What Makes Science Hard? Are the sciences inherently more difficult than the humanities? Apparently many people perceive them to be so. Sheila Tobias, one of the plenary speakers a t the 9th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education described her attempt to investigate the basis for the perception that science is hard. She decided to ask someone. Students who think sciences are hard cannot tell us why because they generally drop science courses and are not available to answer the question. If they were around, such students probably exhibit traits that would make them voor commentators on the question; they lack confidence, are unsophisticated in their outlook. and eenerallv exhibit an inabilitv to concentrate. If they were available for questioning, thkir answers would most likely form the basis of a self-fulfilling prophecy and provide little fundamental insight into understanding whether "science is hard". Tobias struck on the idea of obtaining insights from snccessful faculty peers in the humanities who attempted to learn science under more or less the same conditions that students do. The subject was physics, taught to 30 nonscientist but mature scholars a t the University of Chicago. The impressions of those scholars, who were successful in their own nonscience disciplines, were collected in a number of ways, and they provide the basis for some interesting speculations about how we are perceived to teach science. One problem mentioned by the nonscience scholars is their perception that they lacked sufficient prior knowledge, experience, or intuition about the physical world that could have helped order the information they were receiving. I t is interesting to recognize that these mature scholars probably experienced many of the same natural phenomena in their everyday existence that scientists have and purport to understand. Yet the nonscientists did not "see" these and the scientist-teacher could not make the connections. An imnortant factor in Tobias' observations is that we apparently need to establish connections to realitv: .. what we do conventionally in terms of demonstrations, experiments, etc. does not seem to do the job. The time-honored use of demonstration andlor traditional laboratory experiences were no help with phenomena. These devices often led to confusion. "I could not follow what was being described" and "I could not grasp what was actuallv - havvenine" .. " are tvnical .. vhrases that described the mature nonscientist's impressions of demonstrations or laboratorv work. Obviouslv. the teacher's oresnmntion that demo&rations or labor.%ory assignment; clarify; or enrich, a lecture presentation was in error: these attemvts confused the d t w l ~ ~ p m e natt ,least for the maturr nonscientist taking this wurst.. (.'lcwls, u,e need ru be careful in the mrrhc~rl.;me use to bring phenomena to bear on the exposition of our subject. We may feel-perhaps intuitively-that phenome-
na are important in teaching, hut we need to pay more attention to how we do it. Apparently students need to be told, and perhaps shown, the obvious. Indeed this need was expressed by the nonscientists by phrases such as "I had no way of tellina what was important and what was not". The obia as study revealed a difference in the perception of the uses of the lecture in the educational process. The physicist said he tried "to build knowledge structures to lead the student somewhere". But the mature nonscientists saw the lectures as moving "along their preordained tracks in a way suggesting that nothing I could ever say could ever slow down the train". The scientist preferred a sequential, analytic style of conceptualization in which understanding emerged through the reciprocal nature of science and mathematics. In the humanities, it is often the practice to present one major idea and then "toy with it and kick i t around". This difference in style seems to be one of the important factors in the perceived difficulty of science. When the nonscientists did see the point of introducing a phenomenon, they preferred to think about it in words. Understanding came through articulation and rearticulation of ideas and experiences, which takes time. Avoarentlv time was a precious~commodityto the physicist-teacher because the scholar-learners commented on the rapid pace of the lectures. The nonscientists perceived they needed more time to think. If the scientist-teacher believed the pace was correct, we can onlv conclude that there was no reason for - ~ the ~ humanist-student to think. In effect the material presented was a "set-piece" which the students nrohablv could have obtained h i reading. If this analysis is ialid, what is left for the lecturer? The humanist-students thought that the lectures seemed hard to understand because some of the words used caused confusion. For example, to the scientist, zero was in the middle of plus and minus, but to the humanist it meant "an absence or void". In a similar vein, the word displacement meant moving from one place to another, whereas i t had "deeper social implications" to the humanists. These specific examples as a source of confusion may be understandable for mature scholars, and, hence excusable. However, the general principle that the words we use with our students must be carefully chosen to convey the meanings we intend must be recognized. The careless and imprecise use of language is probably the cause of much confusion in our students. The conclusions of the Tobias study are worth inspecting even though they involve mature learners and a science other than chemistry. They point to some of the factors that others perceive are the causes for "science being hard". At least now we know some of the things we need to overcome JJL but not necessarily how. That's the challenge. ~
Volume 63 Number 9
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September 1986
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737
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