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Re: AP students



Joe Bellino wrote, in response to my comments:

This response is a bit confusing. It starts out saying we are
in agreement and then says that we are not because time doesn't permit
us to do it the right way.
I have real problem with language like "discovery learning" because it
implies that to learn students have to play around until they figure it
out for themselves. I think that lanquage does a disservice to a
pedagogy that tries to consciously create situations in which students
can learn for themselves, because that it the best way for them to
learn. It isn't random play...it is guided inquiry.
No scientist that I know of goes into a lab and just does random
measurements with no prior ideas about what might be done. Graduate
students generally work within a context provided by the group they work
in.

OK, I plead guilty to some sloppy use of the terms. I agree that
"guided inquiry" is a more properly descriptive phrase than
"discovery." In fact, your criticisms of "discovery" as unguided
play, are why I have not become an advocate of the scheme in
education in general. All too, often, in the hands of an ill-prepared
teacher, it becomes just that (unguided play) and enables the student
to come to incorrect conclusions that go uncorrected by the teacher.

My comment about "if we had time" is just that. Even in the guise of
guided inquiry, this method takes up time by the barrelfull, and a
course that bills itself as a "survey" could not hope to cover even a
reasonable fraction of the relevant topics in the time allowed. What
is reasonable, it seems to me, is to do some things via the "guided
discovery," route, but to use other methods as well, for different
topics.

Another aspect of this is pointed out forcefully (too forcefully in
my view, but that's another debate) by Collins & Pinch in their book
"The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science." They say (at
different places) that "facts and reasons [are always] ambiguous,"
and later that "we do not think. . .that scientific facts speak for
themselves." It is valuable for students to learn this, but it can
also be very confusing, so the "guidance" in the inquiry approach
needs to be carefully structured. And, both as a matter of
practicality and because it is not always possible for the students
to come to a "correct" conclusion, especially on subtle points, used
rather sparingly. After all, if all a student does over the course of
a year is one unrelated experiment after another, how are they to
ever come to any conclusions about the unity of their topic?

It will take more time, we will have to cover less content, but I don't
think the model suggested in Hugh's note is a fair assessment of what
needs to be done. It rather reads like an excuse for not doing it.

I'm not sure I understand what Joe is referring to here. What is
"unfair" about arguing for a more student-centered approach to the
teaching of science? I though that's what I was doing. If that's not
the impression I left, I apologize, and I guess I'll have to go back
and re-read what I wrote and see where I went wrong. In the last
sentence if we change "excuse" to "reason" and add the word
"exclusively" to the end of the sentence, I might be more inclined to
agree with it.

Once again, I think that we need some sense of the history and philosophy
of science to better frame out discussions of pedagogy.

Agreed.

By the way, I agree that scientists use procedures that are generally
accepted, but I don't think they are arrived at deductively...unless
they are consciously trying to confirm or deny the deduction from a
theory...I think accepted laboratory proceedures are arrived at
inductively...ie what works best based on experience.

I don't think I said anything that contradicts Joe's statement. I was
talking about figuring out new questions based on some hypothesis,
which can be used to verify or falsify the hypothesis. Sometimes that
is done deductively. Sometimes it is a flash of insight, and
sometimes it is a routine procedure that has worked before.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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