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Thank you, David, your response is useful.


On Apr 14, 2005, at 1:00 PM, David Smith wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology  
> Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related  
> institutions.
> *********************************************************************** 
> ******
>
> Ted wrote:
>> For all the good intentions of the written statements on science and
>> evolution, they strike me as similar to some of our explanatory
>> exhibit labels. We
>> struggle to make them correct and concise, yet in the end they have
>> meaning
>> mainly for those who already know what they mean. The problem is that
>
>> we are
>> reverting to teaching by telling, and many of us are in the science
>> center world
>> because we thought there was a better approach--learning by doing,
>> developing
>> understanding from one's own experience.
>
> Then Clifford wrote:
>
> I agree inquiry based learning is almost always a better approach, much
>
> our first choice.
> But does that mean teaching by telling is never valid?
> How can we show through inquiry based learning that a whole field of
> scientific knowledge is valid when someone comes along to claim that it
>
> isn't?
>
> The possible effectiveness of telling depends sensitively on the
> receiver.  You can tell me all day that science centers need to just
> tell people some things are facts, but that does not fit with my
> conceptual models of learning or of science and so I am very unlikely  
> to
> integrate what you are telling me into my view of the world.  I may  
> just
> walk away, or I may actually indicate some level of agreement, or I may
> even be able to give you back a cogent explanation of your argument.   
> In
> most cases, people would count this as learning, but if you really
> probed, you would find that this knowledge is superficial, that what I
> have learned is how Clifford Wagner thinks the world works.  I have not
> integrated it into my own views of how the world works and I would
> argue, therefore, that I have not actually learned it.  Most
> importantly, it is fragile knowledge, once I no longer have a  
> connection
> to you, I am likely to forget what you have told me.  This happens all
> the time in science teaching - Eric Mazur at Harvard tells a wonderful
> story of one of his Harvard physics students taking a conceptual test
> and asking him, "Dr. Mazur, should we answer this the way you taught  
> us,
> or the way we know it works in the real world?"  When that students is
> filmed at graduation (In Private Universe, for example), 3 years later,
> she will be very unlikely to recall the physics teacher's model.
>
> On the other hand, if my world view is aligned with yours, then what  
> you
> tell me will make strong conncetions and be integrated into my
> understanding.  So the goal, if we want people to accept the scientific
> evidence and explanation about evolution is to change their conceptual
> structures and epistemologies.  Changing people is extraordinarily
> difficult.  They old light bulb joke is all too true, the person really
> has to want to change.  This is where telling completely breaks down.
> Nothing you tell me is going to make me want to change.  The only thing
> that will make me want to change my ideas is when I have experiences
> that cause conflicts within my own conceptual models.  These  
> experiences
> do not cause change overnight, either.  Change happens in stages and
> regression is common.  New research suggests that it takes ten weeks
> worth of experiences to move 8th graders to actually adopt a scientific
> concept of conservation of mass.  We need to be cognizant of this as we
> set goals and objectives for our expereinces, which intersect with
> learners for only an instant in their learning career.
>
> Eric wrote:
>>   As John Dewey said about 100 ago: <<Surely if there is any knowledge
>> which is of most worth it is knowledge of the ways by which anything
> is
>> entitled to be called knowledge...<snip>
>
> Clifford wrote:
> Dewey is fabulous.  That is a great statement.
>
> But Clifford, that statement of Dewey's explicitly contradicts what you
> said before about telling.  It says that the learner has to create her
> own understanding out of experience and moreover, needs to be  
> reflective
> about how she comes to know.  When you follow what Dewey suggests, you
> must be willing for the learner to arrive at a different understanding
> than you did.  Otherwise, you do not have inquiry, you have a game  
> where
> the learner is trying to guess the teacher's ideas.  Much of school
> "inquiry" unfortunately falls into this mode with teacher's being
> deathly afraid that the student will "get it wrong."  If you are really
> implementing inquiry, you need to find another way of assessing
> knowledge than right or wrong.
>
> To insist on right and wrong creates false dichotomies that are very
> destructive ("you can't be religious is you are scientific," for
> example) and unscientific.  We do our visitors a great disservice when
> we pretend that all of science is about one accepted explanation that
> sits atop the heap of discarded ideas.  At one scientific society
> meeting I attended, my advisor and another geologist ended up screaming
> at each other across a packed room, while the speaker stood quietly up
> front.  They were both very highly regarded scientists working on the
> same data sets, but I can assure you that they were not dispassionately
> engaged in a search for truth and also that neither convinced the  
> other.
>
> I would suggest that it is far better to engage our visitors in  
> pursuing
> fundamental questions, especially those for which there is no known
> answer.  We should show the very human face of science, work to infuse
> the idea that anyone can be a scientist, act on the thesis that  
> children
> are born scientists and that science is a fundamental aspect of the
> human condition, and ecourage a mode of discussion that critically
> probes and evaluates the lumpy, bumpy, imperfect science that our
> visitors and our scientists generate at the same time that it afirms  
> and
> values every contributor to the discussion regardless of the quality of
> their explanation.  Having tried to do this in my own classroom, I know
> that it is extremely difficult to do well and that the critical first
> step is to separate the person from the ideas.
>
> Clifford also wrote:
>
>>> No.  Just like you can't learn the periodic table from inquiry on the
>
> museum floor, no one is going to understand the evolution -creation
> controversy without statements made about it.<<
>
> This is getting too long, but here I have to part ways with my all my
> previous discussion and tell you that you are just wrong about this.   
> No
> one handed Mendeleev a Periodic table and said "Here, you need to know
> this!"  We got a periodic table because scientists started noticing
> things about the elements, especially that there were patterns to their
> chemical interactions, they tried to see if the patterns extended to
> other elements, they had the insight to arrange elements in rows and
> columns (but not in the form we all know, at least not at first)
> according to the patterns they saw.  In other words, it was deeloped by
> inquiry.  Visitors cannot and should not recreate all this work, but
> they can be given access to the data or to model analogs and asked how
> they would make sense of it themselves.  The various patterns that they
> develop could be shared with others.  See
> http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/txcetp/cr/science/periodic/ 
> IntroductionToPerio
> dicTrends-Activities.pdf for one possible example and
> http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/HigherEdTitle/productCd 
> -0471220876,cour
> seCd-CH0600,pageType-copy,page-tableOfContents.html for an entire
> undergraduate chemistry course through inquiry.
>
> The same thing is true about creation-evolution.  You can't just say it
> and presto! have everyone believe.  You can, however, share the data.
> How many of our visitors have ever seen chimpanzee, gorilla, and human
> DNA sequences side by side or seen the data from Hawaii and other
> islands about island biogeography and speciation?  We can show them the
> data and try to tell them what we think it means, but it may actually  
> be
> far more effective to accept a wide range of explanations, including
> some "unscientific" ones and to hold our position in the question  
> rather
> than the answer.
>
> Dave Smith, whose five year old daughter routinely mixes magical and
> scientific explanations of the world together in the most wonderful  
> ways
>
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