn the notes for regurgitation in an examination. However, increasingly notions such as ‘active learning’, ‘dialogic teaching’, ‘individualised learning’, and ‘assessment for learning’ have become referents for good teaching.

Something like forty years ago there was something of a shift in the focus of the science education research community, which started to look in more detail at how students spoke and wrote about the science topics that they were studying to see how the learners were making sense of what they were being taught (Gilbert, Osborne, & Fensham, 1982). Rather than simply considering students responses that did not match the canonical answers as ‘wrong’, it was recognised that it was important to try to understand how and why students came away from classes with alternative interpretations of science topics. Answers that might formerly have been dismissed as simply the student ‘getting it wrong’ came to be seen as important diagnostic clues to how teaching was proving ineffective.

The Things Students Say

Indeed any science teacher who has given any thought to the ‘wrong’ or ‘alternative’ explanations and suggestions of their students will know these are often quite intriguing, sometimes mystifying (given what we know we have taught), and on occasions quite impressively creative. As part of my own work over the years— firstly as a school and college science teacher, later as a teacher educator, and as a researcher—I have taken a strong interest in the comments students make that can offer indications of their understanding and thinking about science topics. Textbox 0.1 presents a small sample of things students have said (or written) about science topics in the school curriculum.

The examples given in Textbox 0.1 represent just a small sample from data I have collected over a number of years. As will become clear later in the book, it is sometimes inappropriate to read too much into an isolated comment—sometimes students are struggling to find something to say in response to a question, and occasionally they are intentionally mischievous or intend to be humorous. Much of my data comes from extended interviews with students that allow opportunities to probe and test students’ understanding (many more examples are included on a website intended to inform teachers—see the further reading that follows). But even then, there is always an act of interpretation involved in drawing inferences about student thinking and understanding from how they express their ideas (Taber, 2013).

Textbox 0.1: A selection of students’ comments on a range of science topics.

Apples fall from trees because “it is the intension (intention) of the tree that the pips have their own source of nutrients as they start to grow …”

“I don’t know what Physics is … you study like things you can’t see and things you can see in Physics.”

“… I think the sodium atom would realise that it could form a more stable configuration by giving one of the electrons to the chlorine and forming a bond …”

“I think the stars, some stars, are closer, maybe, than planets.”

“It could have been like evolution, like … the atoms evolved so that they could hold on to each other.”

People age because “they get worn out. Eventually the vital parts of the body become unrepairable and the limbs slowly become more useless. Cells diminish over the years and eyes become over-used …”

“[Plants] respire more at night, because—they do it then instead of in the day because they do photosynthesis during the day.”

Some animals sometimes eat their own young because “they … feel that there [their] young are not capable of handaling [handling] the style of life and don’t want to make them suffer.”

“The gases, their particles try to stay as far away from each other as possible … because they are trying to spread out into the whole room.”

These examples are revisited in later chapters.

Indeed one of the criticisms of some of the early research in science education was that some researchers seemed to focus on collecting examples of students comments about particular science topics, but without having any clear indication of what the real significance of the students’ comments were for teachers. This is linked to wider criticism of what is sometimes called ‘constructivism’ in science education. Constructivism is a theory about how people learn, which has great deal of evidential support, and which offers insights that can support teachers in their classroom work (see Chapter 3). As a research programme, constructivism in science education has now progressed considerably beyond the ‘natural history’ stage of simply collecting and cataloging ‘misconceptions’ (Taber, 2009), and this book draws upon different perspectives on learning to consider the various sources of learners’ ideas in science.

As a basis for teaching science, constructivism has a more checkered history. In New Zealand/Aotearoa, for example, constructivism was adopted as a basis for curriculum reform (Bell, Jones, & Car, 1995), but not without some opposition (Claxton, 1996). In the United Kingdom, constructivist pedagogy was adopted as the basis for a ‘National Strategy’ of guidance on how to teach science (Key Stage 3 National Strategy, 2002), but arguably in a form that made challenging learners’ alternative ideas appear so straightforward that it trivialised the potential significance of those ideas as impediments to learning science (Taber, 2010b). In the United States, there has been a long-standing and quite vigorous—indeed, sometimes somewhat vicious (Cromer, 1997)—debate around constructivism (Berube, 2008; Tobias & Duffy, 2009).

For most of those working as researchers, teacher educators, and experienced science educators, the basic principles of constructivist teaching (which involves taking into account what the learner already thinks) are widely accepted, and indeed sometimes seem as so obvious now that they are considered passé. Yet, in the United States in particular, constructivism has become embroiled in arguments about the relative merits of ‘direct instruction’, ‘enquiry teaching’, ‘student-centred learning’, ‘progressive’ education, and so forth. Unfortunately most of these terms mean different things to different people, and in particular the versions of these approaches presented by their critics are often unrecogni-sable to their advocates. So opponents of direct instruction may identify it with the teacher simply talking at students; and opponents of enquiry teaching may suggest that it involves the teacher refusing to reveal scientific knowledge and expecting learners to rediscover it all by themselves. Clearly no one who knows about science teaching would advocate either of these caricatured approaches, so this does not make a very good basis for a productive debate. (It certainly does not follow the constructivist approach of seeking to move understanding forward by taking into account the other person’s thinking, and presenting your own arguments informed by how the other person understands the issues.) As a result much of the debate about constructivism consists of clever people talking past each other (Taber, 2010a).

Opponents of constructivism in teaching often label it as ‘unguided’ or ‘minimally guided’, implying that the teacher largely lets the learners take their own path to knowledge (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). Yet teaching which is genuinely informed by constructivist theory is very different from that—seeking to find the optimum level of guidance to best support learners: sometimes this means giving learners time and space to explore the implications of their own current thinking, but often it involves high levels of support and structure, and it always involves the design of learning activities planned to guide learners towards scientific understandings (Taber, 2011).

Readers should be assured that the version of constructivism informing this book (see Chapter 3) derives from research showing that simply telling learners the scientific account is often an ineffective way of teaching, and that rather the teacher has to carefully ‘scaffold’ learning, taking into account learners’ current knowledge and understanding. We may not yet always know exactly how best to do this kind of optimally guided instruction for all science topics, but the basic constructivist idea that effective teaching is contingent upon learners’ existing ideas is very well established.

An Invitation to Become a Science Learning Doctor

In this book I discuss examples of things students have said or written that give insight into their thinking and offer research-informed perspectives of how learners come to have these ideas. This is used as a base to argue for the importance of diagnostic assessment to inform teaching, and in particular of the value to science teachers of acting like medical practitioners in paying attention to the ‘signs and symptoms’ of science teaching that is going wrong: when learners say or write things that suggest they do not understand the teaching, or that they have managed to understand teaching quite differently from how we intended.

The latter parts of the book will revisit some of the examples readers met earlier in the book in the context of a simple model of where science teaching can go wrong in engaging with learners’ thinking. Teachers can adopt this model as a useful heuristic tool for thinking about teaching and learning in their own classes. It is suggested that classroom teachers who are reading this book to support their own classroom work might also consider starting to keep a file of their own examples of ‘the things students say’ when they come across examples of questions, comments, written responses, and so on which suggest that students are thinking along very different lines from the scientific account being presented in class. For example, a simple log in the form of a table such as Table 0.1 would be sufficient.

The suggestion is that when reading about the model (in Chapter 11), the reader may wish to consider how the examples they have collected from their own teaching make sense in terms of the ideas discussed in the book. Teachers who have been introduced to this model in teacher development sessions have reported that they find it a helpful tool to think about student learning, and I hope that many readers will also find that this model is useful, whether applied directly as a formal tool to support diagnostic assessment in the classroom, or simply as a perspective to inform thinking about your day-to-day work.

Technical and Ethical Notes

TABLE 0.1 A table for recording signs of learners)’ thinking inconsistent with science teaching.

Student/class	Context	Student comment	Notes

The examples of student comments used in the book are all authentic examples provided by real students studying science subjects in various contexts. Written comments have been copied and typed into my records. Interview data has been transcribed from recordings. Transcribing always involves an element of interpretation, as natural spoken language is seldom entirely clear when a recording is listened to forensically. Recordings often reveal hesitations, false starts, mixed tenses, missing subjects, and so forth that we do not actually notice in ‘real time’ during a conversation. (For an example of how our brains process and make sense of sensory data, and present a polished version of what we see or hear to consciousness, see Chapter 5.) In transcribing speech we need to decide how much of this detail that is filtered out as noise during the actual listening experience should be included in the written record. When we use extracts in our writing we then have further decisions to make about how much tidying up of language is sensible. Hesitations may reflect uncertainty, for example, but too much ‘um’-ing and ‘ah’-ing can make for difficult reading. The judgment to be made is to tidy up extracts to aid readability without distorting the essence of the original speech. I have always tried to limit such editing and use it to enhance the communication of the original meaning rather than distort it. Of course, it is possible to get this wrong. I have done my best to present authentic reports of what students actually told me, but the reader should bear in mind that my interpretations of what students have told me can be fal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• SECTION 1 Student Conceptions and Science
• SECTION 2 Making Sense of Student Thinking
• SECTION 3 Diagnosing Student Thinking in Science Learning
• Index