Conceptual profile of chemistry: a framework for enriching thinking and action in chemistry education

Understanding the nature of chemical thinking and action, as well as their application and impact on our world should be central goals of chemistry education at all educational levels. However, traditional school chemistry is still mostly focused on having students learn the body of declarative knowledge built over the years in the discipline. Achieving changes in curriculum and teaching practices in this context remains a challenging task. Studies in the history and philosophy of the discipline suggest that chemistry has unique characteristics that need to be recognised and considered in chemistry education. Many of these studies point to a pluralism in the discipline, and in the understanding of and about chemistry, that should be characterised and incorporated into our educational models. In this essay, we have attempted to build such a characterisation using conceptual profiles theory to propose a framework that can be used to enrich and support the thinking and action of chemistry teachers at all educational levels.     

Reconsidering the 'nature of science' as a curriculum component

Although the nature of science has long been seen as an important, indeed central, component of science education during this century, efforts to integrate an authentic view of the nature of science into the curriculum have often met with little success. Work in the field of science studies since the 1960s has compounded this difficulty by presenting educators with various competing, often conflicting, views of the essence of scientific inquiry. I discuss previous attempts to come to grips with this fundamental issue of how to deal with the competing views of science and suggest an alternative approach for integrating nature of science issues into the school science curriculum. What is needed is for educators to accept that no single nature of science exists and to develop curricula that help students understand instead the diverse, local practices that are found within and across scientific disciplines.     

Towards a pragmatic science in schools

This paper contrasts naive beliefs about the nature of science, with science as it appears from sociological and philosophical study, feminist critique and insights from multicultural education. I draw implications from these informed views to suggest how school science might be modified to project a pragmatic view of science to its students that allows students to know science and its relationships to themselves and society in multi-faceted ways. From these perspectives, pragmatic school science is situated within a values framework that questions how we know. Pragmatic school science also requires that the naive inductivist views that permeate school science inquiry methods at present be modified to recognise that observations and inquiry are guided by prior knowledge and values; that new knowledge is tentative; that some knowledge has high status, as it has been constructed consensually over a long period; but that even high status knowledge can be challenged. For implementation of these reforms, yet still to embrace the need for some students to appropriate understanding of discipline knowledge required for advanced science education, a broad set of aims is required.     

Enculturation into Technoscience: Analysis of the Views of Novices and Experts on Modelling and Learning in Nanophysics

In physics, the borderline between pure science and technology is increasingly diffuse. Physics can be seen as technoscience, a merged scientific and technological enterprise. The notion of technoscience has emerged from studies in the philosophy of science and sociology of science, and also seems to arise quite naturally in discussions with practicing scientists and as an underpinning of actual scientific practices. Nanophysics, the activities of which are closely connected with the advancement of technology and where modelling and simulations are extensively used, is a natural place to test how the ideas contained in technoscience can be used to understand these central activities and how they are learned. The views of physicists, both experts and novices, working on modelling and simulation problems in nanophysics and nanotechnology are examined in this study using multidimensional methods, to discover their views on how knowledge in their research field is acquired, constructed and justified??and how novices are enculturated into these knowledge-construction processes. Additionally, attention is paid to the question of the skills that are needed and how these skills, alongside the views of modelling, develop as a novice becomes an expert. The need to understand these basic epistemological processes is quite apparent from the viewpoint of understanding science, as well as in terms of using this understanding to guide education. The results of the analysis strongly suggest that ideas characterising technoscience are also present in the practitioners?? views; the technoscientific view can thus be used to understand and support the poorly understood process in which novices are enculturated as researchers in the field.     

Teaching Engineering Practices

Engineering is featured prominently in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and related reform documents, but how its nature and methods are described is problematic. This paper is a systematic review and critique of that representation, and proposes that the disciplinary core ideas of engineering (as described in the NGSS) can be disregarded safely if the practices of engineering are better articulated and modeled through student engagement in engineering projects. A clearer distinction between science and engineering practices is outlined, and prior research is described that suggests that precollege engineering design can strengthen children’s understandings about scientific concepts. However, a piecemeal approach to teaching engineering practices is unlikely to result in students understanding engineering as a discipline. The implications for science teacher education are supplemented with lessons learned from a number of engineering education professional development projects.     

Lenses on Learning: Administrators' Views on Reform and the Professional Development of Teachers

If the intellectual norms and values embedded in the mathematics education reform movement are to move beyond individual classrooms and significantly influence entire schools and districts, school and district administrators will need to become centrally, rather than peripherally, involved. This paper discusses the ways administrators' ideas about the nature of mathematics, learning, teaching, and school culture affect their interpretations of the nature and intent of the elementary mathematics reform movement and their thoughts about of how they might support it. In particular, administrators' views of parents' concerns, professional development for teachers, and of how new ideas move around in a school are discussed. I argue that administrators have well-formed ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching, which influence their views of reform and their ideas of how to provide support. These ideas need to be taken into account if administrators are to be central actors in reform. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

School Chemistry: An Historical and Philosophical Approach

Since at least the eighteenth century scientific knowledge (then natural philosophy) was produced in groups of experts and specialists and was transmitted in schools, where, future experts and specialists were trained. The design of teaching has always been a complex process particularly in recent years when educational aims (for example, teaching scientific competence to everyone, not just to experts and specialists) present significant challenges. These challenges are much more than a simple reorganisation of the scientific knowledge pre-determined by the existing teaching tradition for different educational level. In the context of chemical education, the new teaching approaches should bring about not only the transmission of chemical knowledge but also a genuine chemical activity so as to ensure that students can acquire chemical thinking. Chemistry teaching should be revised according to contemporary demands of schooling. In order to move forward towards new teaching proposals, we must identify the genuine questions that generate ‘chemical criteria’ and we should focus on them for teaching. We think that a good strategy is to look for those criteria in the philosophy and history of chemistry, from the perspective of didactics of science. This paper will examine the following questions: (1) How can school science be designed as a world-modelling activity by drawing on the philosophy of science. (2) How can ‘stories’ about the emergence of chemical entities be identified by looking at the history of chemistry? (3) How can modelling strategies be structured in school chemistry activities?     

Reconceptualizing the Nature of Science for Science Education

Two fundamental questions about science are relevant for science educators: (a) What is the nature of science? and (b) what aspects of nature of science should be taught and learned? They are fundamental because they pertain to how science gets to be framed as a school subject and determines what aspects of it are worthy of inclusion in school science. This conceptual article re-examines extant notions of nature of science and proposes an expanded version of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA), originally developed by Irzik and Nola (International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 999–1021, 2014) in which they view science as a cognitive-epistemic and as an institutional-social system. The conceptual basis of the expanded FRA is described and justified in this article based on a detailed account published elsewhere (Erduran and Dagher in Reconceptualizing the nature of science for science education: scientific knowledge, practices and other family categories. Springer, Dordrecht, 2014a). The expanded FRA provides a useful framework for organizing science curriculum and instruction and gives rise to generative visual tools that support the implementation of a richer understanding of and about science. The practical implications for this approach have been incorporated into analysis of curriculum policy documents, curriculum implementation resources, textbook analysis and teacher education settings.     

Developing epistemologically empowered teachers: examining the role of philosophy of chemistry in teacher education

History and philosophy of science have been widely promoted in science teacher education for several decades. However the application of themes from philosophy of science in science teacher education has been rather broad and not particular relative to the domain-specific features of the science in question. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the new field of philosophy of chemistry can contribute to science teacher education. Since the beginning of the 1990s, philosophy of chemistry has emerged as a relatively new branch of philosophy of science examining the distinctive nature of chemical knowledge. Some implications of this domain in chemical education have been investigated although the research territory in this area remains underdeveloped. The paper is intended to contribute to this area of research by focusing on a particular theme, the microscopic/macroscopic relationship (or the so-called ‘supervenience’ problem) in the context of models and modelling. Literature review of students’ and teachers’ understanding of models and modelling in chemistry highlights the importance of incorporating the epistemological aspects of related chemical concepts. The implications for teacher education are discussed.     

Two Views About Explicitly Teaching Nature of Science

Our focus is on the effects that dated ideas about the nature of science (NOS) have on curriculum, instruction and assessments. First we examine historical developments in teaching about NOS, beginning with the seminal ideas of James Conant. Next we provide an overview of recent developments in philosophy and cognitive sciences that have shifted NOS characterizations away from general heuristic principles toward cognitive and social elements. Next, we analyze two alternative views regarding ‘explicitly teaching’ NOS in pre-college programs. Version 1 is grounded in teachers presenting ‘Consensus-based Heuristic Principles’ in science lessons and activities. Version 2 is grounded in learners experience of ‘Building and Refining Model-Based Scientific Practices’ in critique and communication enactments that occur in longer immersion units and learning progressions. We argue that Version 2 is to be preferred over Version 1 because it develops the critical epistemic cognitive and social practices that scientists and science learners use when (1) developing and evaluating scientific evidence, explanations and knowledge and (2) critiquing and communicating scientific ideas and information; thereby promoting science literacy.     

Knowledge,beliefs and pedagogy: how the nature of science should inform the aims of science education (and not just when teaching evolution)

Lisa Borgerding’s work highlights how students can understand evolution without necessarily committing to it, and how learners may come to see it as one available way of thinking amongst others. This is presented as something that should be considered a successful outcome when teaching about material that many students may find incompatible with their personal worldviews. These findings derive from work exploring a cause célèbre of the science education community—the teaching of natural selection in cultural contexts where learners feel they have strong reasons for rejecting evolutionary ideas. Accepting that students may understand but not commit to scientific ideas that are (from some cultural perspectives) controversial may easily be considered as a form of compromise position when teaching canonical science prescribed in curriculum but resisted by learners. Yet if we take scholarship on the nature of science seriously, and wish to reflect the nature of scientific knowledge in science teaching, then the aim of science education should always be to facilitate understanding of, yet to avoid belief in, the ideas taught in science lessons. The philosophy of science suggests that scientific knowledge needs to be understood as theoretical in nature, as conjectural and provisional; and the history of science warns of the risks of strongly committing to any particular conceptualisation as a final account of some feature of nature. Research into student thinking and learning in science suggests that learning science is often a matter of coming to understand a new viable way of thinking about a topic to complement established ways of thinking. Science teaching should then seek to have students appreciate scientific ideas as viable ways of making sense of the currently available empirical evidence, but should not be about persuading students of the truth of any particular scientific account.     

Practical reasoning and science education: Implications for theory and practice

Practical reasoning is a fundamental competence required for everyday decision-making as well as for the production of scientific knowledge. However, very little attention is given to developing this competence in school science classrooms or in educational research programs. In this paper we explain the tradition of practical reasoning and its relevance to science and science education. We then suggest ways in which practical reasoning may be developed in students such that they are enabled to better understand how scientific knowledge is produced and how they may be better able to contribute to improving scientific practices.     

What is this Substance? What Makes it Different? Mapping Progression in Students’ Assumptions about Chemical Identity

Given the diversity of materials in our surroundings, one should expect scientifically literate citizens to have a basic understanding of the core ideas and practices used to analyze chemical substances. In this article, we use the term ‘chemical identity' to encapsulate the assumptions, knowledge, and practices upon which chemical analysis relies. We conceive chemical identity as a core crosscutting disciplinary concept which can bring coherence and relevance to chemistry curricula at all educational levels, primary through tertiary. Although chemical identity is not a concept explicitly addressed by traditional chemistry curricula, its understanding can be expected to evolve as students are asked to recognize different types of substances and explore their properties. The goal of this contribution is to characterize students' assumptions about factors that determine chemical identity and to map how core assumptions change with training in the discipline. Our work is based on the review and critical analysis of existing research findings on students' alternative conceptions in chemistry education, and historical and philosophical analyses of chemistry. From this perspective, our analysis contributes to the growing body of research in the area of learning progressions. In particular, it reveals areas in which our understanding of students' ideas about chemical identity is quite robust, but also highlights the existence of major knowledge gaps that should be filled in to better foster student understanding. We provide suggestions in this area and discuss implications for the teaching of chemistry.     

Deductive and inductive modes of preservice physics teacher education

The idea that chemical knowledge can be represented in three main ways: macro, submicro, and symbolic (chemistry triplet) has become paradigmatic in chemistry and science education. It has served both as the base of theoretical frameworks that guide research in chemical education and as a central idea in various curriculum projects. However, this triplet relationship has been the subject of different adaptations and reinterpretations that sometimes lead to confusion and misunderstanding, which complicates the analysis of the triplet’s nature and scope. Thus, the central goal of this paper is to describe some of the existing views of the triplet relationship in chemistry and science education and critically analyse their underlying assumptions. We also propose a general structure of our chemistry knowledge intended to better situate the chemistry triplet in relationship with the different types, scales, dimensions, and approaches that seem to characterise such knowledge. Our proposed model may be useful in the analysis, evaluation, and reflection of educational research results and teaching practices centred on the triplet relationship.     

Using Technology-Enhanced Inquiry-Based Instruction to Foster the Development of Elementary Students’ Views on the Nature of Science

The Next Generation Science Standards support understanding of the nature of science as it is practiced and experienced in the real world through interconnected concepts to be imbedded within scientific practices and crosscutting concepts. This study explored how fourth and fifth grade elementary students’ views of nature of science change when they engage in a technology-enhanced, scientific inquiry-oriented curriculum that takes place across formal and informal settings. Results suggest that student engagement in technology-enhanced inquiry activities that occur in informal and formal settings when supported through explicit instruction focused on metacognitive and social knowledge construction can improve elementary students’ understanding of nature of science.

     

科技哲学视阈下的科学教育

科学技术从根本上改变了人类的生存方式和发展模式。它是人类能够更好地生活的基本保证,但并不等于生活的全部智慧。科学技术虽然给人类带来了高度发达的物质文明,却不能为人类提供生活何以值得过下去的理由。该问题的解决必须依靠科学技术哲学思想引领下的科学教育。文章从系统哲学、生态哲学和技术哲学三个维度,对如何提高和发展科学教育提出了初步的设想。只有在正确的科技哲学观的指导下,科学教育的质量才会得以提高,全民科学素质的提升才可能得以实现,人们才会获得更好的生活。     

鲁科版高中化学教科书STS教育内容分析

STS教育体现了高中化学新课程改革全面提升学生科学素养的教育理念,重视科学、技术与社会相互联系,有助于学生正确地分析、解决化学问题.鲁科版高中化学教科书注重在人类生活背景下建构化学知识,选取了丰富的STS教育内容,其组织和呈现方式特点为：利用教材的章节标题呈现;利用教材栏目体系呈现;STS内容与元素化合物知识相互融合渗透.     

Relations Among Two Teachers’ Practices and Beliefs,Conceptualizations of the Nature of Science,and their Implementation of Student Independent Inquiry Projects

In this study we sought to understand factors that shaped teachers’ use of student inquiry projects. We examined, over 3 years, the practices and conceptions of two teachers involved in implementing student inquiry projects. Neither teacher was initially satisfied with her success at supporting student inquiry, but the two had very different responses to difficulties they faced. These responses related strongly to their ideas about how learning should be structured. There was less relation between their stated views about the nature of science and their use of inquiry than was expected. The teacher with espoused views about the nature of science generally in accord with reform documents did not support student inquiry projects that involved actual investigations. The teacher with views on the nature of science less aligned with reform documents worked hard to support student investigations in her classroom. Our findings support the claim that merely learning about the nature of science or about student inquiry may not generate changes in a teacher’s practice. On closer analysis, we found that the two teachers understood aspects of the nature of science from two quite different perspectives, the proximal and the distal. The proximal view of the nature of science was more closely aligned with implementation of actual student investigations. The efforts of these two teachers in implementing inquiry illustrate the dilemmas and challenges they faced as they attempted student inquiry projects.