good-practice-in-science-teaching-what-research-has-to-say

HOW SCIENCE WORKS 23
world. That is, they take their instruments, gather data and then look for
patterns in their findings which they then generalize as summary statements
about how the world works. This is the most common view of science held
by students in schools (Driver et al., 1996) and is seen as a product of the way
science is taught (Millar and Osborne, 1998).
How does this belief come to be so commonly held Indeed, much of the
focus of school laboratory work is on collecting data. Students may be asked
to devise fair tests, collect sets of data and then look for relationships or patterns.
This activity is so common because the stock-in-trade of school science
is persuading students of the validity of well-established, consensually agreed
explanation. With this point in mind, teachers use experimental work to serve
a rhetorical function of providing the supporting evidence for their vision of
the world (Millar, 1998). One consequence is that little attention is paid to
competing explanatory theories or the reliability or validity of the data. After
all, if your goal as a teacher of science is to persuade, then the important
thing is that the material world behaves in the manner you have predicted.
Indeed, teachers of science will go to extensive lengths to ‘rig’ or ‘conjure’ the
material world to behave in the manner that they have predicted (Nott and
Smith, 1995). Scientists, in contrast, manipulate the material world for a fundamentally
different goal: their aim is to develop new knowledge. Observation
and data collection, for them, are driven not by a need to confirm an existing
theory but rather by a need to collect data to decide between competing
explanations (see Chapter 6 in this volume).
The theory dependence of observation
As a picture of science, why is the common misconception that is acquired,
at least in part by the study of school science, highly unsatisfactory The first
important objection is that observation is a theory-dependent act. In short,
what that means is that you can only see things through the conceptual lens
you have available. Look at the photograph in Figure 2.1. What do you see –
a meaningless array of black and white splodges
However, if you are told that what you are looking at is a picture of a
Dalmatian dog drinking at a puddle, many individuals can now decode the
picture and ‘see’ what is there. Some of you may yet still be having difficulty –
you cannot see it because you have not formed an idea of what it is you
are looking for, which makes sense of your perceptions of black splodges on
white paper. Indeed, some people find it impossible to see the dog even after
several attempts. Another example is shown in Figure 2.2. What do you see
A young woman with a feather in her hair with her head turned away or
an old woman with a large nose and her chin dropped into her fur, looking
down
Most people can switch between the two without much difficulty. Most
teachers of science know, at least intuitively, that the theory dependence of