JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 24, NO. 7, PP. 679682 (1987)

COMMENTS AND CRITICISM

AUTHOR’S RESPONSE TO COMMENTS OF CRONIN, CHARRON, AND ESPINET

While the article “Science Education in Elementary School: Some Observa- tions” (Dykstra, 1987) was intended to elicit thought and action to strengthen the enterprise of educating our elementary school children in science, it certainly was not intended to belittle other aspects of science education as Cronin, Charron, and Espinet (1986) seem to believe when they say “...teaching science at higher levels ... is also difficult and demanding.” The issue here is not ‘Who is earning their money?’, but ‘What exactly is the nature of the task at hand?’

Because I was trying to make an entirely different point than the one that is assumed by Cronin, Charron, and Espinet, I believed that most readers are al- ready familiar with the difficulties of the important task of teaching science to older students. Throughout their comments Cronin, Charron, and Espinet reiterate the need for improved training of higher level teachers, too, in the general area of conceptual change. Few of us would disagree, but again, since I was not address- ing that issue, it seemed unnecessary to state. Let me redeclare the two basic points that I was trying to make:

1. There is an extra issue to keep in mind in the task of elementary science education, namely, to understand the intermediate understanding that we should be trying to bring the students to in any given instance of instruction at that level.

2. Evidence of the conceptual change approach to thinking about learning and instnc- tion is nearly nonexistent in the training of elementary school teachers in science when that enterprise is considered as a whole.

It is certainly not to be assumed that most high school and college students have already reached the formal operational level of reasoning, nor did I assert such an idea. I did say that “they often already have or are about to develop the cognitive skills of adults.” The same studies that Cronin, Charron, and Espinet cite (and other much more recent ones (Thornton & Fuller, 1981; Lawson, 1985)) in- dicating that not all high school and college students are at the stage of formal operations, also point out that more than half of the students usually can be placed in a transitional stage or that of formal operations. I have made measurements of reasoning level in nearly every class that I have taught since 1978 and I have never had a college freshman course of students that had over 50% concrete operational responses on a test of Piagetian reasoning level. Since the majority of the students are seen to be in formal operations or are currently developing them, we can say that the majority do have the cognitive skills of adults or are about to develop

Q 1987 by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/87/070679-04$04.00

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them. What about the rest whose test results indicate that they are only using con- crete operations? It is known that human beings can develop formal operational reasoning in early adolescence. We do not really know why a fraction of the population does not seem to develop this stage spontaneously. The belief is that this segment of the population can be assisted in the transition to formal operations (Lawson, 1985); indeed, in all of my classes where I have both pre and post data, there is a statistically significant shift in the class average level of reasoning and the shift is composed of concrete to transistional, transitional to formal, and con- crete to formal. Thus it is the case that “they often already have or are about to develop the cognitive skills of adults” as I stated in my original comments.

The previous argument notwithstanding; Cronin, Charron, and Espinet assert (without justification) that because not all the upper level students are at the level of formal operations “most secondary and college students are indeed not ready to come to a scientist’s understanding of things.” I am unaware of any work that shows the dependence of the ability to construct a scientist’s point of view on the student’s level of reasoning (concrete or formal operational) before he/she is led to attempt developing that point of view. While I can say that I have never had the experience of teaching a class that was composed of 100% formal operational thinkers, I have never seen such a class with as many as 75% formal operational thinkers, either. Yet, I have had the pleasure of seeing a majority (75% or better) of my students move from a non-Newtonian point of view to one markedly more consistent with a Newtonian view of the world. (Probably the greatest pleasure that I have ever experienced as a teacher is watching my students invent a New- tonian point of view as a result of activities that I led them into.) This kind of results seriously calls to question the requirement of formal operations before one can come to a scientist’s view of the world.

Just as the boundary lines between formal operational and concrete opera- tional thinking are not always easy to identify in normal everyday behavior, neither is the boundary between a scientist’s understanding of the world and a more naive view of the world in everyday behavior. More than a few would argue over the point whether the two ways of representing student behavior are exactly congruent.

Our differences might be in how we define “scientist’s understanding of things” and “scientist’s point of view”. To clarify, in referring to “Newtonian point of view”, I do not mean that the student is merely able to state Newton’s laws of motion and/or solve problems using algebra, trigonometry, or calculus on the equation, Fnet = ma. What I do mean is that the student actually believes in the logical necessity that a constant net force gives rise not to a constant velocity, but to a constant acceleration. This belief is revealed in the fact that the student always uses this relationship between force and acceleration, whether answering physics problems or reasoning about everyday situations.

Cronin, Charron, and Espinet argue “that neither children or adults can process two conflicting ideas at once.” While I do not know precisely what they mean by the term “process”, I find it hard to understand how disequilibration could ever occur if two conflicting ideas could not be recognized at the same time. What I actually said was “...hold the two ideas in memory at the same time ...” referring to a very specific situation described more completely below. As Cronin, Charron, and Espinet correctly point out, the capacity of working

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memory is limited which limits the processing that can go on in any particular situation. That is exactly what I was referring to when I indicated that the younger students were apparently unable to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at once. I refer the reader to the work of Case (1985) for an excellent description of how concepts from information processing can be used to refine and improve on the work begun by Piaget.

If I did not believe that “children and adults can be brought to more sophisti- cated understandings of scientific phenomena...”, then I would not still be teach- ing. These more sophisticated understandings might be scientist’s points of view or they might be the “appropriate intermediate conceptual goals” to which I refer. The place where we seem to disagree is whether there is a limit to how young a student we can bring to a scientist’s point of view. Having worked with Jim Minstrel1 (1982a,b) on a conceptual change method that he has developed in physics on what could be called ‘developing a Newtonian point of view’, I am aware of the difficulties of accomplishing the task with high school and college students and have discussed with him the problems that he has experienced with junior high students. We are usually able to get grade 11-16 students to a state in which they realize that: ‘Before the experiment I thought that a constant [net] force gives rise to a constant velocity, yet the experiment shows me that a con- stant [net] force gives rise to a constant acceleration ... so what does cause a con- stant velocity?’ The younger students never seem to recognize both premises at the same time; they ignore one premise or the other. As a result, the question that follows never occurs to them. It is reminiscent of the Piagetian tasks where the children can only attend to one variable or the other, but not both, and so, ‘the tall, skinny glass has more lemonade than the short, fat glass.’

While I agree with the educational psychologists who say that anything can be taught at any level in an intellectually honest way, I am reasonably sure that it is not an intellectually honest goal to achieve a Newtonian point of view in the average first grader. On the other hand I believe that there must be constructive conceptual goals which, if reached in the first grade, would enable that child, later on, to acquire a Newtonian point of view much sooner and with much greater certainty than we achieve by the typical course of education (K-12) today.

While I agree that the “historical parallels” issue in conceptual development is not settled. I find it curious that Cronin, Charron, and Espinet cite several con- firming examples and fail to cite any disconfirming ones, merely stating that they exist. Carey’s work (1985, 1983) and that of Clement (1983) are fascinating and compelling on the issue. Spending time reading and listening to students’ ex- planations of phenomena adds fuel to the fire. Where are these counter examples?

It is certainly the case that more is not better when it comes to the correlation between science courses and developing scientist’s points of view. Having been the supervisor of a large introductory physics lab program, I have known graduate teaching assistants in physics who did not possess a Newtonian point of view on the relationship of forces to motion. Imagine the “instructional heaven- on-earth” in which even the science major courses were developed around a con- ceptual change model.

Finally, I cannot agree that a large body of work on conceptual change exists and is waiting to be applied. Neither do Pines and West (1986), since they say “A

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new field of research in science education is emerging ...” Apparently they would agree with my characterization: “just beginning”. While I am aware of some very impressive work by Clement and Minstrell among others, no one seems to be claiming to have an answer to the situation, yet. Those with methods that seem to work for specific conceptions believe that they can generalize their methods, but these demonstrations have not yet been made. Those with ‘general theories’ have not always captured the complete picture. For example, in the Pines and West (1986) “Vines” metaphor, the downward growing formal knowledge vine does not adequately represent the development of a scientist’s point of view by stu- dents as I have seen it occur. The students form the understanding themselves, it is precisely their questioning of authority and their own previous beliefs that leads them to the new world view, not their acceptance of it. The instructional method used to induce the change assiduously avoids supplying any ‘accepted, authoritarian’ source of answers. This world view is not impressed on them from some outside source; they construct it themselves. It is more like another “spon- taneous” vine that grows up from below and crowds out the old vine.

REFERENCES

Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Brad- ford.

Carey, S. (1983). When Heat and Temperature Were One. Mental Models. Gentner, D. & Stevens, A.L. (Eds), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 267.

Case. R. (1985). Intellectual Development: Birth to Adulthood, New York Academic Press.

Clement, J. (1983). A Conceptual Model Discussed by Galileo and Used In- tuitively by Physics Students. Mental Models. Gentner, D. & Stevens, A.L. (Eds), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 325.

Cronin, L., Charron, E., & Espinet, M. (1986). The Relative Difficulty of Teaching Science in Elementary and Secondary School: A Response. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 23,749.

Dykstra, D., Jr. (1987). Science Education in Elementary School: Some Ob- servations. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 24, 179.

Lawson, A.E. (1985). A Review 01 Research on Formal Reasoning and Science Teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 22, 569.

Minstrell, J. (1982a). Conceptual Development Research in the Natural Set- ting of a Secondary School Science Classroom. Education in the 80’s: Science. Rowe, M.B. (Ed), Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 129.

Minstrell, J. (1982b). Explaining the ‘at rest’ Condition of an Object. The Physics Teacher, 20, 10.

Pines, A.L., & West H.L.T. (1986). Conceptual Understanding and Science Learning: An Interpretation of Research within a Sources-of-knowledge Framework. Science Education, 70, 583.

Thornton, M. & Fuller, R.G. (1981). How Do College Students Solve Propor- tion Problems? Journal of Research in Science Teaching 18 ,335. Manuscript accepted March 11,1987

-DEWEY I. DYKSTRA, JR.