Several goals for student learning have come to the forefront of college and university attention as part ofgeneral education programs, namely, students' skills in the areas of writing, reading, mathematics, sciences, and critical thinking, the latter at least insofar as it relates to how one evaluates evidence. The scientific study of the physical world is a truly advantageous subject for teaching with these concerns in mind, since the structure, reasoning, and community nature of the scientific enterprise have convincing ways to develop these essential skills. Many people feel that they understand the "poetic impulse" and the "artistic impulse" in themselves and others. How should we proceed to cultivate a similar feeling about "the scientific impulse"? The students in an introductory college science or mathematics course are from all areas of the curriculum and have very diverse backgrounds in both science and mathematics. But virtually none of them has been exposed to, or experienced, the notion that thinking about natural phenomena is a time-honored human creative activity, one that is accessible to them and full of significance for their lives. The best of introductory CNSM courses, like the best of any introductory course in any discipline, succeeds by attempting to show and allow students to experience how this particular approach to knowledge answers the important "where, what, when, how" questions. How can some particular phenomenon fit with everything else I have experienced? How do humans sculpt a description of nature into a trustworthy reliable source of information? However, a lively examination of what is meant by the phrase "the invention of a scientific and mathematical description of natural-world realities" is actually sometimes ignored in introductory courses, because it is indeed difficult to accomplish without seeming to overburden a course. But making room for this discussion in some form or other, by eliminating one or two lectures on some factual content, may be a case of less is more. Students need be involved in making this knowledge part of their intellectual life; they cannot simply be listeners. Experiments are central to the sciences. Experiments are planned events which can demonstrate a willingness to have your work validated by others, a feeling of confidence in an ability to think critically, and a willingness to participate in a scientific community, with its criteria and standards of communication. To capture most of the students' minds, the approach must be on broader themes, as well as on particular sets of phenomena. There is no shortage of "stories" that will hold anyone at any level because they address a person's experiences and concerns: the location of human beings in the immense space and time of the universe's scale; the constant change in the universe and concepts of energy flow and transfer; the atomic/molecular model of matter, the microworld of matter that explains our macroworld; e.g., the direct relationship of molecular events to everyday sensory experiences of light, color, music, and similar sensory phenomena, the biological realities of species classification, molecular biology, genetic manipulation, and evolution; the examination of the creation or invention of explanations of the worldphysical, biological, or mathematicalby human beings; and on and on.
Summary of General Objectives for the Teacher
To make clear that scientific approaches are a particularly effective human response to the natural world. To emphasize the creative aspects of scientific and mathematical descriptions of the natural world by examining several phenomena in detail, To enable students to develop skills in applying a powerful set of scientific criteria for evidence and truthfulness in reporting; To have a conscious and explicit goal of effective classroom and laboratory practices, one that have, as much as possible, a research base in psychology and education studies. To increase understanding of mathematics as an alternate descriptive language. To make the problems, exercises and examinations, thoughtful and well-developed, and pertinent to the level of competency at which the course is aimed. By means of a selection of fundamental topics, to allow students to gain a perspective on the uses of science in the creation of human knowledge; To make students aware of the limits of scientific measurements and the difference between the measurements and their interpretation.
General Goals for the Students:
a strong understanding of the fundamental concepts, topics that lay a firm foundation for understanding other ideas which rely on these fundamental outlooks; This involves:
i) an ability to explain correctly in simple language everyday physical phenomena,
ii) confidence in using simple physical materials to explore and clarify physical phenomena, as in a class demonstration or in the laboratory
iii) improvement of qualitative problem-solving skills in order to lay the foundation for quantitative skills, if the students choose to develop the latter.
skills related to measurements and an understanding of their limits; knowledge of the criteria used in judging a measurement, either their own or reported ones, and a clear sense of the differences in criteria used in the arts and sciences; this includes experiences related to the scientific validation of a measurement by the scientific community; and a clear idea of meaning of scientific ethics and honesty; a knowledge of the use of approximate modeling of complicated real events, a process that is extensively used in the sciences and mathematics in order to quantify what is known; a firm realization that the phenomena of the natural world are open to their observation and thinking, and that such effort can be satisfying and exciting. They should leave the course with a clear knowledge that reasoning in science is accessible to them. The understanding can include a strong sense of perspective on the place of science as one of the human ways of knowing, with appropriate limitations and uncertainties. Several examples of the conceptual development of ideas are considered in a detailed way to get a sense of how we humans got from "here to there". a sense of positive accomplishment and positive learning in the course. Without this, most of the rest is simply 'sound and fury'.
Take-home, in-class, and in-lab experiments Guided experiments have the following characteristics
1) Students are told the context and background underlying why particular measurements were chosen.
2) Good data must be obtainable in relatively simple accurate ways. Much of the meaninglessness attributed by non-science students to scientific work comes from the "junk" they are often given to work with in non-science-major laboratories, where those labs even exist in the first place. A technically trained student can find meaning in crude measurements; non-science students without the technical skills usually find only frustration and failure. If you are going to ask them to do something, students at this level need relatively high-quality working instruments and devices, or measurement techniques that truly provide them with the level of accuracy that is required.
3) Students graph or otherwise represent their measured information in ways appropriate to clear communication of their experience.
4) Students share preliminary results and final outcomes across all members of a laboratory section, so that their results can be compared and conclusions drawn on the basis of the entire laboratory section's outcomes. A single measurement cannot be an adequate basis on which to make a judgment about the characteristics of some physical or biological system. Simply put, it is bad science to pretend to do so.
5) The students are trained in reporting some measure of their confidence in the measurement. Is it believable to them? How much of their work should someone else believe?
APPENDIX
The argument for changing the students' social interaction in the physical science classroom
Research studies in these areas overall support the importance of a storyline, the use of conferences, activities and collaborative student groups in terms of greater student accomplishment. At the very minimum, there is no decrease in student performance while there is an increase in student satisfaction when these kinds of teaching practices are followed. Most learning research is done on pre-college students. There has been a number of summaries of the meaning of such research, but one of the more relevant for purposes of educational development was authored by Lauren B. Resnick and published by the National Research Council. She makes the argument for changing the social interaction in the classroom and laboratory. Resnick has pointed out that promising results in cultivating a disposition to "higher order thinking" occur in programs that rely on a social setting and social interaction for much of teaching and practice. How do cooperative groups make comprehension more likely? She points out that studies support the ideas that a) Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge-recording or absorption; b) Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use prior knowledge to construct new knowledge; c) Learning is context-sensitive, highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place.
Some postulated reasons for successful learning in structured social interactions are the following
1. A social setting can provide models of effective strategies. "Thinking aloud" in discussions in a social setting provides an opportunity to articulate and check one's concepts.
2. The social setting functions to motivate students; students come to think themselves capable of engaging in independent thinking and exercising control over their learning processes.
3. Since the proposed social interaction in the lab emphasizes the common ways in which scientific communities operate, this method will enhance sought-after goals of honesty, good observation, and clear reporting. This is not a topic toward which many science-discipline professors are prone to be attentive. Much more attention to this occurs at the middle-school and high-school levels, though that depends strongly on the teacher.
Details: The physical science laboratories have the following characteristics
a) Students are organized into 3-person measurement groups. Heller and Hollabaugh (1992b) found that 3-person groups function better than smaller or larger groups in their problem-solving work, and this is confirmed in our own previous work. Most importantly, the group work positively affects students' attitudes toward the course, and reduces their sense of isolation. Each student completes an individual report of his/her work. b) Our laboratory writeups are longer than usual in order to provide students necessary context. Brief laboratory writeups have not proven to do what they are touted to accomplish, namely, to act as effective motivators of data collection. Each experiment has an introduction that explicitly places the investigation to be done within the context of the broader questions of science, and explains why we chose a particular experiment. c) Each individual report requires the students to represent their information in several waysgraphical, mathematical, proseto clearly communicate their experience. One definition of "understanding" is the ability to manipulate and transform information across several representations. See, for example, Dufresne, Gerace, and Leonard (1997). d) The students are trained in reporting some measure of their confidence in their measurements. This training addresses reasonable estimates of uncertainties, errors, and statistics. Interpreting results with uncertainties is crucial to understanding what the scientific enterprise is about. e) In each laboratory session, a relatively brief Conference is called so that the entire class can share preliminary data, check results, clarify procedures and ideas, and discuss multiple perspectives to form better, more defensible ideas. The structure of a Conference is brief and may differ from experiment to experiment, but its basic function is this: the preliminary data from each group is displayed on the blackboard for comparison of findings across groups. A brief discussion led by the lab instructor provides important feedback. Groups whose data are highly divergent will have the opportunity to re-examine their measurements in the same lab session. By midway in the semester, because of these conferences, students develop a sense of the lab as a local scientific community working together and supporting each other. Like scientists, they participate in data-driven discussions, are allowed and encouraged to voice their reasoning, to make possible mistakes, and to have their reasoning be tested by others (Lemke, 1990). Also, as is done in the wider scientific community, a conference also requires the entire group to come to terms with everyone's results. f) Towards the middle and later part of the course, student measurement groups participate in several Public Reports. For example, during one lab session, half of the students in the lab do one experiment; the other half do a second experiment. The entire next lab period consists of groups bringing together their data and presenting them to the entire class by appointed spokesperson(s). We find that this simulation is quite revealing to students about the public and community nature of scientific work. The process also spurs students toward the organization and understanding of results. g) Grading is important to students, and is a means of providing clear evaluation and corrective feedback. Grading of laboratory individual reports assesses students' clear communication of their results and experiences. We use a report cover sheet (Good, 1985) that has worked quite well in the past in providing feedback and in improving specific skills. The sheet enables instructors to provide non-punitive, specific feedback, as well as to allow correction of particular parts of a report without requiring an entire rewrite.