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Scientific method

Science lab
(Image credit: Jack Amick)

 

When many people think of science, they think of the tools of science, much like the photo of a traditional science lab above shows. They think of beakers, and hypotheses, and labs, and think that this is science. Playing with the tools of scientists does not make one a scientist, or become a scientist. Thinking like a scientist does.

Science is a way of thinking, a way of reasoning about the world. People who reject science, reject reason. Science is not a linear process, it is a dynamic way of thinking and collaborating about the world.

There are flaws with this way of thinking, as there are with all ways of knowing. Science cannot answer ethical questions. Scientific results get fabricated, exaggerated, and misunderstood all the time, since they are produced and understood by human beings. However, the process of reproducing results with additional experiments ensures that, over time, bad ideas get weeded out of what we know to be true about the world. Ideas which are correct get re-inforced by additional experiments.

Teaching science as a series of facts someone else has discovered about the world does not give them the opportunity to learn about the process through which those "facts" were discovered. The process, in this case, is far more important than the result. Our schools need to spend far more time dealing the messiness of the process of science, and less time focusing on the results of the scientific process. Students learn process through practicing it.

We also need to recognize that the standard science lab write-up emphasizes a linear process of science, which does not exist anywhere in the scientific community. Following someone else’s lab to learn how to use the tools of science is fine, but one must actually design experiments for oneself in order to learn the process. We need to de-sitcom science education.
 

Separate science history from science inquiry

Zombie Feynman on Science
(Image credit: XKCD)

It occurrs to me that we have two goals for science education. One is to teach students what existing science is known, and how it can be applied to our lives, or how it is interesting to us. I call this first purpose, "Science History." The other goal is to teach the process of doing science, of thinking scientifically. This purpose, I call "Science Inquiry."

I think we should separate these two purposes into separate courses or domains, because the purpose of the first is diluting the effect of the second. Many children finish school thinking that science is a collection of facts known about the world, and do not spend enough time learning how those "facts" were derived.

Labs are a good start to learning science inquiry, but many experiments done in labs have issues.

  • The labs are rarely designed by students. This leads to underestimate the difficulty in designing a good experiment, and to over-emphasize the paperwork portion of science.
     
  • The labs rarely take more than 30 or 40 minutes to complete. Students rarely have to repeat a lab because of experimental error. They learn from this experience that laboratory science can be easily parcelled into sitcom-like episodes.
     
  • Students do not learn enough about the reasons why we have designed lab reports, and think of the portions of a lab report as blanks to be filled in. Quite often they will fake data so as to complete the boxes faster.

A Science Inquiry course would focus on the process of doing science, and less on the students learning existing scientific knowledge. Obviously students would be likely to find connections between the Science History course and the labs that they design, and hopefully they will also see connections between their Science Inquiry and other domains of knowledge.

A Science History course would focus on what existing scientific discoveries we have made, who made these discoveries, and what are the stories around these discoveries, and how these discoveries impact our lives. It might cover some principles behind the philosophy of science, as well as the connections between science and other domains of knowledge (like math for example).

Right now, many schools see Science Inquiry as optional or even an inconvenience. This suggests to me that some people think that thinking scientifically is an inconvenience or too troublesome to teach, and this scares me. While "thinking scientifically" isn’t the only way to think, it’s an important one, and certainly, we should all learn how to do it. I also think that Science Inquiry is indistinguishable from thinking scientifically. If you remove the inquiry, then it isn’t really science.

End of Year Experiential Assessments

I’m very excited as this will be my first year using experiential assessments as an end of year task.  Every year before this I have been required to produce a "final exam" for each of my subjects, while for the past three years at least I have known the futility of measuring students ability accurately with a single exam.   The school I work at is still in the early stages of adopting experiential exams, but they have had them running for at least one year with success.

The basic idea is, the students get given a final task to complete, which is a cross-disciplinary assessment of what the students have learned how to do this year.  The objective is that a few subjects get together and find a common guiding question for their assessment.  Teachers from these subjects work together to create a task which can be assessed using their own criteria from each subject.  We’ve chosen to break the task into pieces for each subject, but ideally there should be one complete task for the student to do.

Here are some examples, which I can finally share because the students have been introduced to the tasks themselves (and so they are no longer a secret).  I have to tell you, I have been waiting to write this blog post for more than a month!  Note that the students will have several hours to complete these tasks, broken up into 4 or sometimes 5 blocks of time.

In the 9th grade, our guiding question is, "How as Imperialism affected our society?" and we are looking a specific focus of Central and South America and the colonization of those parts of the world.  In Mathematics, my task was, "Determine how much sugar could a galleon carry?" which was relevant because sugar is an example of a trade resource upon which the colonies depended.  Here is the task sheet I provided to the students.  You can see that the task is open-ended, that there is no one specific solution, and that what I will be grading the students on is the process they will be going through.  The task also involves a wide variety of mathematics from the year, and I can generally assume that if the students are unsure about how to include a specific piece of mathematics, then they didn’t really get it.

This is also the kind of task that students might actually find interesting.  In the creation of their diagrams to help explain themselves, there is a large amount of creative license which can be applied.  When the students decide on their assumptions, which they have to justify, they can have all sorts of wild assumptions, provided there is some reasonable basis for their assumption.

Galleons are also pretty cool.  They have been popularized  by movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, so the students are very likely to have some personal idea of what they are like.  The photo shown here is from the Wikipedia article about Galleons, and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

This type of task also lends itself well to differentiation, as the students who wish to present more of their knowledge and understanding can take into account more factors which could affect the amount of sugar these Galleons could hold.  For example, the sugar to be transported would almost certainly be done so in as water-tight barrels as the merchants could find.

In the 10th grade, our guiding question is, "How do we best get our voice heard? Is it through Science, Math, or Language?"  We start by gathering evidence in all three subjects, specifically on the environmental effect of large multinational organization policies can have on small impoverished countries.  We complete our week with a trial, in which students will present their scientific or mathematical evidence to their teachers.  They will also role-play either French speaking or Spanish speaking people’s of said countries (we originally said that this case was a comparison of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) who have been affected by the multinational organization.

Image on the right is of the island of Hispaniola and is from a Wikipedia article about said island.  It is also licensed under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve collected some data sources, through my contacts on Facebook actually, and will share these sources with the 10th grade students as a starting place.  The best part is, most of the data is largely unprocessed, which means the students will have to do this themselves!  In mathematics, the objective is to analyze the data and depending on whether they side with the multinational or the local population, build a case to present in the trial.  Here is a copy of the task sheet we provided.

The day after the trial, students reflect on their contribution in each subject and we wrap up the trial with some conclusions.  It will be really interesting to see what results.

I’m pretty pleased with the design of our experiential exams this year, and I’ll talk more about how well they went after I’ve finished this week, which looks like it will be extremely busy.

Networked communities and E-learning Opportunities in Mathematics and Science

How can a networked community could be embedded in the design of authentic learning experiences in math or science?

Part of my ETEC 533 course is to examine networked communities, such as Second Life (as an example of a multipersion world simulation), using resources such as PBS Nova Adventures (which provides the ability to hold virtual field trips), and Western’s Integrated Laboratory Network (which allows students to complete a variety of lab experiments online). What these different systems have in common is that they provide a simulation of a real-life learning experience, accessed through the internet.

One immediate question I have is, do these networked communities have any value?  This question is relevant because before one can decide on the "How" one really needs to engage the "Why" question.

It is hotly debated for example whether Second Life is in fact a useful teaching tool1.  Having explored Second Life myself, it seems to me that with proper preparation (read here a LOT of time) one could construct a number of simulations for this faux-world that students could explore.  One could easily represent socio-dynamics and economics using Second Life, but as for Mathematical applications, I think these might be few and far between, and end up being contrived.  There are a number of science communities formed within the Second Life platform, which from a cursory inspection seem to have educational value.  Our instructor had us run through a tour of an astronomical observatory, and although I’ve seen better simulations of the solar system, the ability to communicate live with other students about the simulation probably makes this a valuable learning experience.

The discussion in class of the Integrated Laboratory Network (ILN) brought up some useful points.  The first point, brought up by Nancy was that the fact that the lab time needed to be booked ahead of time meant she really felt like she had to be prepared.  A number of other students in my class agreed with this point, and it would be interesting to see if this effect would happen in a high school settings since of course the preparation would involving learning.  Another valid point, brought up by Ian, was that the simulation felt more like "following a recipe instead of doing science", suggesting that the experiment wasn’t as valuable as a result.  Another student, Tris, reflected that at his school the design portion of a lab was an extremely important part of the experimental process.  My thought was that the use of this equipment physically would be extremely unlikely at the high school level and that if a student created an experiment which required highly specialized equipment, an ILN might be the only way to do it.

As for the simulated field trips, one of the greatest values I can see here is the ability to "explore" a location which is otherwise inaccessible.  I can imagine a time in the not-too-distance future where students would be able to book time using a highly durable robot, and explore Antarctica or Mars, both of which are places that are either extremely expensive or improbable places to visit.  Already there are excellent video field trips of many places in our world which are highly fascinating and learning rich experiences.  One obvious flaw with a virtual field trip is the lack of a tactile experience.  Without taste, smell and touch, the experience would be sensory deprived.

Of these three examples, it seems that only Second Life has a true social learning aspect built into its design.  An ILN or a virtual field trip really lacks that social context which benefits the learning for so many of our students.  It will be fascinating when computer processing becomes powerful enough to allow for multiple users to experience a virtually life-like simulation of a place caught on camera only.  When this happens, and if the people can communicate during the experience, then social learning affordances will be relevant to this type of learning.

Now suppose we wanted to design an actual classroom learning experience which would use one of these tools.  The easiest to do this for would be the ILN, since it has been specifically designed to be an instructional aid for laboratory science.  One would have students design detailed experiments, and then have a wide variety of different tools available to them to complete their experiments, through the use of the Integrated Laboratory Network.  Students would have to discuss their experiments ahead of time and reflect on their experiments afterward to allow for a social context for the activity.

To use the Second Life platform effectively, I think that a simulation could be constructed for the students to access, and then students would be given free reign to experiment within the science simulation (the orbiting of the planets seems like a good example for instance) and discuss their discoveries.  One would lack much control over the specific information learned by any particular student, but it could be a valuable learning experience, particularly for the students who need help visualizing three dimensional objects.

The virtual field trips would allow for hostile locations to be examined by students.  For example one could use footage of an exploration of the deep sea bed and show students how even in an hostile environment, life thrives.  This would make for an excellent learning opportunity in a biology classroom.

None of the resources we have been shown looks like it would be useful for a mathematics classroom without an enormous amount of preparation.  One could imagine that one could show a highly specialized simulation of a concept which involves a fair bit of mathematics, but it seems to me that any such simulations would be too contrived to be useful learning activities.

It is clear that there are uses of these networked communities within education, and even within science education there are opportunities for powerful learning to occur through these communities.  One doesn’t have to look very hard to find examples of things in science worth learning which are for various reasons completely inaccessible for students (imagine setting up a virtual black hole for students to look at for instance).  For this reason alone, I think these network communities are worth exploring, but I think that the inclusion of community needs to be stronger in most of these online systems (Second Life excluded) as this will allow for a strengthening of the learning opportunities available.

References:

  1. Aldritch, C. (2006) Second Life is Not a Teaching Tool, accessed from http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2006/11/second-life-is-not-teaching-tool.html on March 31st, 2009.
  2. Cancilla, D. A., Albon, S. P. (In Press) Moving the Laboratory Online: Challenges and Options, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks.