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1.
Museum visitors are an ideal population for assessing the persistence of the conceptual barriers that make it difficult to grasp Darwinian evolutionary theory. In comparison with other members of the public, they are more likely to be interested in natural history, have higher education levels, and be exposed to the relevant content. If museum visitors do not grasp evolutionary principles, it seems unlikely that other members of the general public would do so. In the current study, 32 systematically selected visitors to three Midwest museums of natural history provided detailed open‐ended explanations of biological change in seven diverse organisms. They were not told that these were evolutionary problems. Responses were coded as: informed naturalistic reasoning, featuring some understanding of key evolutionary concepts, novice naturalistic reasoning, featuring intuitive explanations that are also present in childhood, and creationist reasoning, featuring supernatural explanations. All visitors were mixed reasoners, using one or more of these patterns in different permutations across the seven organisms: 72% used a combination of informed naturalistic reasoning and novice naturalistic reasoning, while a further 28% added creationist reasoning to this mix. Correlational analyses indicated that for many visitors these reasoning patterns were coherent rather than fragmented. The theoretical model presented in this article contributes to an analysis of the developmental and cultural factors associated with these patterns. This could help educators working in diverse educational settings understand how to move visitors and students toward more informed reasoning patterns. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:326–353, 2010  相似文献   

2.
Although molecular-level details are part of the upper-secondary biology curriculum in most countries, many studies report that students fail to connect molecular knowledge to phenomena at the level of cells, organs and organisms. Recent studies suggest that students lack a framework to reason about complex systems to make this connection. In this paper, we present a framework that could help students to reason back and forth between cells and molecules. It represents both the general type of explanation in molecular biology and the research strategies scientists use to find these explanations. We base this framework on recent work in the philosophy of science that characterizes explanations in molecular biology as mechanistic explanations. Mechanistic explanations describe a phenomenon in terms of the entities involved, the activities displayed and the way these entities and activities are organized. We conclude that to describe cellular phenomena scientists use entities and activities at multiple levels between cells and molecules. In molecular biological research, scientists use heuristics based on these intermediate levels to construct mechanistic explanations. They subdivide a cellular activity into hypothetical lower-level activities (top-down approaches) and they predict and test the organization of macromolecules into functional modules that play a role in higher-level activities (bottom-up approaches). We suggest including molecular mechanistic reasoning in biology education and we identify criteria for designing such education. Education using molecular mechanistic reasoning can build on common intuitive reasoning about mechanisms. The heuristics that scientists use can help students to apply this intuitive notion to the levels in between molecules and cells.  相似文献   

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Many researchers have stressed the importance of qualitative understanding of physical phenomena, particularly in the context of exploratory learning environments. Qualitative understanding proves to be a major part of the expert's ability to solve complex problems in physics. Some researchers think that this kind of reasoning, far from being specific to experts' knowledge, also characterizes intuitive understanding and plays a part in the transition from intuitive knowledge to more expert knowledge. It is therefore important to help students develop their qualitative reasoning and extend their existing useful conceptions. This paper presents a task analysis of a computer microworld of force and motion problems that allows students to gain a qualitative understanding of some aspects of vector algebra. The aim of the task analysis being to develop a qualitative curriculum for exploratory learning, we tried to represent the knowledge to be acquired in such a way as to promote the progressive conceptual understanding of some basic aspects of Newton's laws of motion, taking into account students' intuitive knowledge about physics. The task analysis was undertaken prior to the experimental study in order to provide guidance for students in their exploration of the microworld. The experimental work allows us to validate and extend the a priori analysis.  相似文献   

5.
ABSTRACT— Contextual support for performance and understanding plays an important role in learning and teaching. This study investigated the temporal course of the effects of support—how it affects complexity and correctness of judgments about density in kindergarten ( n = 35) and second-grade ( n = 29) children. In the experimental group, a teacher provided support through modeling more complex reasoning about why objects sink or float. Children's complexity judgments increased sharply with support compared to no support, although their predictions about whether objects would sink or float were mostly correct from the start. Following the support event, children showed a sudden jump in complexity of explanations, which was transient for most children, who showed either rapid decrease or some oscillation and then decrease. A few sustained the high-level explanation after the jump, showing robust knowledge. That is, patterns of performance across trials were primarily nonlinear, following mostly cubic or quadratic change. In addition, second-graders had a more complex understanding of density than did kindergarteners. Findings indicate that children's concepts are dynamic rather than static, as evidenced by the strong but transient effects of support for most students. To move from transient to robust knowledge requires the building of knowledge and skill over time.  相似文献   

6.
Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best understood statistically. Causal Bayesian Research (e.g. Gopnik and Schulz in Causal learning: psychology, philosophy, and computation, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007) suggests that summing across probabilistic instances is inherent to human causal induction, yet other research (e.g. Schulz and Sommerville in Child Development 77(2):427–442, 2006) suggests a human tendency to assume deterministic relationships. Classroom science learning often stresses the replicability of outcomes, putting this learning in tension with understanding probabilistic patterns in complex systems. This investigation examined students’ reasoning patterns on tasks with probabilistic causal features. Microgenetic studies were conducted in multiple sessions over a school year with students in kindergarten, second, fourth and sixth grades (n = 16) to assess their assumptions when dealing with tasks from four domains: social; games; machines; and biology. Later sessions attempted to scaffold students’ understanding using connection making and analogical reasoning. This paper reports on the overall patterns and trends in the data. Most students held a deterministic stance at the outset; however, at least one student at each grade level reasoned probabilistically from the start. All students except one eventually revealed at least one topic for which they held a primarily probabilistic stance. The results have implications for how students reason about complex systems and for how patterns of co-variation and evidence in science are discussed.  相似文献   

7.
Teleology has been described as an intuitive cognitive bias and as a major type of student conception. There is controversy regarding whether teleological explanations are a central obstacle to, are legitimate in, or are even supportive of science learning. However, interaction in science classrooms has not yet been investigated with regard to teleology. Consequently, this study addresses the question of how teleological explanations emerge in science classroom interactions about evolution and how teachers and students address emerging teleology. In this article, we introduce a theoretical and methodological framework drawing from the sociology of knowledge and systems theory, suggesting that this framework may enrich the understanding of knowledge construction and of social practices in the science classroom because it enables distinguishing between explicit and tacit knowledge. We investigated seven secondary school units about evolution and present data from four grade-12 classes in Germany, a country with very few creationists, to contrast two ways in which teleology is addressed. In the first type, the teachers combine intentional and need-based teleological explanations with aspects of scientific theories in an ambiguous way. Contrastingly, in the second type, the teachers construct a duality between correct mechanistic and incorrect teleological explanations by discrediting preceding scientific theories. In the discussion, we argue that the presented sociological approach can also be valuable in other science education contexts, such as creationism, the nature of science and socio-scientific issues, because classroom interaction involves tacit communication, such as a tacit epistemology, which are essential grounds for the students' knowledge construction.  相似文献   

8.
The development of proportional reasoning was examined using a temperature mixture task. Each individual's task understanding was assessed by components measuring understanding of various principles of the task. Age differences were found in the mean component scores. More important, different patterns of components were found depending on whether the task was presented numerically or nonumerically. Component patterns also depended on whether the task was presented such that subjects predicted the outcome of combining 2 containers of water at different temperatures (prediction task) or such that subjects inferred 1 of the 2 initial temperatures given the final temperature (reverse task). The results show the importance of distinguishing between intuitive knowledge and formal computational knowledge of proportional concepts and provide a new perspective on how intuitive and computational knowledge are related during development. Finally, the results also led to a new conceptualization of developmental levels as categories with fuzzy boundaries. Under this conceptualization, individuals can have different degrees of membership in "fuzzy developmental levels." This new concept preserves individual differences but also describes the sequence of development.  相似文献   

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This article explores 11- to 16-year-old students' explanations for phenomena commonly studied in school chemistry from an inclusive cognitive resources or knowledge-in-pieces perspective that considers that student utterances may reflect the activation of knowledge elements at a range of levels of explicitness. We report 5 themes in student explanations that we consider to derive from implicit knowledge elements activated in cognition. Student thinking in chemistry has commonly been examined from a misconceptions or alternative conceptions/frameworks perspective, in which the focus has been on the status of learners' explicit conceptions. This approach has been valuable, but it fails to explain the origins or nature of the full range of alternative ideas reported. In physics education, the cognitive resources perspective has led to work to characterize implicit knowledge elements—described as phenomenological primitives (p-prims)—that provide learners with an intuitive sense of mechanism. School chemistry offers a complementary knowledge domain because of its focus on the nature of materials and its domination by theoretical models that explain observable phenomena in terms of emergent properties of complex ensembles of “quanticles” (molecules, ions, electrons, atoms, etc.) The themes reported in this study suggest a need to recognize primitive knowledge elements beyond those reported from physics education and suggest that some previously characterized p-prims may be better considered to derive from more broadly applicable intuitive knowledge elements.  相似文献   

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This paper explored (1) the developmental trend of student level of reasoning across grade level in pattern generalization; (2) the mediatory role of task variables in the developmental trend of student level of reasoning within and across tasks; and (3) developmental trend of student level of reasoning associated with strategy use across grade level. A test designed to measure student level of reasoning was given to a sample of 1232 students from grades 4 to 11 from 5 schools in Lebanon. The Structure of the Learned Outcomes or Responses (SOLO) was used as a theoretical model. Results show that student level of reasoning exhibited an increasing trend across clusters of grade levels and that there were several SOLO levels in each cluster of grade levels. Type of task (immediate, near, far) and function type (linear, non-linear) seem to mediate the development of level of reasoning across grade level but the complexity of the task (simple, more complex) did not. Students used several strategies in each cluster of grade levels and the developmental trends of student level of reasoning associated with strategy use were not uniform and varied across clusters of grade levels, thus supporting a neo-Piagetian interpretation of the results.  相似文献   

12.
The idea that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by offspring and result in evolution is a substantial impediment to student understanding of evolution. In the current study, we performed a preliminary examination of how acquiring physical changes in a question prompt may differentially cue intuitive and scientific justifications of inheritance and evolution and how this varies based on how student learned the concept. Middle school students in a suburban northeastern district (N = 314) either learned about evolutionary change with a category construction task (with different levels of feedback support) or completed a worksheet. Three days later students responded to two free response scenarios (one where a physical change is acquired). Responses were coded based on student justifications for either science accuracy or intuitive nature. Specific reasons were coded by justification type with high inter-rater agreement (k > 0.93). Results showed that students were more likely to apply intuitive reasoning when a physical change was acquired (50%) than if the change was behavioral in nature (16%). Additionally, students who completed the category construction task provided significantly more scientifically accurate justifications about inheritance (M = 1.12) than control students (M = 0.47), and significantly less intuitive justifications (M = 0.67) than control (M = 1.13). Finally, category construction produced the most scientific reasoning when feedback was provided. Taken together, these results suggest that intuitive reasoning is differentially applied based on physical organismal changes, intuitive reasoning is less frequent when learning via category construction, and the category construction task is more effective for this population with the inclusion of feedback.  相似文献   

13.
Nine hundred fifty-four students in a large university nonmajors biology course were pretested to determine the extent to which they held nonscientific beliefs in creationism, orthogenesis, the soul, nonreductionism, vitalism, teleology, and nonemergentism. To test the hypothesis that hypothetico-deductive reasoning skills facilitate movement away from nonscientific beliefs, the degree to which those nonscientific beliefs were initially held and the degree to which they were modified during instruction were compared to student reasoning level (intuitive, transitional, reflective). As predicted, the results showed that the less skilled reasoners were more likely to initially hold the nonscientific beliefs and were less likely to change those beliefs during instruction. It was also discovered that less skilled reasoners were less likely to be strongly committed to the scientific beliefs.  相似文献   

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This study tested the constructivist hypothesis that the acquisition of domain-specific conceptual knowledge (declarative knowledge) requires use of general procedural knowledge. More specifically, it was hypothesized that use of a general pattern of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is necessary for the acquisition of novel domain-specific concepts. To test this hypothesis 314 high school biology and chemistry students were first tested to determine whether or not they were skilled in the use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Based on this test, students were classified as reflective, transitional, or intuitive thinkers. All students were then presented with a series of four concept-acquisition tasks. It was predicted that reflective (hypothetico-deductive) thinkers would acquire the concepts while intuitive (empirico-inductive) thinkers would not. Transitional thinkers were expected to be partially successful. These predictions were confirmed as skill in hypothetico-deductive reasoning (developmental level), but not age, was highly correlated with performance on the concept acquisition tasks (X2 = 71.14, p < 0.00001). This result was interpreted to be supportive of the constructivist hypothesis.  相似文献   

16.
Research in science education has revealed that many students struggle to understand chemical reactions. Improving teaching and learning about chemical processes demands that we develop a clearer understanding of student reasoning in this area and of how this reasoning evolves with training in the domain. Thus, we have carried out a qualitative study to explore students reasoning about chemical causality and mechanism. Study participants included individuals at different educational levels, from college to graduate school. We identified diverse conceptual modes expressed by students when engaged in the analysis of different types of reactions. Main findings indicate that student reasoning about chemical reactions is influenced by the nature of the process. More advanced students tended to express conceptual modes that were more normative and had more explanatory power, but major conceptual difficulties persisted in their reasoning. The results of our study are relevant to educators interested in conceptual development, learning progressions, and assessment.  相似文献   

17.
Students in a large one-semester nonmajors college biology course were classified into one of three groups (intuitive—I, transitional—T, reflective—R) based upon a pretest of scientific reasoning ability. Laboratory teams of two students each then were formed, such that all possible combinations of reasoning abilities were represented (i.e., I-I, I-T, I-R, T-T, T-R, R-R). Students worked with their assigned partners during each of the course's 14 laboratory sessions. Gains in reasoning ability, laboratory achievement, and course achievement, as well as changes in students' opinions of their motivation, enjoyment of the laboratory, and their own and their partner's reasoning abilities were assessed at the end of the semester. Significant pre- to posttest gains in reasoning ability by the intuitive and transitional students were found, but these gains were not significantly related to the laboratory partner's reasoning ability. Also, course achievement was not significantly related to the laboratory partner's reasoning ability. Students were perceptive of others' reasoning ability; the more able reasoners were generally viewed as being more motivated, having better ideas, and being better at doing science. Additional results also indicated that course enjoyment and motivation was significantly decreased for the transitional students when they were paired with intuitive students. Apparently, for students in transition (i.e., not at an equilibrium state with regard to reasoning level), it is frustrating to work with a less able reasoner. However, some evidence was found to suggest that reflective students may benefit from working with a less able partner.  相似文献   

18.
The improvement of science education in accord with the current science reform agenda requires the development of sophisticated instructional strategies that are grounded in a clear recognition of student understanding. We describe a pedagogical strategy, the assessment conversation, that helps teachers elicit student understanding and then use elicited and diverse student understanding as the instructional basis for achieving conceptual and reasoning goals in the classroom. We then illustrate the potential and challenges of using the assessment conversation through examples that have emerged from Science Education through Portfolio Instruction and Assessment (SEPIA), a project attempting to reform practices of assessment and instruction in middle school science classrooms. We conclude with a discussion of issues facing any substantial reform of science education.  相似文献   

19.
We explore conditions for productive synthesis between formal reasoning and intuitive representations through analysis of college students’ understanding of the limit concept in the definition of the derivative. In particular, we compare and contrast cognitive processes that accompany different manifestations of persistence of intuitions and tacit models that coexist with students’ logical reasoning. The students are highly trained in mathematics. We encounter expressions of the persistence and impact of intuitions and tacit pictorial models as described by Fischbein. But we also observe some new characterization of persistence of tacit models in which the tacit pictorial model continues to interfere in the student’s reasoning process, coexists with a logical reasoning but does not prevent the student from reaching a feeling of logical consistency. The empirical analysis and the theoretical discussion offered in the present paper permit us to highlight this very special integration of the formal and the intuitive components of the reasoning process.  相似文献   

20.
Grammatical knowledge is an important part of L1 language education. Nevertheless, teachers find it challenging to convey an in-depth understanding of grammar to their students. Previous research suggests that understanding might be stimulated by focusing on grammatical reasoning. The current mixed-methods study explores the grammatical reasoning of 108 Dutch L1 student teachers’ in odd one out tasks, showing that student teachers struggle with such reasoning tasks. A multilevel regression analysis indicates that their level of grammatical understanding as measured by a Test of Grammatical Understanding (TGU) and the elaborateness of student teachers’ argumentation significantly predict the quality of their grammatical reasoning. Student teachers’ performances were also compared to 14 year old pre-university students’ performances (N = 120). Contrary to what was hypothesized, senior student teachers did not manage to outperform junior student teachers, nor did student teachers outperform pre-university students. The paper discusses plausible reasons for these findings and explores how teacher education might need to shift focus to better develop student teachers’ grammatical reasoning skills.  相似文献   

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