The imaginary and the imagined: When scientific concepts meet students’ conceptions…

The RSC Education Award Lecture 2014-2015.

Read about the award at the RSC Website.

Presentation

View the presentation used for the lecture:

Versions of this lecture were given at

• The University of Surrey
• The Institute of Education (University of London)
• The University of East Anglia.

Abstract:

This talk will consider the challenge of teaching and learning scientific concepts in the light of educational research and scholarship. There is considerable research reporting on children’s and students’ ideas about scientific topics, often judging these ideas to be ‘alternative' (to canonical science) and suggesting that such alternative conceptions may be tenacious enough to act as impediments to learning the science set out in the school or university curriculum. Student cognition is not directly observable, and much of it occurs pre-consciously, so we often need to infer learners' thinking from indirect evidence. Despite this limitation, some studies have explored student learning of, and thinking about, scientific topics in depth, so that we are beginning to have a more nuanced understanding of the nature of students’ ideas and how they may change. Evaluating learners’ conceptions relies upon comparing students' ideas with the scientific understanding set out as target knowledge in the curriculum. The nature of science as a communal and on-going enterprise – always open to reconsidering cherished ideas in the light of new evidence – means that scientific knowledge is inherently, potentially, in flux. Furthermore, scientific concepts are themselves mental entities which are only represented imperfectly in journals, textbooks and curriculum documents. Given the elusive status of scientific concepts, and the often tacit, fluid, and manifold nature of student thinking, any successful teaching and learning of scientific concepts (as expected on a routine basis in school classrooms, teaching laboratories and lecture halls) could be considered an impressive achievement. The talk will be illustrated by considering some of the concepts found in school and university courses, and what research tells us about how students understand – or misunderstand – these ideas.