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

THINKING ABOUT LEARNING 73
encounter in many sources, including teachers’ lessons, books, television and
the Internet.
This view is sometimes interpreted as meaning that children need to
‘discover’ concepts for themselves in order to construct their own understanding
(see Mayer, 2004). However, besides being a practical impossibility
(if we did not rely on the work of others who came before us, we would not
have enough time to ‘discover’ the world’s aspects from scratch), research
has demonstrated that discovery is not as effective as guided instruction in
producing new learning (Fay and Mayer, 1994; Inhelder et al., 1974; Klahr
and Nigam, 2004; Lee and Thompson, 1997). In fact, Pea and Kurland (1984)
found that students in a pure discovery learning situation, involving hands-on
experience, were no better at planning a program in LOGO, a computer environment,
than were students receiving no experience at all with the computer
environment. Such research indicates that perhaps a better interpretation of
constructivism involves acknowledging the learner’s agency in any learning
context, rather than suggesting all responsibility lies with the learner. Instead,
it may be useful for teachers to consider how learners conceive of scientific
phenomena prior to engaging in a lesson on a given topic.
Children often develop conceptions about scientific phenomena, and require
guided instruction to hone these ideas. These conceptions have been variously
called by different names: misconceptions, alternative conceptions, folk
science, intuitive ideas, alternative frameworks and everyday science. Driver
et al. (1994) present a wide range of studies that explore children’s ideas in
science. For example, the view that we are able to see objects because light
travels from our eyes to the object or that plants’ mass comes from nutrients
in the soil are two instances of children’s naïve scientific ideas that can be
reorganized through instruction. On the other hand, learners’ alternative or
everyday conceptions can be powerful and difficult to override (Novak, 2002).
As teachers, you must work hard to help learners to overcome the predisposition
to rely on previous ideas, at least when thinking ‘scientifically’.
Leach and Scott (2000) proposed the idea of a ‘learning demand’ in order to
help teachers find ways to help learners make sense of scientific material. These
learning demands offer ‘a description of the differences between everyday and
scientific ways of thinking about the world, and the resultant challenges that
learners will face in coming to internalize and understand scientific accounts
of phenomena’ (Leach and Scott, 2000, p. 45). As they describe it, learning
demands can help teachers to identify where learners are likely to experience
difficulties in understanding the scientific as opposed to the everyday way of
thinking.
Sometimes constructivism can be taken to mean that because individuals
construct their own understandings about the world, there can be no such
thing as a right answer, or absolute fact – because each of us creates our
own explanations. This interpretation has been criticized on the grounds that
knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is based upon repeated empirical
observations of phenomena leading to objective facts (Osborne, 1996). Of