Lessons from teaching about scientific explanations

Choice for the gifted: lessons from teaching about scientific explanations

One of my publications is the book chapter:

 

 

This has also been translated into Turkish

Taber, K. S. (2017). Üstün Yetenekliler İçin Tercih Hakkı Sunmak: Bilimsel Açıklamalar Hakkındaki Öğretimden Çıkarılacak Dersler (M. Gökdere, Trans.). In K. S. Taber (Ed.), Üstün Yetenekliler İçin Fen Eğitimi (pp. 195-211). Ankara: Pegem Akademi Publishing.

 

Introduction:

"This Chapter explores the potential value of ‘choice’ as a feature of science teaching planned for the most able in science classes. Student choice is one feature of learner- centred approaches to teaching…. The context of the Chapter is a sequence of activities focused on the notion of ‘scientific explanation’. The approach taken is considered to offer a number of features that link to the needs of the most able science learners. In particular, there were a number of ways that the lesson activities offered ‘choice’, and positive student responses to the sessions seemed linked to this notion. It is suggested here that choice, as a principle to inform lesson planning, relates to a number of the issues that are considered important in teaching the gifted:

• Creativity: by providing open-ended activities…;
• Differentiation: by allowing students to respond at different levels…;
• Engagement: by offering opportunities to link to personal interests…;
• Metacognition: by requiring pupils to make judgements e.g. about which examples to tackle, and when to move on to another example…;
• Task demand: by offering opportunities for higher level cognition …

Question	Explanation
Why do we sweat?	We sweat because “our body sometimes gets overly hot, whether it is from radiation from the sun or respiration in your muscles. Sweat is useful because it is mainly water; and water generally evaporates when it gets enough heat energy, which it will be able to ‘steal’ from the surrounding. The end result is that we lose heat energy thus cooling you down.”
Why does smoking damage health?	Smoking damages health because “you are breathing tar, that lines your lungs and causes cancer. Nicotine is addictive, so you could keep taking this tar. It damages the cilia by the tar killing them off or clogging them up so they cannot move dirt and phlem [phlegm] up the throat. This is why smokers may get coughs and find it hard to breathe. The other harmful chemicals in cigarettes can cause cancer and other bodily disfunctions [dysfunctions].”
Why don’t people lay eggs?	People do not lay eggs because “our developing babies require more energy and the like provided, and if they developed externally then they would have limited supplies, whereas if the egg was inside the mother’s body then the child would get virtually unlimited supplies through the placenta which is connected to the mother’s blood stream.”
Why do only some planets have moons?	Only some planets have moons because “when the big bang [sic] happened and the mass distributed but not evenly the larger masses of rock were drawn in by stars while some of the smaller masses got drawn in by the larger masses of rock because of their gravitational pull however some of the medium masses of rocks did not have a small mass of rock go near them or did not have enough gravitational pull to send the smaller rocks into orbit around them.”

Contents:

• The science context: the nature of scientific explanations
• The teaching context: working with a top set with a wide ability range
• Student responses to the teaching episode
• Suggest an explanation
• Presentation
• Explanations wanted
• Sequencing explanations
• Evaluating explanations
• Overall response to the sequence of activities
• Lessons from the lessons

Download the author's manuscript versions of the chapter.