Learning science from technology

Abstract

The study explored the possibility that science can be learned from technology and it described the effects of a teaching approach on electric current with learners aged 11 - 15 years. It was based on a constructivist-developmentalist view of learning which recognises that learners bring prior knowledge to science lessons. The nature of that knowledge and how it is incorporated into lessons is believed to influence subsequent learning. The purpose of science learning is seen as developing learners’ own ideas into more coherent conceptual knowledge so that learners can make better sense of their world. As technology is a part of that world, its place as a context for learning was investigated. Technology was defined in this study as ‘the ways humans use their intellectual capabilities and physical resources to solve problems of survival, well-being and quality of life.’ Related to this is a view of science which sees it as problematic, provisional and progressive, and hence different from views of science that are based on positivist-inductivist philosophies. This instrumentalist approach to science provided scope for analogy exploration. A teaching model incorporating learners’ prior ideas was derived from a learning theory which recognised that the principal action in learning occurs when learners generate new meanings. This teaching model used the familiar technology of the learners’ culture as a context for learning electric current. Problem solving was strongly featured in the teaching package. This study confirmed that many learners have prior ideas about electricity which are undifferentiated (with respect to current and e.m.f.), and have based their thinking about it on sequential reasoning and on schemata dealing with consumption. These theories and processes of knowing are resistant to change and likely to impede access to the ideas scientists regard as coherent. The task of changing to systems reasoning and of reducing the weight given to consumption notions has been extremely hard for most learners. An intermediate position may be a more realistic achievement at first contact. A teaching package was designed so that the ideas of 11 - 15 year-old learners could be studied as they followed a course of study on electric current. Its effects were monitored by a range of qualitative research methods in six classroom trials. Some learners adopted new views initially but regressed to their earlier views. Others adopted a new view, and for some this resembled the scientists’ notion that electric current is conserved. Significant changes occurred where learners were able to invent analogies and explore the implications of those analogies in a relaxed environment where there was plenty of time. Learners were not able to change from sequential reasoning, nor from their belief that something is consumed; they coped with the latter idea by proposing a two-component system in which one component, the current, is conserved but the other, a “fuel,” is not. Changing to a two-component model, called a transitional framework, is thought to be as big a differentiation as can be achieved. Thus it is unlikely that learners would develop a view of electric current consistent with scientific ideas at first contact. Female learners appeared not to be disadvantaged by this approach. Implications for the pre-service and in-service education of teachers were considered, resulting in an approach which attempts to ensure that teachers are conversant with the philosophical and psychological ideas embedded in it. Guidelines for considering technological systems from which science might be learned have been suggested.