Reference Notes

Learning Theories

Curriculum is related to teaching and learning. The major purpose of science teaching is to facilitate students’ learning of science. That is easier said than done. Teaching always starts with and in the teacher.

We have to look at your view of student learning because that will affect how you will go about making a curriculum for your students.

Students can be looked on as clay to be moulded or active enquirers who come to class with preconceived notions of things. The first way sees students as empty vessels, “tabula rasa” and supports a view of learning as one-way transmission. This is the traditional view. There is a second view that teaching is transactional, in other words it goes two ways. A third is that teaching should be transformational -- that is change both teacher and student.

Whether you see learning and learners as passive or active will, of course, affect the provision you make for them to learn

For example, if learning is passive and learners are passive, you tell them what they need to know. They absorb what you have told them to varying extents. Some students absorb more than others because they work harder or they are smarter. You use as your guide, the structure of the discipline you are teaching as your curriculum. You test the students to see how much they have absorbed. If you are innovative, you might assess them in a number of ways to see if they have learned by more than simple rote. If you are innovative you may have designed concrete lessons for them to follow in which they have done some practical activities after which you were able to tell them the right answer if they got it wrong.

As you might have seen from my description, making provision for learning involves assumptions and implications of all sorts that come from:

• your view of what constitutes science;

• your view of good science education;

• your goals for the students

• the kind of curriculum you will plan

• the teaching methods you will employ;

• And even what you think about knowledge itself

That is called your epistemology. If you think that knowledge is concrete then scientific knowledge is real and objective and, therefore, can be told to others. Since scientific knowledge is shared by all scientists, you can tell students what scientists know. You can tell students that science is value-free and discoveries are based on observations made by scientists. You know that to teach science well you tell the students the laws, principles, facts that have been discovered by science. How well you teach depends on how well you describe these laws, principles, and facts. You want students to know these laws, principles and facts. You value a textbook that tells students this knowledge in an organised, efficient, readable manner that motivates them to learn this knowledge. This will be useful in reinforcing your telling them the knowledge. It cements your place as the knower – the sage on the stage. This will be useful especially if the practical work doesn’t work out the way it should have. You use the school laboratory to teach the laws, principles, and facts (one of those facts being that science is a process that is followed step by step) and that, if you do it right, you will always get the correct answer.

However, if you view learning as an active process and all knowledge even scientific knowledge as tentative, you have to make much different provision for learning.

What would you say about science? How would you explain science to the students?

What would you say about the scientific laws, principles, and facts?

What methods would you use? Lectures, practical work, projects, investigations?

What would you use the laboratory for? Teaching science, teaching about science, having students do science, trying to help students to enjoy science, or trying to help students get a sense of phenomena?

How will you deal with the results that students get? What if students’ ideas are not generally acceptable to scientists?

How will you know what the students have learned? How will you know how well you did?

Behaviourism (Pavlov and Skinner)

Cognitive Science (Piaget) How learning occurs in the individual.

Goes inside the head of the learner, so to speak, to attempt to discover and model mental processes on the part of the learner during the learning-process. Knowledge is viewed as symbolic, mental constructions in the minds of individuals, and learning becomes the process of committing these symbolic representations to memory where they may be processed. The development of computers with a strict "input - processing - output architecture" have inspired these "information-processing" views of learning. Knowledge, however, is still viewed as given and absolute just like in the behaviorist school.

1. acting on material things and

2. social collaboration

and that children construct a mental image of things

David Ausubel, an educational psychologist around the mid 1970’s said that the most important factor in teaching is to ascertain what the learner already knows. He claimed that there were two kinds of learning - rote and meaningful. To be meaningful a number of conditions had to be met:

•  the material itself must be meaningful

• the learner must have the relevant background knowledge

• the learner must intend to learn

He proposed that teaching must provide “advanced organisers” - that is theoretical frameworks in which students can put their new knowledge. Before you can teach evolution you have to give students a general frame on which they will be able to organise their thinking.

Radical Constructivism (von Glassersfeld)

George Kelly, a psychologist whose ideas seem to support radical constructivism. He had written a book in the 50’s in which he said that everyone has their own constructions or “personal theories” with they explain and cope with the events of life. Students don’t necessarily have the same theories as their teachers or research scientists. For example, students may think that potassium is a mineral not a metal, or that light comes out of our eyes because “we look for things”.

Social Constructivism (Vygotsky)

Similar in its foundations to radical constructivism, this is the basis of much of Computer Supported Cooperative Learning. The socially oriented constructivist theories stress the collaborative efforts of groups of learners as sources of learning. Work in distributed intelligence by Roy Pea is also very important. He states; "...the focus in thinking about distributed intelligence is not on intelligence as an abstract property or quantity residing in either minds, organizations or objects. In its primary sense here, intelligence is manifested in activity that connects means and ends through achievements".

Vygotsky’s notion of the “Zone of Proximal Development” briefly stated says that people learn a new idea on the basis of their prior experience as long as the new idea is nearly adjacent to what they already know. Obviously, this has implications for asking students what they know and giving them experiences that bring them to a point where they can use that knowledge to create a new understanding. Don’t try to teach abstract physics unless you can demonstrate something very similar that the students already are familiar with.

Situated Cognition, Situativity, Sociocultural Theory (Lave and Wenger)

Views learning as integration into a community of practice in which social actions are identified (for example the mathematical manipulation of abstract symbols according to given conventions) and classroom activities designed. The teacher's role in this activity is to forge the last link in the chain by ensuring that students execute the specified social actions that make it possible for them to do what they need. Social actions are seen to be more broadly based than social interactions. Thus the interactions of children in classroom activities are a small part of their enculturation into the required social actions.

Knowledge is not something that is produced or acquired but is constituted in communities of practice and embodied in their tools (says Bereiter). In other words, knowledge is distributed. Like constructivist learning, situated learning is active, and does not serve an ontological reality. But unlike constructivism, it is inherently social rather than individualistic, intricately bound up with language, and is socio-historically conditioned. Cognition is distributed across time, environment and community; in other words culturally organized human activity.

Enactivism (Davis and Sumara)

Where situated cognition offers a theory of learning premised in social practice, enactivism goes beyond, offering a dynamic theory of cultural practice where cognition is ecological and where the collective and the individual change through the process. Collective knowledge and individual understandings co-emerge and interact. Cognition is distributed across individuals and things, is situated in communities, and is occasioned through their interactions. Pedagogy in enactivism recognizes the importance of dialogue. Teachers, as co-participants, acknowledge the share that students have in problems that may be addressed and are responsive to the changes occurring through interaction.

Philosophy of science

Apart from the learning theorists, philosophers of science have also played a role in the development of science education.

In the 1960’s a philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn had looked at how scientists really do work.  He saw them in communities socially creating a logical framework for their disciplines. He called their all-encompassing logical frameworks: paradigms.

He said each paradigm was logically and internally consistent. Furthermore, it shapes the way that scientists even see data. Nuclear scientists and environmental scientists might really see the same data in different ways. Kuhn thought that science usually proceeded by doing its thing in an evolutionary way (that he called normal science) but every so often a new paradigm would come along that was so powerful that it supplanted the incumbent one. He called that revolutionary science. That is how he coined the term paradigm shift. His notions justify the social root of constructivism.

The currently popular view of science education philosophy, pedagogy and philosophy is some kind of constructivism.

The Principles of Constructivism

1.  Learning outcomes depend on what the students know

2.  Learning involves constructing meaning based on prior knowledge

3.  It is continuous, active, and idiosyncratic

We have to know a student’s “referents” to help them construct new meaning closer to that generally held by the scientific community if we are to help them learn science. One of the keys may be to help students to reflect on their own learning so that they can develop some metacognitive learning. Understanding your own thought processes. It has strong implications for assessment too.

1.  Difficulty in dealing with differences in students starting points (due to their having different prior experiences) in a group setting
2.  Time end energy commitments (it takes a great deal of preparation time and energy to do it properly)
3.  Evidence that people continue to hold on to intuitive beliefs despite the evidence:

• People are not always rational – not even academics who have been shown to hold tenaciously to old beliefs

• They may not see the cognitive conflict

• They may not care because their personal theories may continue to be adequate for their daily lives

• Difficulty in conceptualising practice of teaching from a theory of learning

If there is some kind of “scientific understanding” how can we share this with our students so they see it may be a tool they can use in their everyday lives? One possible track might be the introduction through hands on activities, of “cognitive dissonance”. For example, present students with evidence that isn’t easily explained by their everyday personal constructs but which can be better understood using “scientific understanding”. Then reinforce that with a scientific understanding closer to what scientists currently think. For example, you can’t teach Evolution adequately to grade seven students but you can teach aspects of natural selection. If these aspects can explain some everyday phenomenon like why animal species have different characteristics than each other better than students’ current everyday theories, students will be tempted to incorporate it into more “scientific” everyday theories.

If students are active enquirers then teaching must be student-centred not teacher-centred. But there is a conundrum. If we are just learner-centred we run the risk of leaving the students in the “ghettos of their own minds”. If we see teaching as a responsibility then we do have a responsibility to help our students learn those things that will likely be of benefit to them.

Teaching Models

Bruner wrote that there were 2 key elements in learning

1.  The importance of structure in the material and
2.  The importance of activity by the learner.

If you could organize the learning material according to the structure he described

• its mode of representation (images, sensory and mathematical)

• economy (amount of processing to extract meaning) and

• effective power (ability to pull the knowledge together),

then you would have the best possible curriculum. Learners would conduct experiments and from that make their own theory just like scientists had done. It formed the basis of what was called Discovery Learning in the 1960’s. It works great if you already know the content. Therefore, scientists loved it. As Joan Solomon said, “It was noble but ill conceived”. It assumed that students would learn from hands on activities. But it produced a decline in students’ attitudes to science. They were always getting the wrong answers and having to rewrite their work. Because doing hands on work is not as simple as Bruner’s theory conceived it. Still it was better than transmissive teaching and anyway the teachers and scientists liked it.

Three phases:

1.  Exploration of concept
2.  Introduction of the scientific concept
3.  Application of the concept.

Exploration: Students learn through involvement and activities with new materials, ideas and relationships with minimal teacher guidance. The goal is to allow students to apply previous knowledge, develop their curiosity.

Introduction: Teaching strategies to introduce the concept. E.g., demonstration, film, lecture, textbook. Directly related to the exploration activities. More teacher guided.

Application: Students asked to generalize the newly learned concepts to new situations. Or to transfer ideas to other examples used as illustrations of the central concept. Often using several activities.

CLIS Model

• Orientation - spark interest, discuss students’ ideas and models (usually in small groups which report to the large group). Students ideas are not evaluated too early.

• Restructuring - broaden range of application, or differentiate conceptions, or build an experiential bridge to a new conception or unpack a conceptual problem, or import a different model, or construct an alternative conception

• Trial - students try out and apply their revised conceptions, devising experiments to test ideas or develop more complex models to represent their experiences or undertake  practical construction tasks

Important people in this field, Rosalind Driver (deceased) at the University of Leeds head of the CLIS project, Gaalen Erickson at UBC, Lawrence Stenhouse, Jonathan Osborne and Beverly Bell of the University of Waikato

The Atlantic Science Curriculum Project model (as represented in the SciencePlus textbook series) is:

• Elicitation activities - to determine where the students are at, from their prior experiences

• Cognitive dissonance activities: hands on, logic-based or language-based

• Introduction of scientifically held ideas (plausible new notions)

• Integration of scientific ideas with students’ experience

• Consolidation activities leading back to step 1

Step 5 is not constructivist because it doesn’t leave the final responsibility for learning with the students but it fits it in with the conceptual change ideas of teaching.

LEP model (Stinner) Logical, Evidential and Psychological aspects of learning.

• Logical Plane – Concepts, theories, laws, facts, principles of science.

• Evidential Plane – The evidence or proof that has been observed by the students and the connections of that evidence to the components of the logical plane

• Psychological Plane – Students’ personal constructions of the significance of the connections between the logical and evidential planes.

The teacher presents the logical information, asks what evidence supports it and asks students if it is intelligible (makes sense), plausible (fits with prior ideas) and fruitful (explains new things).

Metacognitive model (White). Thinking about thinking makes conceptual change easier.

• Acceptance: a need to change

• Commitment: to make the change

• Support: atmosphere supports change

• Power: able to bring about change

• Reflection: time to think about whether the change is needed.

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