The December 1997 issue of JRST featured an article by Stephen P. Norris and Tone Kvernbekk and a reply to that article by Rosalind Driver. At the time of Ros Driver's untimely death (30 October 1997), the December issue was ready for publication and the only inclusion possible was an asterisk noting her article was being published posthumously. That evening and throughout the course of the next day, I communicated with members of the Editorial Team, as well as with Jonathan Osborne, John Leach, and Phil Scott, discussing issues associated with the publication of these scholarly contributions. I believe it is a story worth sharing as it captures the essence of a dialogical community.
The Norris and Kvernbekk article and the Driver reply came to fruition as a result of the Journal's peer review process. Reviewers of the original Norris & Kvernbekk submission believed that the nature of the contribution to science education would be greatly enhanced if a reply could be developed by Ros Driver (and perhaps by others). With Steve's permission, I invited Ros to offer her reflections of their article. She gladly accepted the invitation, and indeed she consulted several times with Steve as she developed the reply, as he had done with her, while writing the original article. While others were invited to contribute to the dialogue, Steve and I were not able to obtain additional replies in a time frame to meet our publication schedule. However, it was our intent that the dialogue initiated might stimulate others to contribute ideas in the future; indeed, we hope that these articles accomplish that goal.
Ros's eagerness to offer a reply and her willingness to engage in intellectual discourse is characteristic of why over the course of the past quarter century her work has attracted such interest and respect from science education researchers and science teachers alike. Throughout her professional career she displayed an enduring passion towards science education and took very seriously the responsibility of trying to improve our understanding of what is involved in teaching and learning science and, indeed, what might constitute an education in science.
Ros's early work in science education research with Jack Easley examined cognitive behavior in children, which led to her work on the representation of conceptual frameworks in young adolescent science students. She presented an argument that was radical at the time. Students' everyday knowledge of natural phenomena was viewed as a coherent framework of ideas based on a commonsense interpretation of their experience in living in the world, rather than as "misunderstandings" or "mistakes." A new language to describe children's thinking was offered; no longer were their ideas "naΓ―ve notions," but "alternative frameworks" or "interpretative models." Thus, together with Easley (see Driver & Easley, 1978), she proposed that children's cognitive development may be more like a series of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, new ideas about a phenomenon replacing older ones (in contrast to the, then, dominance of the Piagetian stage theory of development). She argued that children's learning was dependent upon existing ideas about a phenomenon, rather than being limited by a child's developmental stage. Through this work, Rosalind Driver became one of the main progenitors of the constructivist movement that has so influenced science education over the course of the past 2 decades.
Ros's most influential work stems from her period as Director of the Children's Learning In Science Project (1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989) and the Children's Learning in Science Research Group (1990Group ( -1995)). The CLIS Project was established to investigate possible reasons for the poor performance of students in science. As a result of the CLIS project, teachers began to change their perceptions of children's learning, and they started to respond to children's thinking more directly in their teaching. This work was a reflection of Ros's