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Re: [Phys-l] Inquiry



I'm not sure what you mean here.

I think part of the vision of guided inquiry is that students learn in ways that are similar to how scientists learn new things...but doing, discussing, being wrong often, writing, reading, etc. The adult scientists are guided by the discourse in their community. The student scientists are guided by the teacher and the instructional materials.

In the adult community, there is a common language, and a common conceptual framework or a few competing frameworks. In the student community there is the common language developed as they experiment and work to develop understanding, and the frameworks supported by the teacher and the instructional materials.

So in what ways are the students not learning like adult scientists?

It seems to me that when we learn science as scientists, we are working inductively to find patterns and then deductively from those patterns to see if they predict well enough. In so doing we formulate ideas about the patterns and how to express them. The problem with so much of school science is that it focuses on the deductive piece, but provides little basis for the conceptual understanding that comes from trying to make sense of the inductive results. So the students learn a limited set of way of applying the physics "rules" but have little understanding of the meaning and content of the "rules."

joe


Joseph J. Bellina, Jr. Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556

On Feb 24, 2009, at 9:07 PM, David Craig wrote:

I don't mean to be cheeky. I DO generally support a lot of what PER
is trying to accomplish, and use many PER methods in my own courses,
to the extent that time and resources permit.

That said, I often find myself with this question: when are students
supposed to learn how to learn like adults? (Like adults must, that
is.)

[Like throwing gasoline on the fire, I know....]

David Craig


<http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/>



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