Powerful Ideas of Science and How to Teach Them

Jasper Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429581700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A bullet dropped and a bullet fired from a gun will reach the ground at the same time. Plants get the majority of their mass from the air around them, not the soil beneath them. A smartphone is made from more elements than you. Every day, science teachers get the opportunity to blow students' minds with counter-intuitive, crazy ideas like these. But getting students to understand and remember the science that explains these observations is complex. To help, this book explores how to plan and teach science lessons so that students and teachers are thinking about the right things – that is, the scientific ideas themselves. It introduces you to 13 powerful ideas of science that have the ability to transform how young people see themselves and the world around them.

Each chapter tells the story of one powerful idea and how to teach it alongside examples and non-examples from biology, chemistry and physics to show what great science teaching might look like and why. Drawing on evidence about how students learn from cognitive science and research from science education, the book takes you on a journey of how to plan and teach science lessons so students acquire scientific ideas in meaningful ways.

Emphasising the important relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and the subject itself, this exciting book will help you teach in a way that captivates and motivates students, allowing them to share in the delight and wonder of the explanatory power of science.

Section 1

Aims for school science education

For whom and for what?

CHAPTER

1

Fallacies of science education

At 8:15 am on 6 August 1945, the first atomic bomb used against human beings exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb, packed full of uranium-235, exploded 600 metres above the city as two pieces of uranium were catapulted into each other, creating a super-critical mass of radioactive material that initiated a chain reaction. Vast amounts of energy were released as uranium-235 atoms split apart by nuclear fission, creating temperatures on the ground that fused metal and melted glass. By the end of 1945, 140,000 people had died (Figure 1.1), but many more would go on to endure the horrific consequences of radiation poisoning. Whilst the atomic bomb was a weapon of war, it was also a product of science.

Figure 1.1 The tricycle of Shinichi Tetsutani (then 3 years and 11 months) who died on 6 August 1945

Note: This tricycle was initially buried with Shinichi at home. Forty years later, Shinichi's remains were transferred to the family grave and the tricycle was donated to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima by Shinichi's father, Nobuo Tetsutani. Photo donated by TETSUTANI Nobuo to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Curatorial Division 1-2 Nakajima-cho, Naka-ku, Hiroshima 730-0811, Japan.

This uncomfortable truth, that scientific knowledge has the propensity for both good and bad, is rarely captured in the school science classroom. Instead, science is portrayed as a method in search of objective truths, without much thought as to why these ideas arose in the first place. But science is a human endeavour that takes place in a context and culture that influences what gets measured as these four examples illustrate:

• the Manhattan Project, the three-year, American-led effort to develop the atomic bomb, was only initiated in fear of Germany getting there first;
• Marie Curie, the first woman to receive a Noble prize, named the element she discovered polonium after her homeland country of Poland;
• in 2012, research funding in the United Kingdom equated to £241 per person with cancer, £73 per person with coronary heart disease and just £48 per person with stroke (Luengo-Fernandez et al., 2015) and
• after the death of a ‘star’ scientist there is often a surge in publications from outsiders who resisted publication whilst established scientists were still alive. Often these publications advanced the field considerably by offering new directions (Azoulay et al., 2019).

Whilst there are some very good reasons why we may want to avoid too many distracting stories when teaching scientific ideas (Harp and Mayer, 1998), there is a risk that portraying science in an overly sanitised way disconnects school science from the complexities of the real world, meaning that for many students science is seen as ‘important but not for me’ (Jenkins and Nelson, 2005). How much then of this messiness should we share when we teach science? The answer depends on what and for whom an education in science is for. Once we've sorted this out, we can decide which scientific ideas students should learn about and, importantly, how they should learn them.

Science for scientists

For a long time now, school science has been justified on the basis that we need to educate future scientists. This virtuous aim makes perfect sense until we consider that only 20% of the UK workforce need scientific training to do their jobs (The Royal Society, 2014). And, even if we are able to increase the number of students who want to work in science, there are genuine questions as to whether more scientists are really needed for this science pipeline; supply seems to be meeting demand in the United Kingdom and United States at least (Smith, 2017). So, whilst there is more work to be done to make sure this pipeline adequately represents the society science serves (DeWitt and Archer, 2015; Smith and White, 2019), it seems entirely undemocratic to justify science for all on the basis of creating future scientists. It seems then that we need a more equitable reason for why science is taught at school, one that is relevant for all students and not just a minority.

Utilitarian aims: useful or practical, rather than attractive

Seeing as not everyone can or wants to become a scientist, perhaps we should be looking for a more pragmatic and practical purpose for science education? Take, for example, knowing how to wire a plug or knowing the location and names of major human organs; surely these are valuable aims for everyone? I'm not so sure. Arguing for a science education for all based on the necessity to wire plugs or identify locations of important organs is problematic for a number of reasons.

For the most part, advances in modern technology have superseded many of these historically useful roles for science. A quick Google search identifies where our clavicle is located and most appliances now come with plugs attached. Then there's the question of whether scientific ideas are really that useful in the first place. The National Science Board of America (2018) reports that 27% of Americans think the Sun goes around the Earth, but this doesn't stop them from distinguishing night from day (in Europe the figure was 44% so Europeans don't go feeling smug!). Indeed, many of the misconceptions that make science teachers shudder, such as closing the door to keep the cold out, are actually very functional in our day-to-day lives. I would suggest that asking someone to close the door to prevent the transfer of thermal energy is unlikely to get you very far, unless, that is, you are in a room filled with scientists!

The scientific habit of mind

Maybe then it's not about such practical aims, but rather being able to ‘think like a scientist’? Over 100 years ago now, the educationist and philosopher John Dewey (1910) gave an address to the 1909 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here, Dewey argued that it is the method of science that should be the primary outcome of a science education so that people can appreciate the ‘scientific habit of mind’ (p. 126) as opposed to focusing on ‘ready-made knowledge’ (p. 124). For Dewey, the significance of science lay not behind the content but behind it being ‘an effective method of inquiry into any subject-matter’ (p. 124).

The problem, though, with seeing science as ‘a method’ is that it divorces the process of doing science from the process of thinking about scientific ideas. In separating out the method from the ideas, it inadvertently undermines the role of scientific knowledge in the inquiry process. Let's take, for example, an inquiry into the factors that affect photosynthesis – the process by which plants produce their own food using light, carbon dioxide and water (amongst other things). You can't begin to design or carry out this inquiry unless you have sufficient knowledge of (a) the variables likely to affect the rate at which plants photosynthesise, (b) know how you will measure the effect of changing these variables and (c) know how to make meaningful conclusions from the results you collect. Ask an inorganic chemist to inquire about the Qin Dynasty – the first dynasty of Imperial China – and you won't get very far; not because she doesn't know how to inquire, but because she doesn't have the necessary knowledge of Chinese history to inquire with.

The second problem with seeing science as a method is whose method are we learning? Take the work done by an evolutionary biologist and a primatologist such as Jane Goodall. The evolutionary biologist may never perform an experiment in the traditional sense with glassware, goggles, solutions and measuring/changing variables. Instead they may spend hours at a computer modelling the evolutionary history of DNA sequences. The primatologist, on the other hand, may spend weeks painstakingly recording the behaviour of chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The archetypal model of a scientist making hypotheses, controlling, manipulating and measuring variables, whilst not wrong, is insufficient to describe the many different ways scientists work to generate new knowledge. Jonathan Osborne (2002) describes this as one of the many ‘fallacies of science education’. What's unique to science then is not the process of how scientists generate knowledge – historians generate hypotheses, geographers make observations and cooks control variables. Instead, what is unique to science is a collection of scientific ideas that scientists use to inquire with and make sense of the natural world.

Scientific ideas as powerful knowledge

Michael Young, an educational sociologist working at the UCL Institute of Education in London, refers to these scientific ideas, amongst other academic knowledge students acquire at school, as ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young, 2009). Powerful knowledge is specialised knowledge, created by communities of subject specialists, that gives us the ability to think about, and do things, that otherwise we couldn't. Young calls this powerful knowledge, not bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Thinking about the right things
• Section 1 Aims for school science education: For whom and for what?
• Section 2 The science of learning science
• Section 3 Planning lessons with thinking in mind
• Section 4 Planning and teaching the phases of instruction
• Section 5 Responsive teaching
• Conclusion: Time to reflect
• Lesson planning templates
• Index