β Scribed by Charles W. Anderson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The "cognitive revolution" in psychology and science education has been with us for a quarter of a century; its influence on science education has been profound. Lists of research reports about student conceptions, cognitive structures, and reasoning strategies fill book-length bibliographies. Conceptual change and cognitive science research have played important roles in the development and implementation of national standards in the United States, Britain, and other countries (e.g., AAAS, 1993, Chapter 15;Driver, Squires, Rushworth, and Wood-Robinson, 1994). Teacher education programs train their students to conduct clinical interviews, and textbook publishers claim to provide teachers with information about common student misconceptions. We take it for granted today that through research we can develop important insights into how students understand and reason about science, and that we should use those insights to improve science teaching practice.
The five articles in this issue provide us with an opportunity to consider the state of this research tradition today-what we are learning about students' scientific reasoning and understanding and the challenges that still lie ahead. In particular, we note two challenges that are addressed by these articles: Developing reliable technologies for assessing students' scientific reasoning and exploring general patterns in students' scientific reasoning.
Two of the articles in this issue focus on specific topics. Voska and Heikkinen investigate college students' conceptions of chemical equilibrium; Cuccio-Schirripa and Steiner investigate middle school students' abilities to generate researchable scientific questions. In both studies, their goals go beyond describing the conceptions and reasoning patterns of students in general; they seek to develop valid, reliable, and efficient techniques for characterizing the reasoning of individual students.
The results reported in these two studies tell us something about the current state of the art in developing tests of student reasoning. Voska and Heikkinen, in particular, carefully investigated the construct validity of their tests, with mixed results. As a field, we still have more work to do to develop tests that reliably characterize stable patterns in the reasoning of individual students. This is an ambitious goal; conventionally developed tests of science achievement could not pass the tests of construct validity used by Voska and Heikkinen. Yet the results tell us something about the current state of the art in test development. As Voska and Heikkinen say in their discussion, "The content validity and reliability of TISC were clearly established, but conclusions regarding construct validity were not as straightforward" (p. 170). These are important considerations, as testing plays an increasingly salient role in our science education system.
The other three articles in this issue each remind us that learning science involves broader reasoning patterns and habits of mind as well as the mastery of specific skills and concepts. Chin and Brown investigate students who take deep versus surface approaches to learning in science.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Men are liars. Men are pigs.Thatβs what Jessie believes, and being a dancer has only reinforced this belief. So when her Friday night customer tells her that she deserves better and that he wants to take her away from the life and make an honest woman of her, of course she doesnβt believe him, no ma
Individual, semistructured interviews were used for the study of 40 primary school students' (ages between 11 and 12 years) conceptions concerning the greenhouse effect. Analysis of the data led to the formation of seven distinct models of thinking regarding this environmental phenomenon. The inferr