"In science sauvage, the facts of nature form a seemingly infinite, atomistic, unconnected set;
Holton, 1993
material bodies come to a stop unless they continue to be propelled;
electricity flows through wires as water does through pipes, only much faster;
space is a big container in which matter appeared at the beginning of time;
time is everywhere the same and marches on inexorably on its own;
notions of probability and scaling are minimal;
science and engineering are hardly distinguishable;
the pattern of cause and effect works most of the time, but unfathomable and magical things do occasionally intervene;
science provides truths, but now and then everything previously known turns out to have been entirely wrong, and a revolution is needed to establish the real truth.
And so forth."
We might want to find out about learners' ideas in science because we find them intrinsically interesting – but in science education our primary motivation is to inform teaching. If we want students to understand teaching about the abstract concepts of science, we need to take into account their starting points. (This is a key tenet of a perspective called 'constructivism'.)
This seems consistent with the advice given to scientists themselves:
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist [or science teacher!] cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of the concepts of his or her own specific field. He or she cannot proceed without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analysing the nature of everyday thinking."
Einstein, 1936
A key area of my research has been in exploring aspects of learners thinking and learning about science. This has been a major theme of many of my publications.
My work has explored aspects of students' thinking about science topics (and aspects of the nature of science). This work has been undertaken from a constructivist perspective. I have written an overview of this topic in the book Student Thinking and Learning in Science: Perspectives on the nature and development of learners' ideas – which includes many examples of ideas elicited in my own work with science learners.
I have explored students' alternative conceptions, but am also interested in how learning occurs, and ideas change, over time, and the ways in which a person's conceptions are structured: thus I labelled this area of work as the ECLIPSE (Exploring Concept Learning, Integration and Progression in Science Education) project.
View the presentation: The imaginary and the imagined: When scientific concepts meet students' conceptions
The origins of people’s scientific ideas
People's scientific ideas can have a number of sources, and realistically, make ideas have evolved under a range of influences.
- People develop some ideas spontaneously from their direct experiences of the natural world.
- Clearly, formal education is a major source of people's knowledge and understanding of science. (Read about 'Science teaching'.)
- But people are also exposed to ideas about science form a wide range of other sources – science in the news, in various media, in popular entertainment and in the 'folk science' circulating through everyday discourse. (Read about 'Public science'.)
Topics in this section:
[Read blog posts about alternative conceptions]
Anthropomorphism – Learners' anthropomorphic thinking
Work cited:
- Einstein, Albert (1936/1994) Physics and reality. In Ideas and Opinions, New York: The Modern Library.
- Holton, Gerald (1993) Science and Anti-science. Harvard University Press
