Edpsy 399 OL - Spring 2000

Tom Anderson, Instructor

Leonard Fretzin

Forum 11 - Lesson 11

Date: Sun April 1 2001

Subject: Lesson 11 Required q4

Cognitive & Behavioral Teachers

Teaching chemistry in high school affords a cogent view to the problems that exist in science education. Imagine a population of students ranging in preparation, proclivity, and natural resources from the lowest of the regular track student to the highest of the honors students. Add to this the recent federal requirement of inclusion in regular classrooms of most special education students. Then require these students to cover a specific curriculum designated by the Chicago Board of Education and the State of Illinois, and attempt to use instructional methodologies which will be effective in assuring their successful results on the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Exam), and it is clear that a dilemma exists.

This diverse population of students enters the classroom with a range and variety of prior knowledge, along with many misconceptions and naïve beliefs. The cognitive, contructivist approach sets up problems to guide the direction of student inquiry and promote breaking the patterns of naïve belief. This approach is exploratory, experimental, and student centered. It involves hands-on activities and observations of the natural world. Student autonomy and initiative are encouraged. Students are expected to be able to generate varying hypotheses about natural phenomena through group discussion, and then test their hypotheses. Higher level thinking is encouraged and is clearly required for this approach to be successful.

(Constructing Knowledge in the Classroom.)

However, the teacher must accommodate the reality of course content requirements, and external assessments. Any course in science must minimally contain these subject areas of learning:

1) Students need to learn the definitions used in science. For example, in Chemistry the definition of a unit of volume as a cubic centimeter based on the International Standard of the cubic meter must be learned; and also that it is the space which a piece of matter occupies. For units of weight, students must learn that the standard unit is the kilogram and that it is the amount of matter that an object has.

3) Students need to learn the relationships between the 'facts'. For example, all substances have densities unique to the substance and the density is equal to the weight of a substance divided by its volume. These varying densities determine which substances float, sink, or are suspended in other substances.

4) Students need to learn the attributes of matter and energy. For example, all samples of the same substance have the same density, no matter how large or small the piece of the substance is.

5) Students need to develop a theoretical basis for interpreting the nature of phenomenon in science. For example, the density of any gas is equal to its molar mass divided by its molar volume; and that the molar volume of any gas is ideally the same for all gases.

6) Students need to comprehend the laws of science that are well established. For example, Charles' Law states that the expansion in volume of any gas is proportional to its temperature in Kelvin degrees.

Studies in education indicate that learning proceeds primarily from prior knowledge. Consequently, learners will distort material presented in class. It is important to understand how prior knowledge affects classroom instruction. The constructivist approach depends on continuity, because new knowledge is constructed from old.

The question is can students construct accurate knowledge from their naive beliefs if these pre-existing ideas are flawed? I believe that they can be if enough time is available to guide student enquiry in the footsteps of the 'great men of science' who overcame the 'naïve beliefs' of their entire society and scientific history to discover the 'laws' of nature.

For the most part, the requirements of curriculum content externally imposed simply does not allow the time for a unified constructivist approach to teaching this subject, and the great variability of the students taking the subject makes cognitive methods less time effective.

Changes in understanding have been found to occur over long periods of time, involving successive approximation, and only gradually and becoming different from 'common sense' knowledge. Learning has been found to involve three different scales of changes. Students assimilate additional experience to their current beliefs. Sometimes an experience causes a small cognitive shock that leads the learner to put ideas together differently. Rarely, learners undertake major transformations of thought that affect everything from fundamental assumptions to their ways of seeing, conceiving, and talking about their experience.

(Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience)

The behaviorist approach can be a useful adjunct to cognitive teaching because operant conditioning and behaviorism offer efficient methods for teaching the basic definitions and facts that are necessary to learn before a greater depth of understanding of a science such as chemistry can be expected.

These methods are especially applicable to the students who are categorized as 'regular track' or 'special eduation'. For a significant percentage of these students, the sophisticated cognitive constructivist approach would be too time consuming given the externally imposed curriculum requirements.

Prior knowledge has diverse and problematic effects on learning. Conceptual change must resolve and overcome this paradox. Prior knowledge is related to both failure and success. Refinement, restructuring, and conceptual change occurs incrementally and gradually; it is hard work and takes a long time. Success begins with an educator's cultivation of the ability to identify the students' viewpoint, and to discover the seeds from which knowledge can grow. People are naturally active, life-long learners.

(Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience)

It is unfortunate when surveying the available curricula, and I mean the materials available from the numerous publishers of textbooks, software, and related instructional materials, to find very little methodology incorporating either a cognitive constructivist approach, or a behaviorist approach. Instead, the textbooks and software are surprising similar, with the traditional 'read, memorize, quiz, and learn' philosophy remarkably prevalent.

This places the burden of improving methodology on the shoulders of the dedicated individual teachers who alone face the daunting task of modernizing the curriculum in a way that will demonstrate improved student academic performance. Why haven't the leaders of public education and the leaders of the education industry addressed these issues?

TEACHERS FIRST!

Anderson, Tom - Cognition of Learning Mathematics & Science

Brooks, J. G. and Brooks, M. G. In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1993)

Bruning, R. H., Schraw, G. J., & Ronning, R. R. - Cognitive Psychology and Instruction,

Chapters 13 & 14; 3rd Ed. (1999) Merrill, Englewood Clift, NJ

Classroom Compass

Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experiences

Roschelle, Jeremy - Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)