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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume
7, Issue 2, Article 1 (Dec., 2006) Shu-Chiu LIU Historical models and science instruction: A cross-cultural analysis based on students’ views
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Introduction
There have been various reasons proposed in the past for including history and philosophy of science in science teaching and learning (Matthews et al., 2001). Apart from a large amount of literature focusing on its relation to teaching nature of science, in the following are some convincing arguments:
1. History of science may harbor keys to science learning for there seems to be a parallelism between students’ and historical ideas.
The eminent historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, explicitly mentioned that the research on children’s cognitive development, in particular done by Piaget, had made a contribution to his thoughts on the historical development of science. He recalled a meeting with a colleague in his speech:
I said to him that it was Piaget’s children from whom I had learned to understand Aristotle's physics. His response -- that it was Aristotle’s physics that had taught him to understand Piaget’s children -- only confirmed my impression of the importance of what I had learned (1977, p.21).
He followed to tell the audience: “Part of what I know about how to ask questions of dead scientists has been learned by examining Piaget's interrogations of living children.” Interestingly, Piaget had a similar view, but in reverse: As for him, the history of science has shed the light on the problems of children’s cognitive development (Piaget & Garcia, 1989). From Kuhn’s point of view, if there is a parallelism between the child’s cognitive development and the history of science, as Piaget argued based upon his comprehensive investigations, this should be of interest both to psychologists and historians. As a matter of fact, it has drawn much attention from science educators, in particular in the 1970s and 1980s, while the intriguing analogous features between the historical and individual knowledge acquisition were considered to have much instructional implication. As Wandersee et al. (1994) cited, among the best available evidence in the field of preconception research is that alternative conceptions often parallel explanations of natural phenomena offered by previous generations of scientists and philosophers. Thus, the development of scientific knowledge may shed some light on the ways in which students come to understand it.
2. History of science can offer more “plausible” accounts of science.
We should bear in mind that science teaching is not successful often because more attention is paid to the precision and comprehensiveness of the subject matter than to making it comprehensible. It is often forgotten that science teaching is aimed at young people, who do not have the same “conceptual tools” as adults. The need for a more plausible presentation of science has led us to look at history. Before technology started to vastly accelerate scientific progress in the seventeenth century, early scientists inquired into nature based on personal experience and observations with naked eyes. Thus, they provided relatively naïve accounts in describing and explaining natural phenomena as opposed to modern science. For the conceptual tools used to derive these accounts seem to be at a level closer to the students’, these accounts would likely appear to be more plausible for them than the intended scientific knowledge.
3. Historical thinking is needed for a “continuous experience” in science learning.
Education is essentially experiential, as John Dewey (1997) contended. Young people come to school and acquire various experiences, some may be defective and negative while others fruitful and positive. These experiences are all of significance insomuch as they are connected to further experiences: No matter a defective or a fruitful experience, it lives on in further experiences. Thus, as Dewey continued to argue, the central problem of education is “to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences”. In doing so, education will provide students with meaningful experiences which “have their roots on what has gone before” and lead to better qualities of future experiences. Along this line, Dewey argued for the necessity of historical thinking in teaching and learning. While learning science, students need to anchor and extend their experience with the aid of historical thinking so that scientific knowledge is not learned as merely an “end” product. It is history which can provide the student with sequences involving genuine figures and thereby assist in the continuous advancement of thoughts.
4. History of science can assist in enhancing students’ conceptual development through contextual alternative representations
It should be especially noted that the recent years have witnessed a shift of emphasis from “conceptual change” to “conceptual differentiation” and “conceptual appreciation” in the research of science teaching and learning (Caravita & Hallden, 1994; Linder, 1993). It is argued that students’ preconceptions can prove to be useful and adequate in dealing with their everyday situations and, therefore, it is not always necessary to remove these ideas. Consequently, science instruction should not focus on how to change students’ ideas, albeit the change may still emerge as a result of the instruction, but instead on how to help students differentiate their ideas from those presented in the science lesson according to the context they apply to. Also, students should learn to appreciate different perspectives or points of view, as they could be all “correct” in their own particular situations. This move in science education research seems to have opened a gateway for the historical approach in science instruction. Pre-scientific ideas can be operated as “alternative representations” in the science classroom for two reasons: first, they can exemplify the argument that concepts may be appropriate in their particular settings; secondly, they may illustrate a third perspective to the two - often very different - ones in the classroom, one from students and the other from science textbooks or the teacher. To provide students an alternative perspective should be meaningful to their learning because, as we may agree, it is easier to gain insight into something when we see its alternative (Marton & Tsui, 2003).
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