“… learning science is difficult not because of what children don’t have or lack, but because of what they do have: some initial commitments and ideas that will need to be revised and changed” (National Research Council, 2007, p. 107). As I was reading the articles for this week, I stumbled upon this quote and kept thinking about it. Initially, I was drawn to the quote because it references students’ prior science knowledge, an idea that I feel is often not integrated into teaching. With a jammed packed teaching schedule, educators often do not have time, or forget, to determine what students come into their classes already knowing. I think that referencing students’ prior knowledge is vital in science classes as many of the concepts have been previously taught, or heard about, by the students. Understanding what students know can help us, as educators, determine where to focus our energy and time on.
On the other hand, the quote also resonated with me because it does not reference students’ prior knowledge with a negative connotation, i.e. the idea that students come in to class with ideas or misconceptions that are completely incorrect and need to be retaught (“accommodated” as Posner and his colleges would put it.) I tend to view misconceptions as ideas that need to be corrected, rather than “attempts by children to make sense of the world around them” (National Research Council, 2007, p. 98). When looking at misconceptions in this way, it is easy to see that children tend to want to answer “why” and “how” phenomena, events, and things around them work, so they rationalize it. This rationalization gives students a concept or an explanation that they believe to be true. From a teacher point of view, it can be very difficult to change students’ science conceptions that are misinformed, which leads me to wonder: if students believe a misconception, one that is often so prevalent that most non-science people commonly believe it, how can educators have their students not only accept a valid explanation but change their future thinking about the phenomena?
To answer this question, I start with a quote from Posner and his colleagues “…learning is the result of the interaction between what the student is taught and his current ideas or concepts” (1982) and one quote from the National Research Council “However, their prior knowledge also offers leverage point that can be built on to develop their understanding of scientific concepts and their ability to engage in scientific investigations” (2007, p. 191). Both these quotes illustrate that without referencing students’ current understanding on how/why something works, educators cannot 1) determine how students’ ideas interact with new, sometimes incompatible, ideas that are being taught to them or 2) have students accept a new explanation. By understanding where students’ thought processes are, educators can assimilate and use part of students’ existing concepts to help explain to them why the presented theory or view of a phenomena is “correct.” In doing so, students will be more likely to accommodate and replacing their current (“incorrect”) conception with new, “correct” ones since they can compare and contrast their old conceptional understanding and the newly presented one. While this is not the only way for students to accept a new outlook/theory about a science concept, it would increase the likelihood of students changing their conceptional understanding.
With that said, I do appreciate the five accommodation-centered teaching techniques Posner and his colleges provide for teachers (1982) as it gives educators specific areas to focus on. However, I did find myself questioning the second teaching strategy “Organize instruction so that teachers can spend a substantial portion of their time in diagnosing errors in student thinking and identifying defensive moves used by students to resist accommodation” (Posner et. al, 1982, p. 226). To me, Posner and his colleges are viewing any idea that does not align with the suggested conceptions as errors. But more importantly, the authors consistently mention concepts that align with a certain conceptual framework, but do not really expand on how such a framework is created, when it was created, or by whom it was created. I wish there had been more information on this framework, but overall enjoyed reading Posner and his colleagues’ article.
Citations:
National Research Council. (2007). Science learning past and present. Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, 11–25.
Posner, G. J., Kenneth, S. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accomodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.
Chloe,
I like your discussion of the need to understand students’ current perceptions of topics before teaching them. I also think it is very important what you do with the information after you “elicit student ideas”. How should teachers modify teaching so that “misconceptions” can be clarified? I think that teaching this way is definitely possible, but much of a teacher’s teaching plan is reliant on what students bring to the table. I think it is definitely important to build trust with students so that they are more likely to be receptive to new ideas– but even if students are receptive to new ideas, how can we make them “stick”? My question is, how many cognitive accommodations that are brought about by teaching end up remaining with the students as time passes? I suppose that question relies a lot on the teacher, instruction, and time given to teaching the student.
Your writing made me think a lot about how we classify student responses, we see them as being misconceptions if they do not fit the class objectives or learning outcomes? What if their responses are other ways of explaining a phenomenon that may be grounded in a science that is not one we are familiar to? I may be a little biased in my own research area, but I think about how Indigenous scientific knowledge is an alternative way of viewing the world and is grounded in the same scientific processes that western science carries out, uses evidence to reason and make claims, but is inherently different. How do we as educators cater for such knowledge when we are siloed to ONLY consider western explanations as being correct? What if an Indigenous student in our class uses Indigenous knowledge to reason, this explanation is no less incorrect than a western explanation, it is merely different. In making all our science students ‘think alike’ in what is a real explanation of a phenomenon, do we risk reducing science by limiting what counts as valuable and what does not? Can explanations be different and still be considered correct. Just throwing the idea out there 🙂