William W. Cobern

Defining "Science" in a Multicultural World: Implications for Science Education

In todays schools there are often competing accounts of natural phenomena, especially when schools are located in multicultural communities. There are also competing claims about what counts as science. This article examines the definition of science put forward from multicultural perspectives in contrast to a universalist perspective on science; that is, the Standard Account. The article argues that good science explanations will always be universal even if indigenous knowledge is incorporated as scientific knowledge. What works best is still of interest to most, and although one may hate to use the word hegemony, Western science would co-opt and dominate indigenous knowledge if it were incorporated as science. Therefore, indigenous knowledge is better off as a different kind of knowledge that can be valued for its own merits, play a vital role in science education, and maintain a position of independence from which it can critique the practices of science and the Standard Account.

Worldview Theory and Science Education Research

People are purposive, intentional beings. People are creatures of habit and yet full of surprises. People can be quite unpredictable. For these reasons and many others, it is difficult to come to know people in the sense of having a causal understanding of human behavior, which was the modernist project in education. At least this cannot be done as scientists do with moving objects such as particle or projectile motion, for example, or even with the behavior of non-human animal species. What a person can do that an object cannot is to tell you about him or herself, thus helping you to get to know this person. This is of course a different kind of knowing and it suggests that getting to know a broad range of people provides an educator with exemplars of what people in general are like. “Interpretive researchers,” noted Cobern (1993a, p. 936), “do not expect that the procedures of experimental natural science can ever be used to produce general laws of education. Rather, one must come to a greater understanding of what meaning is and how it is created. Similarly, the classroom environment is not to be composed of causal variables which the teacher manipulates to foster learning, but an environment mutually shaped to fit the members of the classroom, both teacher and students.” My research takes it thus as axiomatic that the more educators know about students as people the better educators will be able to teach people as students in their classrooms. Among others, Fenstermacher (1979), Hawkins and Pea (1987), Lythcott (1991), and Shymansky and Kyle (1992) have espoused similar views.

Constructivism and non-western science education research

In this paper it is argued that science education research and curriculum development efforts in non‐western countries can benefit by adopting a constructivist view of science and science learning. The past efforts at transferring curricula from the West, and local development projects that result in curricula only marginally different from western curricula, stem from an acultural view of science. These efforts also ground science learning in concepts of logical thinking rather than understanding. The resulting level of science learning, however, has not met expectations. Constructivism offers a very different view of science and science learning. It assumes that logical thinking is an inherently human quality regardless of culture, and instead focuses attention on the processes of interpretation that lead to understanding. Constructivism leads on to expect that students in different cultures will have somewhat different perspectives on science. Science education research should inform curriculum project...

Experimental Comparison of Inquiry and Direct Instruction in Science.

There are continuing educational and political debates about ‘inquiry’ versus ‘direct’ teaching of science. Traditional science instruction has been largely direct but in the US, recent national and state science education standards advocate inquiry throughout K‐12 education. While inquiry‐based instruction has the advantage of modelling aspects of the nature of real scientific inquiry, there is little unconfounded comparative research into the effectiveness and efficiency of the two instructional modes for developing science conceptual understanding. This research undertook a controlled experimental study comparing the efficacy of carefully designed inquiry instruction and equally carefully designed direct instruction in realistic science classroom situations at the middle school grades. The research design addressed common threats to validity. We report on the nature of the instructional units in each mode, research design, methods, classroom implementations, monitoring, assessments, analysis and project findings.

Science education as an exercise in foreign affairs

In Kuhnian terms, science education has been a process of inducting students into the reigning paradigms of science. In 1985, Duschl noted that science education had not kept pace with developments in the history and philosophy of science. The claim of certainty for scientific knowledge which science educators grounded in positivist philosophy was rendered untenable years ago and it turns out that social and cultural factors surrounding discovery may be at least as important as the justification of knowledge.Capitalizing on these new developments, Duschl, Hamilton, and Grandy (1990) wrote a compelling argument for the need to have a joint research effort in science education involving the philosophy and history of science along with cognitive psychology. However, the issue of discovery compels the research community go one step further. If the science education community has been guilty of neglecting historical and philosophical issues in science, let it not now be guilty of ignoring sociological issues in science. A collaborative view ought also to include the sociological study of cultural milieu in which scientific ideas arise. In other words, an external sociological perspective on science. The logic of discovery from a sociological point of view implies that conceptual change can also be viewed from a sociological perspective.

4. THE CARD EXCHANGE: INTRODUCING THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The nature of science is an important though difficult subject to teach meaningfully and effectively to preservice teachers. To engage the students’ minds in this subject that many find obscure and esoteric, a good introduction is a necessity. This chapter presents a learning game called The Card Exchange which has been found effective in arousing student interest in the philosophy of science. The chapter presents a brief description of how the game is set up and played and how it relates to the authors’ instruction on the philosophy of science. The chapter includes a list of card statements. The statements as well as the text of the chapter have been revised and updated from an earlier publication (Cobern, 1991a). There are a number of thoughtful articles in the literature stressing the need for philosophically literate teachers of science at all school levels (e.g., Andersen, Harty & Samuel, 1986; Hodson, 1985; Martin, 1979) and for many years the textbooks used in science methods courses have contained at least some material on the philosophy and nature of science. Nevertheless, science educators have been concerned that an acceptable level of philosophical sophistication was not being reached within the ranks of science teachers, and consequently are concerned about views toward the nature of science promoted in the classroom (e.g., Schmansky & Kyle, 1986). DuschI (1988, p. 51) summarizes the classroom situation by saying that “the prevailing view of the nature of science in our classrooms reflects an authoritarian view; a view in which scientific knowledge is presented as absolute truth and as a final form.” This view has been called scientism. This is a problem first because as we learn more about the world views that students bring to the classroom we begin to understand how the scientistic view extinguishes students nascent interest in science (Cobern, 1991b; 1996). Secondly, those students who do accept the scientistic view are likely to become disenchanted with science at a later date as science fails to achieve the unrealistic expectations accompanying a scientism orientation. The challenge is how to teach the philosophy of science be taught to teachers with greater effectiveness?

The professional development of college science professors as science teacher educators

The purpose of the study was to examine qualitatively the development of four community college science professors as science educators while they prepared and taught a summer life science academy for K-12 teachers. Since this was the first experience with teacher education for the professors, the academy provided an excellent opportunity to study the response of science professors to the challenge of teacher education. The academy was sponsored by an NSF-funded Comprehensive Regional Center for Minorities in a large metropolitan area. The funding enabled the professors to learn about science education while preparing for the academy. Prior to the academy the professors thought that they could contribute to teacher development because of their expertise in science. In preparation, the science professors visited school classrooms, consulted with a science educator, read widely in the literature of science education, and worked with exemplary teachers. As a result of preparing and conducting the academy, the professors came to see their traditional lecture/lab approach to science education as inadequate with regard to most students. Since the experience of the academy, the professors have altered the format of some of their community college courses.

Invoking Thomas Kuhn: What Citation Analysis Reveals about Science Education

This paper analyzes how Thomas Kuhns writings are used by others, especially science education researchers. Previous research in citation analysis is used to frame questions related to who cites Kuhn, in what manner and why. Research questions first focus on the variety of disciplines invoking Kuhn and to what extent Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is cited. The Web of Science database provides material from 1982 for this analysis. The science education literature is analyzed using back issues from 1985 of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching and Science Education. An article analysis reveals trends in terms of what Kuhnian ideas are most frequently invoked. Results indicate a wide array of disciplines from beekeeping to law cite Kuhn – especially generic citations to SSR. The science education journal analysis reveals pervasive use of the term ‘paradigm’, although use is quite varied. The two areas of research in science education most impacted by Kuhn appear to be conceptual change theory and constructivist epistemologies. Additional uses of Kuhn are discussed. The degree to which Kuhn is invoked in ways supporting the theoretical framework of citation analysis, whether his work is misappropriated, and the impact of Kuhn are discussed.

Pedagogy of Science Teaching Tests: Formative assessments of science teaching orientations

A critical aspect of teacher education is gaining pedagogical content knowledge of how to teach science for conceptual understanding. Given the time limitations of college methods courses, it is difficult to touch on more than a fraction of the science topics potentially taught across grades K-8, particularly in the context of relevant pedagogies. This research and development work centers on constructing a formative assessment resource to help expose pre-service teachers to a greater number of science topics within teaching episodes using various modes of instruction. To this end, 100 problem-based, science pedagogy assessment items were developed via expert group discussions and pilot testing. Each item contains a classroom vignette followed by response choices carefully crafted to include four basic pedagogies (didactic direct, active direct, guided inquiry, and open inquiry). The brief but numerous items allow a substantial increase in the number of science topics that pre-service students may consider. The intention is that students and teachers will be able to share and discuss particular responses to individual items, or else record their responses to collections of items and thereby create a snapshot profile of their teaching orientations. Subsets of items were piloted with students in pre-service science methods courses, and the quantitative results of student responses were spread sufficiently to suggest that the items can be effective for their intended purpose.

Valuing Science: A Turkish–American comparison

The process of modernization began in Turkey under the reform government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938). Turkey officially became a secular nation seeking to develop a modern economy with modern science and technology and political democracy. Turkey also has long been, and remains, a deeply religious society. Specifically, the practice of Islam is widespread, which raises the important question: whether the path of modernization in Turkey will look more like the American pattern or the European, where the Europeans are much more philosophically secular than the Americans? One way to look at this question is by examining how people value science vis‐à‐vis other important aspects of society and culture. Hence, our study is a comparative look at Turkish and American opinions about science. The American society, which is certainly a very modern society, is of particular interest in Turkey, given the significant religiosity of the American people, making the American and Turkish societies similar at least on this one significant point. Although we do not have comparable European data at this time, our Turkish–American comparison can be suggestive of whether or not Turkey is likely to follow the American pattern of a highly modernized yet deeply religious society.