Between science and common science. Nonformal education for village health workers in Kenya

To help the 50,000 people living in Saradidi improve their community, the Anglican Church of the Province of Kenya of originally organized a health project in 1979 as the cornerstone of an extensive rural development effort to reach people through parish and congregational committees. The Saradidi Health Program intended to reduce the high rates of infant and child mortality and morbidity by directly involving the community in the provision of its own health care and the improvement of its quality of life. Each village elected its own health and development commitee and later selected volunteers to work in the community. Training was given to those selected to organize teir communities for the health program--the Nyamrerwa or Village Health Helpers (VHHS). Their task was not simply to provide information about appropriate health practices, but the much more difficult 1 of spanning the 2 worlds of medical science and traditional beliefs and practices. Over the course of several years, the experience at Saradidi proved that these 2 worlds need not be in competition. They could be complementary provided that the VHHS were capable of integrating their newly-acquired knowledge with the common sense of centuries-old practice. An evaluation of the program has shown that the VHHS have now begun to accoomplish their task of influencing the practices and changing the attitudes of the people in Saradidi. The nonformal approach is effective because it involves the whole community in the process of promoting good health. The VHHS act as a catalyst, bringing together useful information and practices from the outside and making them part of the community's own information and practices.     

Representations of nature of science in U.S. science standards: A historical account with contemporary implications

This study evaluated the representations of nature of science (NOS) in U.S. state science standards, and examined the changes in these representations from documents advanced in the 1980s through 2016. Drawing from the consensus perspective on NOS and prior studies focusing on the analysis of textual content, documents were inspected for 10 target NOS aspects: the empirical, tentative, inferential, creative, theory-driven, and social NOS, in addition to the myth of “The Scientific Method,” the nature of scientific theories and laws, and the social and cultural embeddedness of science. Ninety-eight state documents from 48 states were analyzed and multiple editions were collected from 34 states. Additionally, relevant materials from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were assessed for their coverage of the same NOS aspects. Collected materials were scored as whole documents, including over 11,000 pages of text in total, on each target aspect, which reflected the treatment (naïve vs. informed) of NOS in text and the manner of presentation (explicit vs. implicit). Overall, surprisingly, state standards documents have improved very little with respect to their NOS coverage over the last 30 years. NOS standards documents remain silent on a majority of key aspects of NOS, and the number of aspects showing explicit, informed representations has held constant. The NGSS performed well compared to many contemporary documents, but they failed to address all target NOS aspects in a desirable manner. Further analysis raised concerns with the degree that states fully adopt and disseminate standards in manner consistent with the NGSS despite stated intentions, which may negatively impact NOS coverage in instructional resources and classroom enactments. To improve NOS representations in standards, recognizing the role these documents play in shaping instructional materials and teaching in the science classroom, exemplars from analyzed materials were highlighted with informed and explicit representations of multiple aspects.     

对科学文化和科学教育的思考——兼谈素质教育的几个问题

“科学求真 ,人文求善” ,“科学教人做事 ,人文教人做人”的二分观点值得商榷 ,传统的事实价值二分模式和主客二分模式是其理论渊源。科学作为一种文化 ,不仅求真而且求善求美。对真善美的追求是科学文化的价值内蕴。科学在本质上是人文的 ,这是科学文化与人文文化“和而不同”的根基。缺乏完整的科学文化观和科学教育观 ,是科学教育最大的不足。完整的科学教育应当并且能够既教人做事也教人做人。要充分挖掘科学文化蕴含的人文价值来教育人 ,关键在于教师要提高自身的科学文化素养     

Undergraduate science students' images of science

This article describes views about the nature of science held by a small sample of science students in their final year at the university. In a longitudinal interview study, 11 students were asked questions about the nature of science during the time they were involved in project work. Statements about the nature of science were characterized and coded using a framework drawing on aspects of the epistemology and sociology of science. The framework in this study has three distinct areas: the relationship between data and knowledge claims, the nature of lines of scientific enquiry, and science as a social activity. The students in our sample tended to see knowledge claims as resting solely on empirical grounds, although some students mentioned social factors as also being important. Many of the students showed significant development in their understanding of how lines of scientific enquiry are influenced by theoretical developments within a discipline, over the 5–8 month period of their project work. Issues relating to scientists working as a community were underrepresented in the students' discussions about science. Individual students drew upon a range of views about the nature of science, depending on the scientific context being discussed. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 201–219, 1999     

Uses of cognitive science to science education

The paper looks for common ground between cognitive science and science education starting from historical roots. Topics critically scrutinized are: representation of knowledge with applications of the schema and frame concept to physics education centering around the hierarchical structure of knowledge, the qualitative-quantitative distinction, the declarative-procedural distinction, and the semantic-episodic distinction; the uses of network versus production system representations, stressing the distinction between outward and inward representation which is often neglected; a short discussion of the likewise often forgotten index and reference issue.The paper has been presented to the ATEE Symposium on Implications of Cognitive Science for the Education of Science Teachers IPN (Kiel) 29.–30.08.1985.     

Similarity of science textbooks: A content. Analysis

The investigator completed a content analysis of the astronomy portion of science texts at three grade levels (4th, 5th, and 6th) that were produced by five different publishers. The analysis used an operant paradigm and compared the responses expected of students who used one science text to those expected of students using other science texts. The response comparisons were made both within and across grade levels. Using similarity of the responses expected of students as a basis of comparison, elementary school science texts produced by different publishers had more in common across grade levels than within grade levels. Less than 50% of the responses expected of students at one grade level were common to other science texts at the same or different grade levels.     

Hermeneutics of science and multi-gendered science education

In this paper, I consider the relevance of the view of cognitive existentialism to a multi-gendered picture of science education. I am opposing both the search for a particular feminist standpoint epistemology and the reduction of philosophy of science to cultural studies of scientific practices as championed by supporters of postmodern political feminism. In drawing on the theory of gender plurality and the conception of dynamic objectivity, the paper suggests a way of treating the nexus between the construction of gender within the interrelatedness of scientific practices and the constitution of particular objects of inquiry. At stake is the notion of characteristic hermeneutic situation which proves to be helpful in designing a multi-gendered pedagogy as well.