Chapter 1 Draft – 4-Phase EMPNOS
Erin E. Peters
2-21-07
One of the most prominent reforms in science education is inquiry science (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993). Educators who teach inquiry science are striving to improve student understandings and explanations about the real world. In other words, inquiry science is the enactment of the nature of science. Too often, inquiry science is taught as either the scientific method or as “hands-on,” disconnected activities (Bybee, 2004). Science is usually transmitted in the classroom as a rigid body of facts to be accumulated, instead of a way of knowing (vanDriel, Beijaard & Verloop, 2001). National documents such as the National Science Education Standards (1996) or The Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993), written for the audience of science teachers, tend to give ambiguous guidelines for teaching science inquiry. In the current environment of standards-based education, it is easy for science teachers to slip into the mode of disseminating information rather than teaching the ways of knowing that categorize the discipline of science (Duschl, 1990). McComas, Almazroa, and Clough (1998) call for a more prominent role of the nature of science in curriculum to be explicitly taught for maximum effectiveness, although specific suggestions for implementations in the classroom have not been offered.
Research
Problem
Authentic inquiry in a classroom requires the teacher to understand how science operates as a discipline (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996). If the teacher does not understand how knowledge is obtained and verified as scientific knowledge, then inquiry in the classroom is limited to teaching process skills rather than knowledge about science. If a teacher understands the nature of science, he or she is better able to pose questions to students about why they are doing process skills as well as establishing an environment that allows students to construct meaningful scientific knowledge.
The nature of science can be understood as the culture of science. Scientists have inherent, agreed upon processes and assumptions (Lederman, 1999) that help them to construct meaningful knowledge. For example, workbench scientists use their creativity and inquire to expand the current scientific body of knowledge. Workbench scientists present their findings to professional scientists for verification (Magnusson, Palinscar, & Templin, 2004). In this way scientists work as a community to uphold the processes and assumptions that comprise the nature of science.
Many
teachers have only a surface understanding of how science operates as a
discipline (Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson,
2004; Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick
& Lederman, 2000; Bianchini
& Colburn, 2000; Chin & Brown, 2000). Allow me to use the metaphor of
travel to illustrate the implications of teachers’ practical knowledge about
the discipline of science. If someone from
.
Purpose
of the Study
The attempt to teach the nature of science didactically is a futile one. Students need to think deeply about the nature of science in order to have more that a rote understanding of the discipline of science. Teaching the nature of science out of the context of scientific knowledge and inquiry does not give students access to the important connection between scientific knowledge and knowledge about science. Research shows that teaching teachers about the nature of science by didactic, disconnected or implicit means has limited success (Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson, 2004). Even teachers with an elaborate understanding of the nature of science and who are motivated to teach their students about the nature of science have unproductive outcomes when trying to explicitly identify aspect of the nature of science during inquiry activities (Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). Abd-El-Khalick and Akerson (2006) have done preliminary work on developing metacognitive strategies to elicit pre-service elementary teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science through concept maps, interviews, and scenarios. Their preliminary work has shown to have some promise in getting teachers to explain their views on the nature of science. The purpose of this study is to better understand if students can be trained to think about their scientific thinking processes through a series of developmental steps leading to independent student metacognition about aspects of the nature of science.
Students who are self-regulated are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process (Zimmerman, 1989). Metacognition is the ability to think about and evaluate your own thinking processes (Brown, 1987) and is a part of being a self-regulated learner (Zimmerman, 1989). In order to accomplish the goal of learning about the nature of science, students can perform an inquiry activity and think about why they are conducting certain processes and evaluate their thinking in terms of the way a scientist might think about the processes and outcomes. Most research in the field of metacognition and science has been focused on allowing students to conduct scientific activities and listening to group conversations or asking students to talk aloud about their thinking. These are passive activities and do not give the students the modeling they may need to understand the aspects of the nature of science. A typical student is not exposed to the culture of science, so the teacher needs to provide the scaffolding that will illustrate how scientists think and operate. Metacognitive prompts built from the identified aspects of the nature of science (McComas, Almazroa & Clough, 1998) will give teachers a vehicle to scaffold scientific thinking to students who are underexposed to this type of thinking. Actively prompting students to evaluate their scientific thinking brings them closer to authentic scientific inquiry.
Developing metacognitive skills should also be an explicit activity in the science classroom and should focus on personal, behavioral and environmental influences on learning understood through social cognitive theory (Zimmerman, 2000). Research shows that self-regulated skills can be developed through four stages: observation, emulation, self-control and self-regulation (Zimmerman, 2000). Observation entails vicarious induction from a proficient model. In the case of an inquiry unit exploring electricity and magnetism, a teacher can ask students to observe by placing a sample observation in the laboratory worksheet. For example, when asked to rub objects together to make static electricity, this statement should be included in the laboratory worksheet as a proficient model. “Observation: Rubbing the silk on the glass 50 times produces more sparks when pulled the silk was pulled from the glass than silk rubbed on glass only 10 times. This is a sample of what a scientist might write about this exploration.” Emulation is an imitation of the general pattern of the model. Students can be prompted to emulate the observation the scientist made. “Now use the silk and glass to create static electricity and write an observation using the scientist’s as a pattern.” Self-control shows a guided practice of the mental skill. Students should practice writing an observation and compare it to a similar observation made by a scientist. “Rub the wool and plastic to produce static electricity and write an observation of your findings.” After the student writes an observation, they can be presented with a checklist of the factors a scientist would consider in making the observation: 1) The observation can be reproduced by another person, 2) there is no judgment in my observation (this is good, bad, ugly), 3) my observation has qualities that are measurable (such a standard measuring system, not relative such as big or small), 4) my observation is descriptive (no pronouns such as it), 5) I would be able to understand my observation months or years from now. Self-regulation is the adaptive use of the mental skill. Students at this stage should be able to explain their thinking in terms of a scientific way of knowing. An example of a metacognitive prompt at this level would be “Are your observations relevant to the purpose of the investigation?” A student at this level should be able to think about and evaluate their ideas according to a scientific way of knowing. Since metacognition is a part of self-regulation, the four stages can be adopted to help students think like scientists. Instead of just asking questions that prompt metacognition and hoping students will think deeply, students should be gradually scaffolded to the ultimate goal of metacognition using observation, emulation, self-control and self-regulation.
Significance
of the Study
The culture of science is passed down from generation to generation through science classes. If each generation receives the idea that science is a body of knowledge and has no access to the nature of science, knowledge about how science generates and verifies knowledge will no longer be part of the public’s understanding of science. Education has a responsibility to teach students how to think like a scientist in order to continue to be progressive, critical thinkers in our technological future.
To date, few specific, measurably successful suggestions for pedagogy resulting in a deeper understanding of science have been proposed (Akerson & Abd-El-Khalick, 2003; Beeth & Hewson, 1999; Davis, 2003). Perhaps this occurs because the nature of science has been as content rather than epistemology. One method for teaching epistemology is to develop student metacognition about their thinking processes and how they validate knowledge. Some evidence for incorporating metacognition as a learning component comes from the ThinkerTools curriculum (White & Frederickson, 1998; White, 1993). The ThinkerTools curriculum incorporated a reflective piece within an inquiry unit to encourage monitoring of the specified outcomes. Students using ThinkerTools showed increases in content knowledge and inquiry skills.
This study attempts to draw from the understandings found in the literature regarding the nature of science, metacognitive processes and self-regulatory processes. Recently there has been convergence in the literature about the important aspects of the nature of science, and this study attempts to implement the seven identified aspects of the nature of science in learning modules to guide student thinking processes to become more scientific. This study also incorporates findings from recent literature that metacognitive prompts often do not aid student thinking if the student does not have the skills to think metacognitively (Davis, 2003), and operationalizes Zimmerman’s ideas that four stages can be used to train self-regulation. This study extends Zimmerman’s ideas into the realm of metacognition. The results of this study could illustrate processes and interactions that will help scaffold metacognitive thinking to naïve scientific thinkers.
The field of the
nature of science still requires a great deal of exploration. In order to fully
understand how people learn such as esoteric subject as the nature of science
there needs to be more dialogue between the scientific community and science
teachers (Glason & Bentley, 2000), more
understanding of student views of the nature of science (Zeidler,
Walker, Ackett & Simmons, 2002), and more
understanding of how teachers who have a sophisticated view of the nature of
science can incorporate these ideas into classroom practice. Several
researchers have begun to take a non-traditional view of the nature of science
in order to expose some of the mechanisms to understanding. Wong (2002)
suggests that science educators and science education researchers abandon the
search for commonalities in the nature of science and begin to embrace the
diversity of the nature of science in order to translate ideas to the
classroom.