Mike Watts

Science education and affect

This mini special issue is about affect: it is about interest, motivation, attitudes, beliefs, self-confidence and self-efficacy within science education. In Kincheloe and Steinberg’s (1999: 238) words, it is about the desire to avoid ‘boring places marked by drudgery and repetition where isolated students work in joyless and meaningless lessons painfully tied to their development level’. There is, of course, far more to science education than cognition. The role of emotions in teaching is well documented. When science teachers talk about their work, they recount episodes of wonder, delight and excitement (Bell and Gilbert 1996), not only because of their association and identity with science, but also because of the emotional bonds, the relationships established, developed and maintained with children in their everyday practice. It has been widely documented how these practices are inextricably tied to emotions. Identity, self-esteem and confidence permeate pedagogical practices and have a key role in formulating personal and professional classroom identity (Day and Leitch 2001). In a broader sense, Hargreaves (1996) writes of the ‘emotional geographies of schooling’, the ‘spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions or relationships within the school’ (Zembylas 2002: 80). Central to this landscape is the student, managing and circumnavigating the oftenheightened emotions associated with learning science. After all, learning involves moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, traversing the emotional quagmire of success, self-doubt, challenge and classroom identity. At an extreme level, emotions can overwhelm thinking and concentration so that intellectual efforts are swamped and rendered wholly ineffective. ‘Cognition doesn’t matter if you’re scared, depressed or bored’, as Claxton (1989: 155) notes. At the other extreme, feelings of enthusiasm, confidence and zeal are equally powerful motivators, so that learners are swept up in a flow of eagerness to learn. In the middle ground, learning is a place of mixed emotions, Claxton writes:

The secret life of the chemical bond: students’ anthropomorphic and animistic references to bonding

This paper discusses students’ use of anthropomorphic language in science, and in particular calls upon some examples from research into student understanding of chemical bonding. It is argued that anthropomorphic language is common amongst scientists as well as science students. A simple classification of such instances is suggested to distinguish between those examples that are useful in aiding communication and understanding, and those which merely stand in place of such understanding.

LEARNERS’ EXPLANATIONS FOR CHEMICAL PHENOMENA

There is a growing body of research which explores the nature of explanation in science classrooms. The vast majority of this work highlights the teacher’s role as explainer of scientific phenomena, while little has explored the quality of learners’ own explanations. This paper helps redress this inbalance by undertaking an analysis of students’ explanations related to aspects of chemical structure and bonding. In this paper we set out our results - an analytical framework for exploring the explanations produced by students within the context of a chemistry course. The primary source of data used in this research derives from interviews with students in the U.K. studying chemistry at University entrance level. These interviews were undertaken as part of a longitudinal study of the development of students’ understanding of the chemical bond concept. The data collected has been interrogated to develop an analytical model of learners’ explanations in chemistry. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. Eur.: 2000, 1, 329-353]

Humanizing and feminizing school science: reviving anthropomorphic and animistic thinking in constructivist science education

Science and scientists in general reject any form of animism or anthropomorphism. Meanwhile, there is considerable evidence that these forms of thinking are quite commonly present in the constructions and causal explanations of both children and adults as they try to make sense of their everyday world. The question is: can animistic and anthropomorphic ways of thinking have any positive value in school science? This article addresses four distinctive but linked issues within the broad context of constructivist science education. The first concerns the mismatch between animistic thought and the ‘mechanistic’ world‐view of orthodox science. The second examines the extent to which such ways of thinking are manifest and their relationship to general constructivist theory. The third explores briefly some classroom and textbook examples in use. The fourth explores some implications of this for instruction in science education. Within this, the article is premised on the notion that the mechanistic nature of sci...

Facts and feelings: exploring the affective domain in the learning of physics

This article presents the results of a comparative study of two groups of learners. The study explores whether their feelings about a potentially emotive topic - radioactivity in this case - influence their approach to learning.

Prompting teachers’ constructive reflection: pupils’ questions as critical incidents

Constructive reflection is seen as an important ingredient in the professional development of teachers, in order to stimulate significant change in approaches to classroom practice and the general provision of science education in schools. This paper explores the use of pupils’ questions in provoking ‘critical incidents’ in the professional lives of teachers. It is suggested that pupils’ questions can be both indicative of their own conceptual change as well as being sophisticated prompts for teachers to examine their own thinking. Case studies of two teachers ‐‐ one primary and one secondary ‐‐ are used to illuminate how such critical incidents can lead to changes in teacher thinking, resulting then in changes in classroom practice in science. Suggestions are made for the use of pupils’ questions as critical incidents in the professional development of teachers.

An explanatory gestalt of essence: students’ conceptions of the ‘natural’ in physical phenomena

Comments like ‘its natural’, ‘its normal’, ‘its obvious’ or ‘its common sense’ are everyday occurrences in the responses students make in their descriptions of physical phenomena in school science. This paper explores some of the meanings students attach to these terms and the ways in which they are used, within both orthodox science and ‘childrens science’. The common use of ‘its natural’ leads to a discussion of experiential and explanatory gestalts of meaning, and their relationships with ‘alternative conceptions’ and ‘alternative frameworks’. In essence it is a study of the ‘taken for grantedness’ that lies within both scientific explanation and students’ ‘alternative conceptions’ in school science. The final section explores some examples taken from the contemporary research literature and from interview discussions with students conducted by the authors.

Towards critical constructivist teaching

The notion of ‘constructivist teaching’ is discussed as it features within debates on constructivist research in science classrooms. An argument is then made that constructivist teaching itself should be superseded in favour of ‘critical constructivism’, an approach which undertakes a broader critique of the relationships between teacher and taught, between learner and subject matter, and between schooling and society. Some data are presented from a study of Brazilian teachers moving from constructivism towards critical constructivism through an in‐service professional development course and a series of action‐research projects. The summary comments broaden the debate from this single context to draw wider implications for science education.

‘Event‐centred‐learning’: an approach to teaching science technology and societal issues in two countries

This paper addresses the shaping of an approach to teaching called Event‐Centred‐Learning (ECL). This approach has grown from a joint project, begun in 1991, between two institutions in the UK and Brazil. Its main objectives have been to promote common research interests in the field of science education in secondary schools, in teacher education and in postgraduate studies, both in the UK and in Brazil. This has been achieved through a programme of organised visits between academics, ECL has been developed for use in the teaching of issues within Science, Technology and Society (STS). The main features of the ECL approach are: the exploration of real events or circumstances constructed from TV and newspaper reports, articles, books and popular accounts; an emphasis on ‘real life’ problem‐solving through active classroom tasks, such as preparing a television programme and the use of role play and drama; the integration of aspects linked to science and technology in a social context. So far, two modules re...

A feeling for learning: modelling affective learning in school science

Abstract Much of the work on conceptual change in the learning of science has focused on the cognitive domain—the factors influencing and underwriting the knowledge acquired by learners. Many writers have used the model developed by Strike and Posner (1985) who suggest that conceptual exchange will only take place when the matter to be learned is seen to be intelligible, plausible and fruitful. While these are important ingredients for learning, this is a particularly cognitive approach and their model takes little account of the affective domain. Through a series of studies in the UK and elsewhere we argue that subject matter needs also be seen to be ‘salient’, ‘palatable’ and ‘germane’. We explain our use of these expressions through a range of examples drawn from our own studies in the area, though we focus in particular on a recent survey of teachers and student teachers concerning the learning of radiation and radioactivity in schools. This argument takes discussions of conceptual change clearly into...