Does anyone else have a good lesson on scientific
thinking?
Everything I do in class tries to reinforce how I
think that science works. I took this method from
Dewey Dykstra who I believe uses it in his college
program.
Each lesson -- there might be more than one lesson per
class period -- begins with me presenting the students
a situation requiring a specific prediction. Perhaps
it is me showing them a speaker cone and how the
motion of the cone would change if I increased the
pitch of the sound. Then the students write down what
they think will happen and give reasons why they think
that their prediction will occur. These reasons are
essentially their mental model of the topic.
Then, we test the predictions. In this case, I raise
the pitch of the source, and the students look at and
feel the speaker cone to see whether or not their
prediction is correct. If the prediction is correct,
then the students have reason to believe that their
explanations are good. If it isn't right -- and you'd
be amazed how often it isn't even on this topic --
then the students are asked to modify their
explanations to include this new piece of data.
This process continues iteratively until they have as
complete a model of the topic as I'd like for a high
school class.
I like this method for three reasons. First, it seems
that the students learn and retain physics better than
in some other ways. My results on the FCI show gains
of about 0.5, which seems to be pretty good. However,
I do have a small n, so feel free to take it with a
grain of salt.
Second, I think that this approach is more memorable.
Most of the students find that they don't have to
study much for tests, because they feel like they
still remember what we did.
Finally, the students are acting like scientists of a
sort. Although are not coming up with their own
experiments, they are coming up with and testing their
models. They are making opinions based on evidence
from the world. Many start doing this in other areas
as well.
If you are interested in seeing some of my lessons and
how I progress through the topics check out
<http://tochnit.jchsofthebay.org/~zkossover/> and
select F Block Activities. It has been updated in a
few weeks, but you should still be able to see what
I'm talking about.