 |
Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 11, Issue 1, Foreword (Jun., 2010) John K. GILBERT The role of visual representations in the learning and teaching of science: An introduction
|
|
|
Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 11, Issue 1, Foreword (Jun., 2010) John K. GILBERT The role of visual representations in the learning and teaching of science: An introduction
|
The essence of learning and the contribution to it of teaching
Behavioural psychology provided the dominant model of learning and hence the guidance for teaching for many years. This assumed that successful learning involved the mental acquisition of a ‘copy’ of the information being taught. It was a convincing model for the acquisition of skills where no extensive transfer understanding to other situations was really necessary e.g. in the routine operation of a piece of machinery. However, it proved unable to explain the very varied outcomes of conventional classroom teaching, where the context-transferable understanding of established knowledge is required but which is by no means always attained, ‘misconceptions’ often being acquired by students(Gilbert and Watts 1983). The suite of psychological theories described as being ‘constructivist’ has become increasingly influential in both formal and informal educational systems in the last few decades. It assumes that what a person already knows acts severally as a barrier to, a critical filter for, a foundation on which to build, information being received. The major variants of constructivism are the ‘personal’ variety, where the individual acting alone is the locus of learning (Pope and Keen 1981) and the ‘social’ variety, where interpersonal interactions are seen to be the locus of learning (Vygotsky 1978).
Underlying all the major theories of learning is the assumption that thinking proceeds by the brain acting on data being received as if that consisted of a stream of ‘entities’ –that is, as if it had object-like properties. These entities convey specific information about what is being studied by depicting ideas, objects, systems, events, processes, as what may be broadly termed ‘representations’. Whilst all thinking employs representations, they are of especial importance in science, and hence in authentic science education. Here the major commitment is to making predictions about the behavior of natural phenomena, based on postulates about the entities of which they consist and on the causal mechanisms operating in them, that are borne out by empirical enquiry. This paper is about the nature of these representations, how they are utilized in the learning of science, and about the implications of this utilization for the design of the science curriculum and for teaching.
Copyright (C) 2010 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 11, Issue 1, Foreword (Jun., 2010). All Rights Reserved.
