What Can Research in Education Do for Teachers? A gap exists between the chemistry taught in the classroom and the chemistry that the world finds "useful". A similar gap exists between the day-to-day activities of teachers and the implications of current research in science education. Often i t is difficult for a teacher to cross that gap to find how research in science education can help in the classroom. The interested teacher needs to know where t o look, what to look for, how to interpret the specialized language used, and how to translate the results into action. Most teachers tend t o he intuitive when they teach. They draw in an empirical way on a body of examples, often anecdotal. Much teaching is done by analogy. The current interest in the quality of science education provides a strong impetus to look a t what research in education has to say that may be pertinent t o science teaching. For example, one interesting set of ideas comes from the literature describing better ways to teach reading and writing. Obviously, one reads t o gain an understanding from texts. From this point of view, the teaching of reading involves teachine technioues both to gain understandine and t o monitor on2s curre& level of unlderstanding. The cey word here is "understandine". Psvcholow ~ r o v i d e ssome insieht into what i t means & understanz text. Most psyciologista would agree that t o understand some new piece of information involves relating i t to a mentally represented schema, that is, integrating it with already existing knowledge. What does all of this have to do with science education? Currently, o w scientific heritaae is extensive, hut i t is also a counteri&uitive understanding of the physical world. Our microscopic interpretation of phenomena often belies the macrosc6pic manifestation. We should want to teach some aspects of that understanding to our students, and we should
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want them t o grasp the nature of the scientific process and how i t yields scientific understanding of our world. The messaee t o science teachers from the research on reading is a obvio& Students reading a science text (or listening teacher) must gain understanding by relating these activities to what they know, this requires an active, constructive effort on the part of the student. I t also leads to an apparently paradoxic& situation. T o understand means to &late to extant schemata, but the goal of science teaching is to impart new (for the student) schemata for the physical world. That the validity of the student-held schemata must be changed is evident from a number of examples illustrated by those who study the general idea of misconceptions. Piaget, among others, has documented a number of misconceptions commonly held by young children. For example, young children believe that suear ceases to exist when it is dissolved in water. a piece of Styrofoam weighs nothing at all, and shadows are made out of "stuff' in the same sense that a chair or desk is.
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Thus we cannot affect students' understandine without recognizing the depth and tenacity of pre-existing knowledge. First we must find better wavs of re~resentinaconceptual structures, and we need to de;elop methods t h i t will facilitate change in these representations. A knowledge of what science education tells us about the process of understanding may not tell us explicitly how to be more effective teachers, but it does provide clues to where to start looking for possible solutions t o some of the problems. This seems a more promising approach then to rely excluJJL sively on intuition in teaching.
Volume 66
Number 12 December 1989
975
