Day 4 Historiography

Wang and Marsh's article dealt with humanizing science in the classroom, and teacher's perceptions and actual practice during instructional time concerning inclusion of science history in science courses. First of all I liked that this was a research article which allowed me to utilize some of the statistical techniques I learned recently in Quantitative Analysis I to help me understand the article's methods, analysis, and conclusions. The main point of the article was to compare how teachers valued inclusion of history of science with how much or often they actually did in practice. All in all it seemed teachers consistently agreed on the importance of history of science (except for elementary school students), but rarely actually followed through to the same degree in the classroom, for a variety of reasons. The authors also interviewed several teachers for more perspective, and I found myself nodding in agreement as I read their comments, especially about the lack of time to teach all the topics in a given semester. This is often true even when history of science isn't included, as there is a lot of pressure today on teachers in all subject areas to be sure students do well on standardized tests, whether they are actually learning anything or are just being trained to be good test takers.

The authors defend their conclusions through statistical analyses, the teacher interviews, and by describing the framework in which history of science can be included. The three componenents are conceptual, procedural, and contextual understanding. They also touch on some topics from some of my other readings for this course, including Kuhn and Conant as they lay out the efforts that have been made over the years to humanize science education. They describe the golden age of science education after the launch of Sputnik, attempts to form an enlightened citizenry, and the standards-based science education reform that started in the 1980's. I have always felt even though there are certain basic ideas and terminology that students must know to be competent in science, it is much more important to help young people be able to think critically, evaluate data, and make decisions.

The authors give in my opinion valid reasons for conceptual understanding being brought about through history of science, and they consistently cite other studies and authors to support their points. To achieve procedural understanding they show how students work in class can parallel scientists' work both in the past and present. I appreciated how they point out that the process of investigation is rife with errors, and great discoveries such as antibiotics can come about through apparent laboratory "mistakes". They also stress the importance of deductive reasoning and not having students just perform cook-book labs that merely verify what is already known. This brings me back again to the Learning Cycle and the workshop that inspired me to pursue my PhD. In the Learning Cycle the students perform the procedure and then develop the concepts, not unlike what scientists have done for centuries. The potential for humanizing science in this context is limitless. History of science for contextual understanding is as important as the previous two, in my opinion. The authors discuss psychological, social, and cultural factors and give clear examples involving Einstein, Curie, and others. We need to take advantage of children's natural curiosity and not turn them off to science by numbing them with terms, book work, and tests. Young people naturally want to figure things out and we need to nurture that innate desire to be a scientist. We can inspire students with the work of scientists of their countries of origin or ethnicity, their humanitarian concerns involving diseases and hunger, and even gender. My students always found it interesting that it was a woman who did most of the original work that enabled Watson and Crick to elucidate the double helix. Students need to realize that scientists and developers like Bill Gates (who also happens to be the world's welathiest man) are held in very high esteem in certain cultures.

In conclusion the teachers in the study reported a lot of the same feelings and opinions I have had over the years, including; it is important to humanize science ans scientists, intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivation is necessary, science/politics/social factors are often closely tied together, scientists must work together and build on other scientists' work, and diverse cultural and heritage role models can be displayed. I disagree with the teachers about elementary students not benefitting from historical perspectives and the lack of procedural understanding.

Bibliographic Note:

Hsingchi A. Wang and David D. Marsh, "Science Instruction with a Humanistic Twist: Teacher's Perception and Practice in Using the History of Science in Their Classrooms", Science & Education, 2002, 11:169-189.