CoS and Effect: An Integral View

Introduction

In current educational practice, a distinction has arisen in the realm of science. There is now a significant gap between the practice of science and science education (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Barnett, 2000; Healey & Jenkins, 2006). While the majority of previous research on this topic has been directed at identifying and working to remediate the differences in how science is conducted by college undergraduate students and by researchers, it may be instructive to wind back the proverbial clock somewhat further and investigate what is occurring in grade school science classrooms. Such a perspective may prove useful in designing an intervention that can introduce students to the practices, conventions, and communities associated with being a scientist. This study investigates one such possible intervention.

Relevant here is research carried out in the United Kingdom by Beau Lotto, who with his research group descended on a fifth grade elementary school classroom armed with bees and the desire to help students to be creative. In what became known as the Blackawton Bees Project (Schenk et al., 2011), students were first encouraged to learn about bees and then to design and implement experiments on them; soon they were pushing the boundaries of previous work and, with some assistance, conducting real scientific research. This project demonstrates the potential for grade school students, who have relatively few intellectual and creative constraints, to operate as research scientists. Further, from the students’ perspective, this opportunity will have provided an understanding of what it means to practise science as opposed to simply learning about it. So it was in the Blackawton Bees Project that, through the process of learning about bees, working with researchers, conducting experiments, and seeing their work published (as it eventually was), the students were also introduced to the range of actions and essential elements involved in contributing to the scientific community.

In my own science education practice, I have observed that the experiments recommended for and conducted in many classrooms follow a highly prescriptive model. Typically, this model involves the use of a textbook or other source that provides a list of materials, a set of procedures, and a series of questions intended to guide students toward certain conclusions. Frequently, an understanding of the conclusions from the textbook experiments is required in order to advance to the next topic, so the significance is revealed in subsequent pages to prevent any child from being left behind. Furthermore, most of the experiments are designed to verify previously determined results, a situation that is not the typical of experiments that researchers conduct for publication in scientific journals. Using the textbook commonly assigned to physics students in the province of Alberta (Ackroyd, 2007) provides a particularly illustrative example: in it, the acceleration due to gravity, g, is validated in no fewer than 11 ways, none of which is representative of approaches currently used by actual scientists.

Finally, while many classrooms model the scientific method in the conduct and presentation of an experiment, in that the instructions serve to communicate certain requirements of the thought processes involved, these exercises lack a fundamental component of what makes science humanity’s most powerful knowledge-generation tool. This missing piece is the peer-review process, through which a potential contribution to the body of scientific knowledge is subjected to rigorous scrutiny by other members of the scientific community prior to publication and dissemination for wider public engagement. The present study has accordingly been designed to help fill this gap in science education.