DEFINING A N IDENTITY

Science & Technology Education Library

V O L U M E 20

SERIES EDITOR
William W. Cobern, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA
FOUNDING EDITOR
Ken Tobin, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
EDITORIAL BOARD
Henry Brown-Acquay, University College of Education of Winneba, Ghana
Mariona Espinet, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Gurol Irzik, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
Olugbemiro Jegede, The Open University, Hong Kong
Reuven Lazarowitz, Technion, Haifa, Israel
Lilia Reyes Herrera, Universidad Autönoma de Colombia, Bogota, Colombia
Marrisa Rollnick, College of Science, Johannesburg, South Africa
Svein Sj0berg, University of Oslo, Norway
Hsiao-lin Tuan, National Chanhua University of Education, Taiwan
SCOPE
The book series Science & Technology Education Library provides a publication forum
for scholarship in science and technology education. It aims to publish innovative books
which are at the forefront of the field. Monographs as well as collections of papers will
be published.

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
 Defining an
Identity
The Evolution of Science Education as a Field of Research

by
PETER J. FENSHAM
Emeritus Professor of Science Education,
Monash University, Australia

SPRINGER - SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-1-4020-1468-0 ISBN 978-94-010-0175-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0175-5

Printed an acid-free paper

AlI Rights Reserved

© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microf:tlming, recording
or otherwise, without written permis sion from the Publisher, with the exception of
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computer system, for exclusive use by the purchase of the work.
To Christine

With much gratitude for both the positive and the

critical ways you have responded over so many years
to my adventures in science education.
 TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Preface ix
Introduction xi
CHAPTER 1 Science Education: What Defines a Field of
Research? 1
CHAPTER 2 Origins 11
CHAPTER 3 The Researcher as Person 37
CHAPTER 4 The Significance of Research 61
CHAPTER 5 Major Influence on Research 76
CHAPTER 6 Asking Questions 93
CHAPTER 7 The Role of Theory 101
CHAPTER 8 Methodology 114
CHAPTER 9 Evidence of Progression 132
CHAPTER 10 Focus on Content 145
CHAPTER 11 Research to Practice 162
CHAPTER 12 Gender and Science Education 176
CHAPTER 13 Politics and Science Education 183
CHAPTER 14 Science Education, Technology and IT 191
CHAPTER 15 Conclusion: Language and Science Education 200
APPENDIX A Respondents’ Own Significant Publications 211
APPENDIX B Publications of Major Influence by Other
Authors 224
Name Index 238
Subject Index 243

vii
 P R E FA C E

Peter Fensham has given the science education community a wonderfully

different book that I believe will attract many readers. This book about the
identity of science education research is a book for both new and veteran
science education researchers. Veterans reading the book will “identity” with
many of the experiences shared by other researchers. New researchers reading
the book will find help establishing their own personal identity as science
education researchers.
The book traces the evolution of science education as a field of research
hence the title but does so in no ordinary manner. By making use of exten-
sive conversations with established science education researchers in many
countries Fensham weaves a very personal narrative about both the growth
of the field and about the personal, professional growth of researchers. It is
a personal narrative in the sense that the reader hears from dozens of
researchers in their own words. The field of science education research
becomes the personal stories of the field’s many researchers, and the reader
feels invited to ask: Where do I fit in this field? What is lineage for my
research? Who are my research ancestors?
Peter Fensham’s book goes a long way toward helping researchers see
that they are part of a much larger and very worthy enterprise.

William W. Cobern
Series Editor

ix
 INTRODUCTION

So it’s really in retrospect that you see these things. You

don’t always see them at the time.
Rosalind Driver, England

This book is about the emergence of science education as an international field

of research. from three perspectives: its identity as a research field, the
researcher as person, and trends in the research. The data on which it is
based are particularly suitable to address the phenomenon from these three per-
spectives.
The first two of these perspectives have not been discussed previously in
any detail, but the third one, trends in science education research, has been
approached in a number of ways, and I begin by referring briefly to some of
them. My friend and long term colleague at Monash University, Richard White
(2001), has addressed the phenomenon in terms of the trends in the research
over time in his chapter, Science Education, in the AERA’s Fourth Handbook
of Research on Teaching. He draws on two sources of data, research studies
listed in ERIC and the papers that have been published in several leading inter-
national journals for research in science education. In his analysis he compares
these studies by topic and type of study across three decennial reference points
– 1975, 1985, and 1995. The trends he reports are evidence that there have
been several shifts in the foci to which researchers have addressed their ques-
tions about science education, and in the methods they have used to attempt
answers.
Another approach to a study of trends in the research is to undertake some
form of citation analysis over an extended time period. Citations are a measure
of when and how relevant a published study has been to other researchers,
but they are not necessarily an indication of its relative influence on the
development of the research as a whole. In my own approach to these trends,
I endeavour to uncover both the relative importance of sources that have
influenced researchers in the field and which of their own publications they
see as contributing significantly to a trend in the research. Longitudinal
reviews, such as those in the decennial Handbooks of the American Education
Research Association also address the trends over time.
Eybe and Schmidt (2001) in Germany addressed a trend in the phenom-
enon in an interestingly different way. They focussed on how quality has been,
and is recognised in research in science education, and reviewed 81 research
publications in chemical education that were published over a period of years.

xi
xii INTRODUCTION

These were checked against the quality indicators the editors of these research
journals set out in their guidance to authors, and also against any such indi-
cators the authors themselves may have explicitly built into their research
designs at various points. Six categories for quality were established: theory
relatedness, the research question, the methods employed (in quantitative
and qualitative studies), presentation and interpretation of results, implica-
tions for practice and competence in chemistry. This study, although set in a
trend perspective, has as its focus an internal feature of the research, that relates
it more to my first perspective – the identity of science education as a field
of research.
To address the fascinating issue of the identity of science education as a
research field, I begin in Chapter 1 by identifying a number of criteria that
become my means of addressing this issue of identity. Each of Eybe and
Schmidt’s categories of quality is explicitly or implicitly involved in these
criteria.
The second of my perspectives, the science education researcher as person,
became possible through the approach I chose to gather the data to explore
the phenomenon. I set out to let the voices of persons, who have helped to
make the research in science education, tell its story. During my more than
thirty five years in this research area, I have had the opportunity to meet a very
large number of them, and I know that whatever this area now is, it is the
product of their efforts and of others like them. In talking with them in the
formal interviews, and from repeated contacts with many of them, I was aware,
as I was for myself, that research in science education is a reciprocal process.
As it evolves, so can its researchers evolve as persons.
This second perspective has, hitherto, not had much discussion in science
education, but Mason (1998) clearly identified it for the case of research in
mathematics education, when he answered the question, What are the most
significant products of research in mathematics? with ‘The transformations
in the being of the researchers themselves.’ ( p. 357, Sierpinska and Kilpatrick,
1998).
For myself, science education has been the most continuous of my career
research interests since I was invited by the newly established Monash
University to take up a post in 1967 as Professor of Science Education – the
first such professorial appointment in Australia. The intent was quite clear. The
Vice Chancellor and the Dean of Education wanted the university to estab-
lish itself quickly as a leading research university in a number of fields, and
they wanted science education – a hitherto unrecognised field in Australia –
to be one of these.
Why was I invited? By several odd quirks of the academic world, my dual
backgrounds in the physical and social sciences, and my interest in teaching
had become known to the Vice Chancellor of Monash. At that point of my
career I had been a staff member of the Chemistry Department of the University
 INTRODUCTION xiii

of Melbourne for just over a decade. I had published a reasonable number

of papers in solid state and catalytic chemistry, one paper on assessment of
chemistry at the university level that could be described as science educa-
tion, and a sociological paper in which I had shown that the net effect of a
national scholarship scheme for senior secondary students was compounding,
rather than alleviating the disadvantages that existed in Australia’s school
systems. My other substantial academic publication was a book derived from
a three year, anthropological study of a textile company in a small town in
Britain that was undergoing very rapid technological change. This last pub-
lication was the outcome of my participation in the 1950s in an experiment
of the Nuffield Foundation in Britain to encourage physical scientists with a
doctoral degree to undertake a second education in one of the social sciences
and to carry out a research study in it.
As the anthropological study was drawing to a close, I applied for lec-
turing positions in both chemistry and social psychology. The offer that came
from the Chemistry Department at the University of Melbourne determined
that I would return to chemistry teaching and research at least for some time.
Ten years later, the quite unexpected offer from Monash University meant
that I could be in a position that combined both the disciplinary backgrounds
of my somewhat unusual undergraduate and post-graduate education.
In 1992 a young primary teacher who had just joined another university
in Victoria to teach in its Primary Science Methods course approached me
for help. As one member of the development team for a new distance edu-
cation course in science education, she had been allocated the job of putting
together the associated book of literature readings. She wondered how she
might do this, so I gave her an international list of a dozen or so names of
leading researchers, and suggested she ask these persons to choose one of their
papers to go in this volume. In due course, the book of readings appeared,
and I remember it attracted quite some interest, as a very interesting collec-
tion from various local and overseas visitors to my room at Monash. Months
later I met the young woman again, and told her how interesting her volume
had turned out to be. Off-handedly, I said what we need to know now is why
they chose the paper they did. This remark kept coming back to me as an
interesting question to pursue, if I ever had the chance.
In late 1994 I was in Chile with Reinders Duit and David Treagust as part
of a team to conduct workshops in science education and to participate in a
South American conference. On one free afternoon I was navigating for
Reinders as he drove along a road towards the Andes. I asked him to tell
me about two of his research papers that he regarded as significant. He was
silent for a minute or so and then, much to my surprise, proceeded to identify
and describe two papers by other researchers that had had an important influ-
ence on him. When he had finished I told him that what he said was very
interesting, but it was not what my question had been. When I repeated it,
xiv INTRODUCTION

he said , “Oh that’s much too hard to think about without considerable notice,
and when I’m driving in a strange country.”
These two events are the origins of the two questions I have since then
pursued with science education researchers around the world, as I encoun-
tered them in the freedom to travel that my formal retirement from Monash
provided. The first interviews were in 1995, a year when I was fortuitously
able to conduct a large number, and the others were in 1996–1999 as oppor-
tunity offered itself.
The two questions are:
1. Tell me about two of your publications in the field that you regard
as significant.
(significant was left to the respondent to interpret and each response was
probed to clarify how significant was being used.)
2. Tell me about up to three publications by others that have had a major
influence on your research work in the field.
(each response was again probed to clarify what the major influence was).
I conducted more than sixty of these open-ended interviews face-to-face, and
I am indebted to my friends, Reinders Duit, David Treagust and Richard
Gunstone, who helped with six of them. A small number of the others were
conducted by telephone, and a few were done by email, although this medium
did not facilitate, for me, the same conversational probing that was so often
illuminating in the face-to-face situation. In total 79 interviews, ranging from
20 to 60 minutes were completed and transcribed.
When asked by my respondents what the interviews were for, I gave the
project a title, The Evolution of Science Education as a Research Field.
The answers to these two questions make up the two sets of empirical
data I have analysed in different ways to illuminate the three perspectives of
the emergence of science education as a research field.
To introduce you to the flavour of these data, let me share an extract from
my interview with Rosalind Driver, just before she was moved from Leeds
to London to take up the Chair of Science Education at King’s College. Sadly
Rosalind died late in 1997 after an all too brief period in this appointment.
Those of us who knew her as a friend and very great researcher will be
reminded again of her qualities as she responds to my first question.
Ros Yes. I think the first one I would choose is the review paper I wrote,
Pupils and Paradigm. It was perhaps the first time I had portrayed a
perspective on children’s ideas, the importance of children’s ideas
from their point of view, and used both my own PhD work and brought
that into the public domain, but also reviewed other peoples’ work
that did this. And also gave, as it were, a twist to Piaget’s work from
this point of view, saying that the importance for science education
 INTRODUCTION xv

could be looking at Piaget’s studies from the point of view of what

they told us about, if you like, the content of children’s scientific
reasoning, rather than the form of their reasoning. So that I think would
be the first one I would choose.
Peter You’ve implied some of the things that were important for you. What
sort of response have you experienced to that paper from others? I mean
has that reinforced your sense of its significance?
Ros My goodness! Yes, it is one of the papers that, in a sense, stood the
test of time. It’s not the sort of thing that, when it first came out, there
was a great flurry, though a number of people did write and say how
helpful they thought it was. But it’s been referred to by a lot of people,
and described as a marker paper.
Peter It’s a very common reference paper.
Ros And people have referred to it as a sort of a point in time in the field.
Peter Very much. Yes.
My respondents were both reluctant and willing to take part. Reluctance
showed itself in two ways. There was a modesty in many cases about engaging,
particularly with my first question. They also acknowledged that it was not
an easy one to reflect on, and hence to sort out among the body of their research
publications the two or three that my first question required. For some the
suggested number was too constraining and rather more publications were
identified. Just a couple of the respondents were such existential researchers
that they found it difficult to reflect for significance beyond the research
problem they were addressing when I interrupted them. For them, the issue
of the moment, or their most recent publications was their most significant
piece of research.
Overall, their willingness to cooperate and to take my indulgence seri-
ously has led to a very rich data set indeed, and one that has enriched me
considerably. In Appendix A the respondents’ own publications of significance
are listed, and in Appendix B those publications by others that were of major
influence appear.
Most of my set of respondents resulted from convenience sampling –
researchers who were at the international conferences I attended, or were at
places that were en route in my traveling from here to there. I cannot claim
that my respondents are a representative sample of the international popula-
tion of science education researchers. However, I do not know what a
‘representative sample of science education researchers internationally’ would
mean, since the national populations, to which it would have to apply now vary
from very large to still quite small. These respondents do, however, make
up a very interesting set of researchers, and together they total 79 – a sub-
xvi INTRODUCTION

stantial number. Many familiar names are included, but this does not mean that
there are not others I would like to have included. Some of these others may
have drawn my attention differently through their descriptions of their own
research and their accounts of the influence of publications by others. Perhaps
better examples, or even other types of evidence may have been provided,
but it seems unlikely that the conclusions that are drawn about the research
area as a field would be markedly different.
As much as possible I interviewed established researchers. By this I mean
researchers who had engaged in, and published studies beyond their own
doctoral work. In some of the most recent countries to establish this area of
research, I did, however, include some who had just completed their doctor-
ates. The respondents were working at the time of the interview in sixteen
countries – Australia (15), Canada (10), Denmark (1), England (10), Germany
(7), India (1), Israel (2), Italy (1), Korea (3), New Zealand (2), Norway (1),
Scotland (1), Spain (1), Sweden (5), The Netherlands (6) and USA (13). It
would have been good to be able to include some researchers from the Africa
and South America, although many of their more established researchers
have been trained in overseas centres that are represented. Where appro-
priate, I do make reference to studies in countries that are not listed above.
Apart from the USA, there was little or no coordinated academic activity
in science education as a research area until the 1960s. Then, as a consequence
of the great surge of science curriculum reforms in the USA and United
Kingdom that began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, other countries began
to be involved in research and this process has continued during each of the
subsequent decades engaging more and more researchers in more and more
countries in the phenomenon. This suggests that generationally is one way
to look at the range of my respondents. Applying this generational view, 10
of my respondents began in the 1960s, 24 in the 1970s, 29 in the 1980s, and
16 in the 1990s. Another consideration is the gender participation in the
research. 15 (19%) of the respondents were women, probably an over-
representation from 1960–1980, and an under-representation since 1980.

ORGANISATION

The book is organized in the following way. In Chapter 1 three types of criteria
– structural, intra-research and outcome – for science education as a field of
research are developed. These are for use in later chapters where the identity
of science education as a research field is explored. Chapter 2 outlines some
of the origins of research in science education, first in USA and then as it
spread to other countries. In doing so, the degree to which it now meets the
structural criteria for a field of research is made evident. The next three chapters
are used to illustrate the ways the researcher respondents interpreted the key
terms, significant and major influence, I used in the questions to collect the data.
 INTRODUCTION xvii

Since a number of respondents chose, in each case, to reply in terms of their

own person, their comments open a window on the second perspective of
this book. Chapter 3 is devoted to describing in their own words some of
the impact that being researchers in this field had on their personal being. In
Chapter 4, the interpretations of significant in relation to the research field
are described, and Chapter 5 provides the corresponding meanings that were
given to the major influences of publications by others.
Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 discuss, in turn, the evidence in the data with
respect to the first five of the intra-research criteria developed in Chapter 1
for a well identified field of research. The evidence for the outcome crite-
rion, O1. Research to practice, about the link between the research and the
practices of science education is discussed in Chapter 11. In each of these
chapters there are also examples of trends in the foci of the research. In
Chapters 12–14 the trends in the particular sub-themes of gender, politics,
and technology, represented in my data are described. Finally, in Chapter 15
I attempt to summarise what my analysis has found about the research field
by relating it to the newly emerging interest in the language of science edu-
cation.

NOTE

Throughout the book, I have used the following conventions. When quoting
or referring to the respondents’ comments and choices of publication their
name and country is given, at least initially. References in the general text
of the book are identified in the standard referencing style of name and date
with full details at the end of each chapter. References to the respondents, when
they are not associated with their comments in the interviews, are also reported
in this manner.

REFERENCES

Eybe, H. and Schmidt, H.-J. (2001) Quality criteria and exemplary papers in chemical educa-
tion research. International Journal of Science Education 23(2): 209–225.
Mason, J. (1998) Researching from the inside in mathematics education. In: A. Sierpinska and
J. Kilpatrick (Eds.) Mathematics Education as a Research Domain: A search for identity,
p. 357. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sierpinska, A. and Kilpatrick, J. (1998) Mathematics Education as a Research Domain: A
search for identity. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
 CHAPTER 1

S C I E N C E E D U C AT I O N :
W H AT D E F I N E S A F I E L D O F R E S E A R C H ?

Coming from nuclear physics, the paper by Gilbert and Watts

(1983) fascinated me because I found it a very balanced
opening of attention on a new field, which may have many
promises in itself, and which may be comparable to the
development of science in history.
Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands

QUESTION IDENTITY

In this chapter I begin to address a basic question that underlies my first per-
spective about the identity of science research: In what senses is science
education a field of research? So much research about science education has
been done in the last forty years and is now in accessible literature, and so
much more is in process, that it is an appropriate and interesting way to
consider what has been achieved.
A parallel question was asked a decade ago in relation to research in
mathematics information, and a quite elaborate study, What is research in
mathematics education? and What are its results?, was launched by the
International Commission on Mathematical Instruction, ICMI. Mogens Niss,
the Secretary of ICMI, established a Program Committee for the study and this
group collaborated in 1992 to produce a Discussion Document describing
the reasons for the study and laying out the following questions to be addressed.
• What is the specific object of study in mathematics education?
• What are the aims of research in mathematics education?
• What are the specific research questions or problematiques of research in
mathematics education?
• What are the results of research in mathematics education? and
• What criteria should be used to evaluate the results of research in mathe-
matics education?
The Document was followed by a Study Conference in Maryland, USA, in
May 1994 when, despite the quite different responses that were given to
these questions, the participants agreed that together ‘they still constitute a
(research) community and that it is necessary to search for what constitutes
its identity’ (p. xi, Sierpinska and Kilpatrick, 1998).
This search was taken a step further when the book, Mathematics
Education as a Research Domain: A search for identity, edited by

1
2 CHAPTER 1

Sierpinska and Kilpatrick, was published in 1998. This volume is not the
proceedings of the Conference although many of its authors, internationally
leading mathematicians and researchers, were present. The views of these
authors were so diverse, and the issues they address so sectional, that it was
not possible to organize the book under the five questions above. Rather it
is organized in six parts that group together papers that related more or less
to each other in focus or ranging response to the whole issue of this study.
In my approach to the similar question I am asking about research in science
education, the criteria I set up to provide answers are more specific than the
five above, although there is some overlap and the very similar intention of
searching for identity. Because the answers to the question for science edu-
cation research that I provide in this book are by me as a single author, albeit
informed and expressed by almost 80 research colleagues, I was able to strive
for a coherence that was not possible for Sierpinska and Kilpatrick, as editors,
of such a variety of chapters from thirty two authors.
This is not to claim that there is, in practice, more coherence in the science
education community, and its lack will often be evident in later chapters.
Nevertheless, that this community is also searching for its identity is evident
from the paper by Dahnke et al. (2001) that is referred to in some detail towards
the end of the chapter. It arose from a group at the second ESERA Conference
in 1999, who were concerned with the comparison between the considerable
authority that the research communities in the sciences have in comparison
with the authority of the science education one. I also have chosen to use
comparison with the research communities in the sciences in this chapter to
set up a number of criteria for assessing the state of science education as a
research field or, in other words, for revealing some details of its identity.

ALTERNATIVES TO IDENTITY

However, to begin, it will be as well to see how all this now considerable
body of research might be viewed if some of the answers to the basic question
above turn out to be negative. In that case, the research could perhaps be
assigned as a sub-field within a larger field, for example, educational research.
It is, however, commonly argued that educational research, in its entirety is
far too diffuse and disparate in its interests to warrant the identity of a field.
In that case, the various studies in science education could be apportioned
to a range of other established research fields like history, psychology, soci-
ology or philosophy depending on the questions being asked, the explicit or
implicit theoretical stance that is taken, and the methodologies that are
employed. It is certainly true that, over the years and still, there are researchers
from these and other disciplines, who have studied the situations in which
science education is occurring. They would not identify themselves at all as
science educators. This is very evident in the currently fashionable area of
 SCIENCE EDUCATION 3

language and science education, which was largely pioneered by linguistic

scholars of various theoretical persuasions. The contexts of science and science
education provide them with very distinctive genres of language to study
and in which to explore their theories. In general these scholars do not publish
their work in science education journals, but in Chapter 15 we shall see that
they are now being joined increasingly in these studies of the language of
science education by researchers, who do identify as science educators.
Having acknowledged these alternatives to positive conclusions about
science education as a field of research, how might the basic question be
addressed. One obvious way is to establish a set of criteria for a research
field and then to check the corpus of science education research against these.
Any piece of research that relates to the teaching and learning of science
in the past, in the present or in the future, can be identified as a component
of the much larger corpus of such studies. When these component pieces
were small in total number, their association with educational research in
general, or with some other more clearly defined disciplinary field of research,
made more sense than to suggest that they formed a distinctive field. This
may well have been the case when Fletcher Watson (1963) wrote his chapter
on science education in the first AERA Handbook of Research on Teaching.
Indeed, he commented on the shortage of studies, and identified several
neglected areas. All the studies he cited were in the USA.
In a number of countries, and certainly internationally, we are now well
beyond this point, since there are now thousands of published studies, and
the total is increasing by several hundred each year in the four or five more
highly respected research journals alone. It would, on the one hand, be naïve
to say that the existence of such a quantity of research about science educa-
tion is a sufficient criterion to say that science education is now a research
field. On the other hand, that is the criterion that has encouraged the growing
number of quality research journals with science education in their title, some
of which now are for studies in more specialised aspects of science educa-
tion. Since a number of these journals are commercially based, rather being
the journal of a professional association, their continuing state of health reflects
that, internationally, there is now a large body of professional researchers,
who identify with these research journals as the locations for their scholarly
work.
I believe that today’s large body of researchers in science education do
now recognise each other as a community of colleagues engaged in a common
enterprise. This is similar to the way I remember, as an research physical
chemist, recognising other chemists with very different chemical interests as
colleagues, and how, together, we distinguished ourselves from physicists, even
when their interests overlapped with ours.
The fact that I spent a study leave in the Physics Department at Stanford
in the laser research group never enabled me subsequently to speak with the
4 CHAPTER 1

same authority on physics that my undergraduate and post-graduate degrees

in chemistry and my position in a Chemistry Department gave me in that
discipline. My strong backgrounds in these two physical sciences have,
however, been very important in gaining credence for the initial efforts we
made to establish research in science education in Australia.

CRITERIA FOR A FIELD

Structural Criteria
In the hierarchical structures of universities, an important stage in the estab-
lishment of new fields of scientific research is reached when full professorial
appointments in that research area begin to be made. More junior appointments,
no matter how active in research, tend to be associated with the field of their
professorial-led department. A first structural criterion for science education
as a field of research can thus be identified as S1. Academic recognition.
The existence of successful journals for the reporting of quality research in
an area is a second structural criterion for a research field, S2. Research
journals. Healthy national and international professional associations and
regular conferences for the direct exchange of research and that enable
researchers to meet each other in person are similarly features of research
communities, that constitute two more structural criteria, S3. Professional asso-
ciations, and S4. Research conferences.
In the natural sciences for more than a century there have been programs
for initiating new researchers into the field. In the case of chemistry, Germany
pioneered this process and chemists from other countries went to be so
initiated in the universities in Germany that were the leading centres for the
many advances in organic, inorganic and physical chemistry. In Australia when
I graduated BSc there was a research masters degree but doctoral level
programs were just beginning, so I considered one well known research lab-
oratory for solid state chemistry in Germany and one in England to go for
my PhD training. At Princeton University in the USA where I spent a post-
doctoral year I had some experience of the advanced course work plus research
that was the pattern for doctoral training in that country. Thus, two final
structural criteria can be suggested: the existence of leading centers for
research, S5. Research centres, and established programs for training the
next generation of researchers, S6. Research training.

Intra-Research Criteria
Criteria of a different and rather more interesting type are ones that are asso-
ciated with the substance and methodologies of research itself. They go beyond
the enabling and necessary character of the structural criteria to the distinc-
 SCIENCE EDUCATION 5

tive essence of the research activity, in other words to its identity. I call these
intra-research criteria. For science education it is among its published studies
in the literature that we should look for evidence that meets some or all of
these more dynamic intra-research criteria. These processes are the means I
use to explore the identity of science education as a field of research.
Again I shall use the features of research in the natural sciences as my
reference source for this set of criteria, although I am mindful here that there
are limitations in using analogies from the natural sciences in relation to the
social phenomena of science education.
If we take the case of research in chemistry or any other of the sciences
there is an à priori assumption that the researcher has a deep understanding
of at least the chemical background to the particular research question being
asked. A parallel intra-research criterion for science education can be expressed
as follows: Studies belong in the field of science education if their design
and conduct requires a level of scientific knowledge in the researcher. I shall
call this criterion, R1. Scientific knowledge.
The words design and conduct here mean more than just data collection
or data analysis, which can in almost any research field be done by an assis-
tant, from outside the knowledge field, with clear enough instructions. Design
and conduct means asking a research question, designing a means of answering
it, analysing whatever these data are, and discussing the findings. The scien-
tific knowledge of the researcher, under this criterion, would be an essential
ingredient of these research processes. It means that such studies would not
be available to researchers without this knowledge, but such researchers,
may, nevertheless, see situations of science education as worthy of research
study for other reasons of their own.
A study of the use of analogies in biology teaching would certainly meet
this R1 criterion. The recognition of analogies for a biological topic or process
and their proper use in teaching, requires knowledge of this aspect of biology.
On the other hand, a study I did many years ago of the socio-economic and
educational background characteristics of PhD students in chemistry did not
require any such chemical knowledge, and would certainly not meet this
criterion. A study of the classroom climate in science classrooms using a
particular content free instrument would probably also not meet this partic-
ular criterion, although it could if comparisons of climate across different
science topics being taught were made, and the nuances of these topics were
part of the discussion of the findings. The better research journals for science
education do not require this comparative elaboration of classroom studies and
will accept these types of studies, provided the authors in reporting them
meet peer-reviewed standards of design, presentation etc. Thus while exper-
tise in science is a criterion that is indicative of a distinctive field of research,
it is too restrictive to apply to the corpus of studies that are now being recog-
nised as science education. In Chapter 10 I shall, however, consider a class
6 CHAPTER 1

of research studies and research publications that give a priority to this

criterion in which scientific knowledge is a problematic aspect.
A second feature of research in the natural sciences is that the members
of each community tend to ask questions that are distinctive and mutually
recognized. The parallel would be questions about education involving the
subject content of the natural sciences that other researchers are not asking,
and which enable new perspectives or new directions for the exploration of
these questions to emerge. From the interactions between the questions and
the research’s answers, the research becomes more and more detailed and
refined. This asking of distinctive questions is a second intra-research crite-
rion R2. Asking questions.
A third feature of research in the natural sciences has been the invention
of concepts that enable a multiplicity of observations to be reduced to man-
ageable sets, that share some characteristic in common, or which enable these
sets to be linked to other observed behaviours at a level that is the begin-
ning of a theoretical explanation of what is being observed. These concepts
may be exclusive to one field of science or shared by several fields.
A classic example of the importance of concept generation in establishing
a field of science is given by Herbert Butterfield (1949) in the The Origins
of Modern Science 1300–1800. He discusses the transformation of chemistry
into a science in the late 18th century. The widespread experimentation and
the considerable technological progress involving chemicals up to that point
were not enough to give the sophisticated alchemy of the time the status of
a modern science. What was missing was an intellectual framework that
could embrace the emerging data and help to decide at any moment the
direction of the next enquiry. Butterfield describes how the intellectual giant,
Antoine Lavoisier, after reviewing all the known data and the myths that
surrounded the traditional elements of air and water, declared instead for the
recently discovered oxygen as an irreducible element. In 1789 Lavoisier in
the Preface to his Elements of Chemistry gave a clue to his own cognitive
processes when he acknowledged the claims of the Abbé de Condillac that
“We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical
methods. . . . The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well
arranged.” (Lavoisier, 1790). These claims are very much to the fore again
in the current surge of research interest in the discourse of science educa-
tion.
Consequent on the invention of significant concepts in the different sciences
is the emergence of theoretical models, based on relations between the invented
concepts, that have some predictive or explanatory power in relation to the
phenomena of interest. These processes could similarly be expected in science
education, and together they constitute the intra-research criterion R3.
Conceptual and theoretical development.
A fourth feature of a scientific field of research is the use of methodol-
 SCIENCE EDUCATION 7

ogies that are either adapted from other science disciplines or, like a number
of the analytic and synthetic methods I learned as a chemist, have been
developed within the field of chemical research itself to answer, or solve
chemistry-specific questions or problems. Research in science education also
depends on the invention, development, or at least adaptation of methodol-
ogies, techniques and instruments, that have particular use for science edu-
cation researchers as they endeavour to answer their specific research questions.
Methodological activity in the research area, and especially, its indigenisa-
tion relates to an intra-research criterion, R4. Research methodologies. If
new methodologies are developed they may, of course, then be used by
researchers in other fields for their purposes, just as spectral methods devel-
oped in chemistry are used in a range of other scientific disciplines.
A fifth feature of research in the sciences is that over time there is devel-
opment. The concepts in use and their associated theoretical models are
progressively refined as the research proceeds, or perhaps, from time to time
even discarded as new evidence rejects what was believed, and a new set of
concepts and theories emerge. Development and progression in research in
the sciences also takes forms other than this refinement of theoretical under-
standing. For example, when a physical phenomenon has been experimentally
established and conceptually described, it can become the basis of an instru-
ment in the form of a new technological device which is then used to probe
and measure aspects of quite different phenomena from the ones of its initial
discovery. A progression of this type would be the conceptualisation that
followed the discovery of the phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance
by Felix Bloch, a physicist. This was largely elaborated theoretically through
its use in elucidating molecular structures by chemists, and now it has been
developed to such a degree of sophistication, that it is used as a diagnostic tool
in the medical sciences.
In the more fluid social contexts of science education, the idea of pro-
gression in the research is likely to be more complex. It is, nevertheless,
reasonable to expect that researchers will be heeding the work of others,
building from one set of studies to another, to expand and deepen our appre-
ciation and understanding of science education and its situations of occurrence.
This expectation is expressed in the fifth intra-research criterion, R5.
Progression.
Some publications of research in the natural sciences become well known
in ways that distinguishes them from the many others being published around
the same topic. One of these ways is the published papers that other researchers
refer to as models for the conduct and presentation of research studies in the
field. Another is that a small number of papers become, in due course, recog-
nised as so important and definitive, because they have marked new directions
or provided new insights, that have really advanced the field’s overall under-
standing of its phenomena. These papers acquire a magisterial status, and
8 CHAPTER 1

play a seminal role in the initiation of new researchers into the field. If the
research studies in science education are contributing to a field of research,
some of their publications should be recognised in the community of
researchers in these ways of further developing it. These two types of research
publications make up the last two intra-research criteria and are identified as
R6. Model publications and R7. Seminal publications respectively.

Outcome Criteria
The applications of NMR in the medical science referred to above is an
example of another feature of strong fields of research in the natural science.
Some of their conceptual relationships become so strongly and confidently
established that they can be applied in the technologies that humans use to
interact with the natural world and to transform it. In like manner, it may be
expected there would be some outcomes from research in science education
that would be applicable to the practices of science education itself. This
outcome or research into practice criterion is identified as O1. Implications
for practice.

VALIDATION OF CRITERIA

In all then I have set up fourteen criteria – six structural, seven intra-research,
and one outcome – that are my suggestions for the hallmarks of a research
field. In this section and in the first part of Chapter 3, although such speci-
fication has not been done previously, I will refer to other discussions that
can provide a sense of validation for my suggestions. Dancke et al. (2001),
in the paper referred to earlier set out to defend the research authority that
science educators have to argue with their colleague scientists about the many
aspects of what is appropriate in science education.
These authors argue that science education is an interdisciplinary domain,
and hence that science education research requires its researchers to have
competence in the science reference domain and also in at least one or more
of a number of other reference domains. What is needed, they claim, is the
right balance or mix of the science and other reference domains. They go on
to present six general statements about science education research that sum-
marise their sense of how researchers in science education see their own
tasks, their role and their perspectives about research. In these statements
the authors use the phrase, science education as a research discipline in order
for it to stand comparison with the special sciences as research disciplines.
They accept that science education as a research discipline has roots in the
special science disciplines and in those of educational science. They argue,
however, that it is not a partial discipline, belonging to just one of these root
disciplines, nor is it derivable from one of these or some combination of
 SCIENCE EDUCATION 9

them. It is, they claim, a discipline sui generis (with its own identity), because
it has the following five features: its own area of topics, its own indepen-
dent goals, some independent research methods, an independent system of
secured knowledge, and different institutional allocations. They follow this
claim with a long (but not exhaustive) list of goals and tasks for science
education as a research discipline.
The claim by these authors that science education research is a discipline
sui generis is equivalent to claiming that science education is now a field of
research. The five features that underpin their claim are each subsumed within
the set of fourteen criteria above. In their brief article, there was no room
for Dancke and his colleagues to present the evidence they undoubtedly believe
exists to support their case. In the later chapters of this book one very large
set of data, namely, the premium publications of many researchers, will be
considered to see if there is evidence to support not only these authors’ claims,
but to meet the larger and more differentiated set of criteria that I have set
out in this chapter.
Jenkins (2001), in the same volume as the previous paper, reviewed science
education as a research field, both historically and in terms of the promi-
nence that is often given to some of its areas of study as distinct from others.
In doing so, he hints at criteria that might be applied, but does not add any
that would extend the set of fourteen. He did, however, quite specifically
refer to the improvement of practice, the original and traditional purpose of
science education research. He agrees that this purpose (my outcome crite-
rion, O1. Implications for practice) needs to kept in the forefront, lest the
researchers begin merely to talk to each other. However, he goes on to argue
that wider senses of purpose about practice are needed than the traditional
one of classroom improvement. Some of these purposes would be directing
attention to issues about that practice, clarifying problems of policy about
that practice, and encouraging debate about how changing societal demands
should alter practice. Moreover, he suggests that these are, indeed, neces-
sary, if the practitioners at all levels of science education are to be sufficiently
informed about their tasks. In Chapter 11, there is a discussion of how the
relation of research to practice is treated among my respondents, and of what
evidence there is about criterion O1. Implications for practice. Jenkins’ critique
of a too simple view of the research/practice link will be revisited there and
also in Chapter 12, where policy and politics in science education is discussed.
The structural criteria, S1–S6, are addressed in Chapter 2 where the devel-
opment of science education research since 1960 in the USA and internationally
is discussed. In Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, I review the significant publica-
tions in terms of the intra-research criteria, R2. Asking questions, R3.
Conceptual and theoretical development, R4. Research methodologies, R5.
Progression; and R1. Scientific knowledge respectively. Then in Chapter 11
the outcome criterion, O1. Implications for practice is addressed.
10 CHAPTER 1

REFERENCES

Butterfield, H. (1949) The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800. London: G. Bell and Sons.
Dahncke, H., Duit, R., Gilbert, J., Östman, L., Psillos, D. and Pushkin, D.B. (2001) Science
education versus science in the academy: Questions – discussion – perspectives. In H.
Behrendt, H. Dahncke, R. Duit, W. Graber, M. Komorek, A. Kross and P. Reiska (Eds.)
Research in Science Education – Past, present and future, pp. 43–48. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Jenkins, E.W. (2001) Research in science education in Europe: Retrospect and prospect. In H.
Behrendt, H. Dahncke, R. Duit, W. Gräber, M. Komorek, A. Kross and P. Reiska (Eds.)
Research in Science Education – Past, present and future, pp. 17–26. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Lavoisier, A. (1790) The Elements of chemistry, in a new systematic order, containing all the
modern discoveries. With a new introduction by D. McKie, xiii–xiv. New York: Dover
Publications.
 CHAPTER 2

ORIGINS

Keynote presentations by visiting science educators like Bob

Yager of Iowa and Marjorie Gardner of Maryland provided
inspiration and whetted my appetite to pursue further studies
in science education in the USA. Contact with NARST then
followed directly.
David Treagust, Australia

Prior to the 1960s the USA was the only country that had established science
education as an academic discipline with the possibility of advanced course
work, research studies and doctoral degrees. This is not to say that there
were no research studies in science education elsewhere before that time. These
certainly existed, but only as isolated studies by individual researchers and
not as research work from a coherent group or institutionalised program that
was recognised as science education. There were also research studies of
other aspects of education, using historical, psychological or comparative
approaches, that sometimes included details about the state of school science,
but this was incidental, rather than as the issue in question.
Why science education was established as an area of research in the USA
so long before it was recognized elsewhere is an interesting question, but it
lies outside my scope and expertise. Assessments of the research that was done
in this early period are, however, important for my purposes about what has
been achieved since, so they are now discussed.

PART 1. ORIGINS IN THE USA

A number of research studies and the journal, Science Education, which began
under a different title in 1916, predated the foundation of the National
Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) in 1928. According
to Joslin and Murphy (1993), its foundation was in part due to the refusal of
the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers to act to form
a national council of science teachers. NARST’s initial purpose was to promote
scientific study of problems of science teaching and to disseminate the results
of such study. Although the statement of this purpose clearly emphasises the
link between researchers and teacher practitioners, actualising this interac-
tion has not always been easy. Murphy (1992), in an historical study of NARST,
argued that the interest in bringing together those researchers and teachers who
aim for the highest quality of science education has been ongoing, but the

11
12 CHAPTER 2

effectiveness of this inclusive position has varied over the years. In 1970, policy
was established to hold the annual meeting alternately in association with
the conference of the American Education Research Association, AERA, and
with the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, NSTA,
– a compromise between the competing linkage interests of the membership
that has persisted.
In 1926 Francis Curtis at the University of Michigan reviewed both the pub-
lished and some unpublished studies in science education to select those that
he deemed worthy of being reported in a shortened form in A Digest of
Investigations in the Teaching of Science in the Elementary and Secondary
Schools published by the Teachers College Press at Columbia University, New
York. The study reports were classified as Learning Studies and Curricular
Studies. In 1931 he repeated this process covering studies between 1925 and
1930, this time using members of NARST to nominate and rate studies for
worth of inclusion. The selected studies were now listed under three headings,
Teaching Science in the Elementary School, Teaching Science in the Secondary
School and Teaching Science at College Level. Each of these sections also
had a bibliography of other worthy studies not described in the full digest
form. The third of what became known as the Curtis Digests, using the same
methodology and structure as the second, was published in 1939 covering
the period 1931–1937. It is interesting to note in the digests that each study
is reported in the form The Problem, The Method, and The Findings/
Conclusions – a format reminiscent of reporting science experiments in
schooling.
Curtis’ mantle as digester and his procedures for selecting the studies for
publication were taken up by Robert W. Boenig for Research in Science
Education: 1938 through 1947, J. Nathan Swift (1948 through 1952) and
Elizabeth Phelan Lawlor (1953 through 1957).
Fortunately for researchers in other countries Teachers College Press decided
in 1971 to reprint these six digests because of their historic and foundational
character. Willard Jacobson was the Series Editor and in his foreword to the
first volume he wrote:
Science education research is the systematic attempt to define and investigate problems involved
in the learning and instruction in science. It is desirable that the research be cumulative so that
investigations build on the research of others. Hopefully research will also influence practice.
These digests are designed to serve as a guide to reports of science education research and to
make the results of research more readily available.

Jacobson also pointed out that, after 1957, other agencies, like ERIC and
AERA’s Review of Educational Research assumed responsibility for this
periodic form of bibliographical review of science education research in USA.
John Nisbet (1974) reviewed the set of six digests and the research reported
in them. As an anthology of research into the teaching of science across 50
 ORIGINS 13

years they are, he stated, a must for any research library. They did, however,
inevitably raise the questions: How has science education research devel-
oped in the past century? and What has it achieved?
Nisbet selected a digest at random and tried to date it, or at least to allocate
it to pre-1939 or post-1939. This was usually not easy to do, and much the
same kinds of studies are reported in each of the six volumes. There seems
to have been little progress towards a science of education as distinct from
science education. Perhaps it is significant, Nisbet suggested, that the second
and third sentences of Jacobson’s foreword above were omitted after the first
volume in the reprint series.
The early years of science education research and of NARST itself were
inspired by a belief that experimentation would, in due course, lead to a best
pedagogy, an ideal curriculum, etc. The digests of research provide impres-
sive evidence that these goals were not established. What then was achieved?
Nisbet argued that empirical research of this type can only solve relatively
minor educational problems, but that the research had played and continued
to play a very important role in sharpening thinking, directing attention to
issues, and encouraging debate, that is, increasing the problem-solving capacity
of those within the education system. Research in science education, he
claimed, is a ‘different activity from research in the physical sciences, but
that does not make it any less worthwhile’ (p. 106).
Just over a decade before Nisbet’s formal evaluation, the fact that the
projects of the National Science Foundation’s new era of curriculum reform
and development turned elsewhere for their research bases, was a silent but
telling assessment that little of worth for improving science teaching had come
out of the research in science education.
Accordingly, it is not surprising that some members of NARST were con-
cerned about the state of research in science education, and took action in
the early 1960s to raise these issues for debate within NARST. At the same
time James Rutherford at Harvard, a young member of NARST, began an in-
depth and extensive survey of existing doctoral programs in science education.
In due course, the Association decided to establish the Journal of Research
in Science Teaching (JRST) as the Association’s official journal in place of
Science Education. Volume 1 of JRST appeared in 1963 and it is possible
to extract from its foundational issues, as a specifically research journal, a
number of these concerns.
The following issues of concern (C1–C4) were voiced in the 1963 volume
of JRST.
C1. Until a profession devotes a considerable amount of its resources to
pure research, until it discovers how to produce its own first class
researchers, it cannot expect to move ahead rapidly.
James Rutherford emphasised by R. Will Burnett
14 CHAPTER 2

C2. Research workers are often inarticulate and incomprehensible when they
attempt to discuss practical implications of their work for science class-
rooms. Herbert A. Smith
C3. Research in science education must rise above the incidental, decimated,
peripheral and surface tendencies which have characterized much of its
products, and it must somehow find a way to sort out those basic areas
where our knowledge is not secure and complete, and bring about a
concerted attack on each in turn. Ellsworth S. Obourn
C4. There has been too much of everybody doing a little of everything and
nobody carrying our knowledge anywhere in particular.
R. Will Burnett
Rutherford (1963) reported the conclusions from his survey at a meeting of
the Association for Education of Teachers of Science in March 1963 and this
paper was included in the second issue of JRST. One of his recommenda-
tions addressed the scholarly isolation in which he found many doctoral
students to be working. ‘It would certainly be better for the profession of
science education to have science educators emanating from, say, ten to twenty
universities having distinguished programs, adequate financing, and highly
selected candidates, than from 45 or 50 universities, many of which have vague,
unspecified doctoral programs in the field and, by their own admission, a
substantial proportion of less than the highest grade students.’ (p. 114)
In part to counter these concerns about the superficiality and fragmented
nature of the research and the lack of adequate preparation of new researchers,
and in part to express their enthusiasm for the new journal, the founders of
JRST allowed themselves in these first issues of JRST to express their hopes
and dreams about what science education research could, or would become.
Table 2.1 lists seven of these dreams.
It will be evident that the first part of concern C1 is picked up by most
of these dreams, concern C2 is taken up in dreams D5 and D6, and concerns
C3 and C4 link with D3. The second part of concern, C1, is picked up in dream,
D4.
These dreams or hopes for science education research can be rephrased to
form, from within the research area itself, a set of criteria to be achieved as
research in the area matured towards a distinctive field. In spelling out these
criteria, their link to the seven dreams (D1–D7) is indicated.
Research in science education should:
A. be theory-based in which concepts are formulated and become progres-
sively refined so that explanatory and predictive power is increased (D1
& D2),
B. be inspired by good studies that suggest new lines for others to follow (D3),
C. be clearer about the research’s implications for practice (D1 & D5 & D6),
 ORIGINS 15

Table 2.1. Some dreams in NARST in 1963 for the field of science education research

D1. Science education research will become theory-based in a way that advances conceptual
schemes that will enhance, as in other fields of Science, its explanatory power.
D2. Such refinement of the conceptual schemes will require ongoing research studies.
D3. Good research studies will become the foundation for more searching enquiries.
D4. Centres will emerge led by experienced researchers who have ongoing programs of research
that will also provide sound training for future researchers.
D5. More knowledge of the research approaches of science will lead to better studies and
more practical outcomes.
D6. More knowledge of the research approaches of the social sciences will lead to better studies
and more practical outcomes.
D7. Measurement will improve, and the design of experiments will be more imaginative and
less faulty.

D. be focused on important problematic issues and persistent in attempting

to resolve them (D1 & D3),
E. be more methodologically sound, including whatever measurement and
design mean in relation to these methodologies (D7 &D5 & D6).
F. have centres with strong lines of research and sound training programs
(D4).
It is interesting to compare this set of criteria, emanating as they do from within
the area itself, with the list in Chapter 1 assembled by comparison with other
established fields of scientific research – see Table 2.2. It can be seen in
Table 2.2 there is much coincidence about the nature of the research and that
the comparative set more than subsumes all of the within-area set.
In 1963 NARST was a well-established association with a number of full
professors as members. It had an annual conference and had just created a new
journal. Thus it is not surprising that the four structural criteria in Chapter

Table 2.2. Relationship between criteria for a research field from within science education (1963)
and from comparison with research in natural sciences

Criteria from within area Criteria from Chapter 1

of science education (1963) (comparison with natural sciences)

A. R3 & R5
B. R2 & R5 & R6
C. O1
D. R2 & R5
E. R4
F. S5 & S6
16 CHAPTER 2

1, S1–S4, dealing with these features, were not part of the NARST dreaming.
As far as the researchers in the USA were concerned these structural criteria
for a field of research had already been met by 1963, although it is evident
there was doubt about whether sufficient concentrations for research existed
and about the programs for training new researchers. These two concerns
constitute two more structural criteria, – S5. Centres of research and S6.
Training programs.
The existence of a sharp division within the NARST dreamers is evident
from Dreams 5 and 6, which point respectively to the approaches of the natural
sciences and to those of the social sciences as the way for the research area
to develop. In 1963 this was probably primarily an argument about method-
ology, and design, but even then, the two dreams did reflect differences of
perspective about the contexts of science education, particularly science
classrooms, and how they relate to the assumptions of experimental science.
These issues are taken up substantively, with the advantage of hindsight, in
Chapter 8. The evidence from my respondents weight heavily on the side of
the social sciences, if these dreams are narrowly conceived as methods of
data collection and analysis (e.g. interviewing, social scale measures, content
analysis, ethnographical, and historical analysis). If, however, they are read
in terms of the design of research studies and the analysis of the data in
them, the approach of the natural sciences was initially very dominant. More
recently, the approaches in a wider range of social sciences have been drawn
upon and the research community is now quite eclectic in the ways in which
studies are designed and analysed. In Chapter 5, where the influence that
publications by others have had on the respondents is discussed, the manner
in which the approaches of various social sciences have penetrated research
in science education is given more attention.
There is not even a hint in the debate within NARST in 1963 that would
suggest that the new journal might be called the Journal of Research in Science
Learning. The focus was squarely on the teacher and teaching, with the assump-
tion that if we could get the teacher and teaching right, the intended learnings
of the exciting new curricula that were emerging would follow. The shift in
focus, from teachers and their teaching of the phenomena and concepts of
science to learners and their engagements with these phenomena and concepts,
is probably the most remarkable example of progression that has thus far
occurred in science education research. It is taken up in Chapter 9.
Just as the NARST dreamers in 1963 were very focused on the teacher
and teaching, so they were embedded in the perspective that the science content
for teaching was a given, or at least it would be, when the authoritative teams
of experts in the big curriculum projects had done their work. In such a climate
of curriculum reform, it is not surprising that they did not dream that the
content of science itself was a problematic issue for school science educa-
tion, or that they needed to contribute to its resolution as part of the quest
 ORIGINS 17

for improved science teaching. The role of science content in relation to

research is taken up in Chapter 10.
The pathway of the research since 1963, in the USA or internationally,
has certainly not been as linear as perhaps the NARST dreamers envisaged
in 1963. Some lines of research have not proved as fruitful as they seemed
initially, and they have petered out, and some examples of these and their
high initial promise will be discussed in later chapters. In the later 1970s a few
brave researchers in the area acknowledged inadequacies in their theretofore
best research studies, thus enabling them to become the foundations for more
searching enquiries (Dream D3 above). They made a new start using very
simple methodologies to talk with children of all ages about science. This,
and other examples of the need to develop a fresh start for the research, with
a quite new focus and new methods, will also be illustrated in the chapters
that follow. Such stops and starts are very different from a linear path of
progress.
In Part 2 of this chapter I discuss the major role the introduction of cur-
riculum development, as an enterprise on a new scale, played in establishing
science education academically in many countries. In the USA, where this
establishment had already been achieved, the great burst of curriculum project
activity in the 1960s and early 1970s also had effects – established centres
expanded, new ones were started and federal funding to support research
became available at hitherto unprecedented levels.

PART 2. INTERNATIONAL ORIGINS

I was developing curriculum materials in the field of oscil-

lations, sound and noise pollution. I rank it highly among
my publications because it brings together content from
physics, biology and even law in a way that integrates role
playing and other pedagogies. I have a feeling it is a great
example of bringing science teaching to connect better to
everything. Hans Niedderer, Germany

Curriculum Development
The first signs of international interest in science education as an academic
discipline were a direct consequence of the projects for curriculum develop-
ment that were launched in the USA and in Britain at the end of the 1950s.
These projects were a movement for curriculum reform and development on
a hitherto, quite unprecedented scale. Curriculum development for school
science had, until that time, resulted from the work of part time committees
and examination boards which periodically made decisions about the scope
of what was to be taught and learnt. Individual academics and teachers
wrote textbooks and other support materials, often in conjunction with com-
18 CHAPTER 2

mercial publishers, or with educational systems that had their own publishing
arms.
The worldwide depression in the 1930s, the Second World War (1939–45)
and its aftermath of rebuilding, meant that many curricula for school science
in the 1950s had not had these periodic reviews, and the modest reformula-
tion they provided. The curricula were very evidently out-of-date, given the
remarkable changes that had occurred in science itself in the previous thirty
years. Furthermore, they were badly out of step with the teaching of the
sciences in university and faculties which, by the mid 1950s, had reformed
themselves and modernised their courses and teaching.
In the USA, the National Science Foundation was the major initial source
of funding for this new style of curriculum development for school science.
Its first acts were to establish a number of projects to reform high school
biology, chemistry and physics for students in senior high school. In Britain,
the Nuffield Foundation soon played a similar role, funding and establishing
project teams in each of these school sciences for the academic stream of
students in their secondary schooling.
These first waves of projects were followed, throughout the 1960s and
well into the 1970s, by a number of other waves in both countries. By the
end of this era, there did not seem to be a level of the primary/elementary
or the secondary curriculum in these two countries, that had not been reviewed
and reformulated for the teaching of science with supporting new materials.
The great majority of students seemed to have been serviced. Not only were
there projects for the teaching of the disciplinary areas of science – physics,
chemistry, biology and earth science – but also for the teaching of science
as a subject that drew on several or all of these disciplinary areas – combined
science, general science, science, integrated science, environmental science,
etc.
These large scale projects, with their substantial full and part time staff,
were nearly all based on Research, Development and Dissemination (R,D&D)
and Centre to Periphery models of product development and distribution. They
were staffed by well-intentioned academic scientists and by highly regarded
and well qualified science teachers. The former brought to the projects research
expertise in their particular science, enthusiastic interest, and their experi-
ence of teaching in the university the heavily conceptual content of their
subjects. The latter brought experience of teaching the traditional curriculum
in schools and a varyingly strong background in academic science. However,
many of those who worked on the elementary/primary projects and on the
less academic projects were teachers who had not taught these levels of
schooling or these types of students. This was almost inevitable since science
had not really existed as an established subject for these early years of
schooling, or for the less academic students, and few, if any of their own
teachers had taken science as a major study.
 ORIGINS 19

Research Bases

Considering the scale of the resources, financial and human, that went into
each of these many projects, lasting on average three plus years, it is remark-
able, in hindsight, that they conducted so little of their own research, especially
since so little classroom research on science teaching and learning was avail-
able on which to base their developments. They did, of course, try their new
materials for short periods in classes and schools with cooperating teachers,
but such predetermined, formative evaluation is not the same as a sound
research base in science education.
The ideas and theories about learning that the various projects adopted were
drawn from psychological studies that were not specifically associated with
the teaching and learning of science. Thus, Robert Gagne’s work on hierar-
chical learning influenced Science – A Process Approach (USA) and Science
5–13 (England) for the elementary/primary years, and Intermediate Science
Study Curriculum (USA) and the Integrated Science Project (England) for
the junior secondary years. Jerome Bruner’s ideas about spiral learning and his
research on concept learning were influential in the Elementary Science Study
(USA) and the Nuffield Primary Science (England) and on secondary projects
such as the Physical Science Study Course (USA) and several of the Nuffield
Science projects (England). Bruner’s (1965) influential book, The Process
of Education, was an outcome of a conference at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
in the early days of the American projects.
Jean Piaget in Switzerland, had, by the 1960s, a long history of studying
individual young persons in relation to some key science topics, but his
publications (in French) were not as widely accessible in the early 1960s as
were the works of these other psychologists. Nevertheless, his maturational
ideas about the acquisition of logical thinking processes, involving abstract
concepts like those that are commonly included in the early years of school
science, did influence the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (USA). By
the 1970s, Piaget’s work had become better known and it had a more abiding
and powerful influence on science curriculum thinking in a number of coun-
tries, including my own in its junior secondary Australian Science Education
Project.
While research into learning, albeit not usually the learning of science,
was an explicit influence on the projects, research into teaching was less
commonly mentioned or acknowledged as important by the project teams. This
was partly because their personnel were chosen because they were regarded
as exemplary teachers (and hence, not in need of other models), and partly
because there was a strong belief throughout this large project movement
that the structure of the materials themselves would direct the manner of
their use by teachers. In other words, the projects were concerned with pro-
ducing materials that would be teacher directing, or more unkindly, teacher
20 CHAPTER 2

proof – a conception about teachers and schooling that can be related to why
the materials could spread to some countries but not to others (see Chapter
10).

Other Influences
An exception to the implicit materials-directed approach to teaching was the
idea of guided discovery as a teaching approach. This idea – a strong one in
the early Nuffield projects, and in some NSF ones – did not stem from research
studies of science teaching. Rather, it was a resurrection of an approach
promoted early in the 20th century by Henry Armstrong in England and by
John Dewey, the great educational philosopher in the USA. The former saw
it as a good heuristic for the laboratory experiences that the better equipped
secondary schools were able to include for their science classes, and for use
with simple materials in other schools. The latter advocated it for education
more generally, and for science teaching more particularly.
Ideas from one other academic research field did have an influence on these
projects via some of the academic scientists who were involved in them.
This was history and philosophy of science. Joseph Schwab, a biologist with
a philosophical background exercised a strong influence on the BSCS biology
projects in which the idea of “teaching as inquiry” became a central feature
– an echo of John Dewey’s early 20th century special interest in science
teaching. Robert Karplus, a physicist, built into the Science Curriculum
Improvement Study the idea that the concepts of science are inventions rather
than discoveries. In Harvard Project Physics, a second wave 1960s project
in the USA, Fletcher Watson ensured a much stronger presence of historical
and philosophical features of physics than had been included in PSSC Physics.
In Environmental Science, a lower secondary level project in USA, the
philosophical ideas of David Hawkins, who worked at Los Alamos, were
evident, and his ideas also had influence on several of the second wave projects
for elementary schooling.

Diffusion Overseas
The publication of the materials from the first wave of these projects saw
less grand, but similar curriculum movements in a number of other coun-
tries. Initially, the simplest response was to adapt the American and British
materials so that they would be useable in revisions that the local authorities
were now able to initiate in their school science curricula. Canada and Australia
were already using these adaptations in some of their provincial educational
systems by the late 1960s, even though there were marked structural and
curricular differences between these contexts and those for which the mate-
rials were originally designed. Several other English speaking countries were
 ORIGINS 21

soon also involved. In non-English speaking countries, for example The

Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and Iran, translations of these materials were made,
and trials of these translated versions were conducted in some schools.
As second and third waves of the curriculum development movement
occurred in the USA and Britain, some larger scale projects appeared in other
countries that were more substantial attempts to design and develop mate-
rials to meet the local curriculum’s need of reform. The overseas projects
now became sources of ideas and possible models, rather than materials for
adoption or adaptation.
Because all these projects were based on a “Centre to Periphery” model
of innovation and change, there was an expectation that their impact on the
character and quality of school science teaching and learning as a whole would
be considerable. Some changes were usually achieved, but there was also a
considerable shortfall in a number of the expected effects.
By the late 1970s, there was a general lament that a disproportionate amount
of the projects’ expenditure had been on materials production, compared with
what was devoted to the more subtle aspects of the dissemination process to
schools and teachers, or to research into the nature of the problems of science
education they were meant to be solving. Although such comments were being
made soon after the first wave of new curricula were in place, the later projects
also rarely resisted spending just as heavily on production, even though they
continued to speak of themselves as R,D&D projects. The first R and the
last D were underdone and under-resourced almost universally.

Science Teachers Plus

As indicated above, the writers and developers who were involved in this quite
new approach to the development of science curriculum were a number of
the better educated and more highly regarded science teachers from the edu-
cation systems that set them up. For the first time, these science teachers
were being asked, not merely to practise their arts of teaching, but to reflect
on them, considering whether they might be different, and to devise new
supporting materials to assist other teachers to teach science in new ways.
The experience of spending three or four years working in one of these
development teams radically changed the lives and outlooks of many of these
teachers. They were part of a team, regularly interacting about science teaching,
which contrasted with the isolated way much teaching occurs in schools.
They had now been required to make explicit, orally and on paper, their ideas
about teaching – procedures that were inherent in their practice, but which
usually had not previously been articulated. Conversely, they were now
exposed, on a regular basis, to the ideas of others about how the teaching of
science can proceed.
Although the degree to which the theoretical sources described above were
22 CHAPTER 2

kept in the forefront of the overall development process was variable, the
existence of theoretical bases for science teaching was also a new idea for
many of them. As part of their preparation for the development tasks, these
teachers had opportunities to read and reflect on materials for science teaching
in schools and in education systems that were different from their own limited
experience of science teaching. Science education became for them problem-
atic rather than simply functional. The developmental side of their projects
drew heavily on their functional expertise, but it also opened up for them
questions about science education, that they had not had occasion to ask or
face before.
Finally, in most cases they were also involved in the more structural pro-
cedures – summer schools, teacher workshops, documentation, etc. – that
their project used to introduce its curriculum ideas and materials to practitioner
teachers in the schools. That is, they had a taste of science teacher educa-
tion from an educator’s perspective, rather than from the recipient’s one they
had had during their own initial training.
These broadening experiences meant that a number of these teacher/
developers did not return to the classroom when their association with the
project finished. They sought posts in science teacher education in universi-
ties and colleges, that seemed likely to make use of their project experience
and the different perspectives they had now acquired.

Research Beginnings
At the very time these science teachers were busily engaged in these projects
another major social movement was occurring. In country after country, the
secondary and tertiary education sectors were about to be expanded, with
science and technology seen as priority areas. Recommendations for these
expansions gained support from the post-war, international rivalries associated
with the threat of nuclear warfare, and the launch by the USSR in 1957 of
the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, heralding the space race of the next 35
years.
Expansions occurred in the existing institutions for teacher education, but
also through the establishment of new universities, teachers colleges and
polytechnic-type institutions in many countries. The obvious persons to recruit
as new science educators for these institutions were the teachers who had
worked on the curriculum projects. They had, in the process as described above,
been prepared for new careers, rather than simply to return to their former
teaching roles in schools. Especially in the universities they now found them-
selves in a context that put a high value on research, an enterprise for which
their project reflections and experiences were very useful, but which demanded
some further, unfamiliar ways of thinking and acting.
In Britain, Germany, Canada and Australia, since there was no prior
 ORIGINS 23

academic discipline of science education, several appointments to Chairs of

Science Education were made to give leadership to this new academic devel-
opment. The appointees were of two types – former senior school teachers who
had been leaders of a curriculum project team, and academic scientists in senior
positions in a disciplinary science department of a university who had shown
a major interest in the teaching of their subject. The former, as leaders,
contributed wisdom from their long experience of the realities of teaching
science at the school level, and of the curriculum development process, while
the latter contributed the status of scientist and the knowledge and experi-
ence of at least some form of university level research. Frank Halliwell’s
appointment to the chair of Chemical Education at the University of East
Anglia in Britain was an example of the former. He had led the Nuffield O
Level Chemistry project.
My own appointment can serve as an example of the latter group. In 1966
I was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Physical Chemistry at the University
of Melbourne with research interests in solid state chemistry and catalysis. I
had, however, published in 1961 one empirical paper on Educational objec-
tives in teaching science at universities (later reproduced in Nature, 1962).
I had also begun to explore professorial positions in new universities where
teaching would be a major challenge. The rapidly growing new Monash
University in Melbourne appointed me in 1967 to the first Chair in Science
Education in Australia. It was located in the Faculty of Education, and I was
charged specifically with developing research in this area as quickly as
possible.
I remember the suspicion with which my appointment was greeted by
some of the other Education staff at Monash. First, it was made clear to me
that subject matter content had no place in an Education Faculty (except as
a Methods subject in the year of initial teacher education following a cognate
degree). Second, that apprenticeship and experience of teaching in secondary
school classrooms were necessary foundations that every other staff member
had had to have, and third, that a masters degree in one of the foundations
of education – history, philosophy, psychology and sociology – should be
the prerequisite for doctoral studies.
In practice, five of the first ten doctorates from the faculty were in science
education and two of these involved young teachers with outstanding results
in their honours science degrees as the basis for their doctoral studies. The first
research masters degree in the Faculty was completed in 1969 by a teacher
who became the project officer for a curriculum project in Environmental
Science. The first doctorate was completed in 1971 by the physics teacher who
had been the project officer for the implementation of an adaptation of PSSC
Physics into Victorian schools. Both these persons continued in academic
careers to very senior positions. Today, all sixteen countries from which my
respondents are drawn have professorial chairs of science education in at
24 CHAPTER 2

least some of their universities, as do many other countries, both developed

and developing.

Doctoral Programs
Drawing attention, as I have just done, to successful doctoral studies in science
education in countries other than the USA, constitutes one of the first pieces
of evidence that a new discipline of science education research was emerging
internationally. As soon as the review journal, Studies in Science Education,
was established in 1974, its editor, Professor David Layton published a list
of doctoral theses in Britain, 1971–1973, a feature that was sustained until
1985, by which time 11 British universities were producing doctorates in
science education. After 1985, refereed publication of papers reporting research
studies in science education was more readily available, and these indicated
more adequately the worth of the research.
In like manner, the European Journal of Science Education (now the
International Journal of Science Education) published three sets of sum-
maries of European Dissertations in its early issues. It is interesting to note
that in that first set (Vol. 1 No. 2 in 1979) dissertations from Sweden (Björn
Andersson, 1977), Germany FR (Hille Lucht-Wraage, 1977; Parveen Riaz,
1978), England (Robert Fairbrother, 1977), and Scotland (Dennis Gunning,
1978) were included. The second and third sets (in Vol. 1 No. 3, and Vol. 2
No 2) added Finland (Hannu Koju, 1978 and Lyyli Virtanen, 1979), German
Democratic Republic (Alfred Jueg, 1972) , The Netherlands (Hent Ten Voorde,
1977), Switzerland (Gabor Ugron, 1978), and France (Laurence Viennot, 1977)
to the European countries where doctoral studies in science education were
being completed before 1980.
Kjöllerström and Lybeck (1978) conducted and published for the Council
of Europe and the IPN in Germany (see below) a survey of doctoral and masters
research programmes in science education. Thirteen (of eighteen) countries
reported the existence of research groups. These were located in a discipli-
nary Science Department (8), in a Science Education Department (8), in an
Education/Philosophy/Arts Department or Faculty (21), in a Social Science
Faculty (6) and in a Centre (4). All six in Finland and eleven of the fourteen
in the United Kingdom were in Departments of Education/Philosophy/Arts.
The common interest areas in which studies were reported were Education
and Psychology (20), Teacher Training (10), Curriculum Development (10)
and Research in Natural Science (10). Between 1971–1976, 556 masters and
203 doctoral dissertations were reported although it was not clear just how
many of these were in science education. France, Finland and United Kingdom
providing most of the masters and Italy, France, Federal Republic of Germany,
Finland, and United Kingdom most of the doctorates.
 ORIGINS 25

Curriculum Development to Research

The pattern of movement, from teaching school science to curriculum devel-
opment to tertiary science education, was to be followed in many countries
over the ensuing years. Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Israel in
the 60s; Malaysia, France and Thailand in the 70s; New Zealand in the 80s;
and Norway, Korea and Spain in the 1990s are just some of the countries where
the pattern occurred. Some brief case descriptions follow

Germany
Not long after the developments in USA and Britain, Karl Hecht in Germany
persuaded the Study Group for Science Education within the German
Association of Technical and Scientific Societies in 1964 to submit a
Memorandum on Founding an Institute for Science Education. Two years
later the Institut für Pädagogik der Naturwissenschaften (Institute for Science
Education), IPN, was indeed established supported by the Foundation for
Science Education which was initially funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Professor Hecht was appointed Director and guided the IPN through its
development years until 1972, when Karl Frey was elected Managing Director,
a position he held until 1989. During this time the Institute became recog-
nised as having a national function, its funding base shifted to a joint
arrangement involving the Federal Government and the Land (State) of
Schleswig-Holstein, and the supporting Foundation was dissolved. With its
purpose built building and between 40 and 50 professional staff of scien-
tists, science educators, psychologists and sociologists, this Institute was poised
to play a very significant role in establishing and forwarding science educa-
tion as a discipline – a promise that in a number of senses has certainly been
fulfilled. In one of the more international senses, the periodic specialist
conferences the IPN has sponsored have been major contributions.
As elsewhere at that time, the main task of the Institute in its first years
was the development of curriculum materials for biology, chemistry and
physics. Its two aims were to improve science teaching in grades 5 and 6,
and to engage in research that would aid curriculum development. Since
initiating a more fundamental programme of research would take a number
of years, the early research in the Institute were concerned with problems
concerned with the design of instruction such as the affective pre-conditions
and effects of learning processes together with problem solving skills. Models
for the evaluation of the implementation of new curriculum materials were
developed.
From 1970 there have been regular meetings of German scholars, and pro-
ceedings of their meetings were published in Zur Didaktik der Physik und
Chemie. In 1995 a new journal was launched, Zeitschrift fur Didaktik der
26 CHAPTER 2

Naturwisschenschaft, with three issues per year, and it has been online since
volume 6 in 2000.

France
In 1970 a Science Section was established in the Institut National de Recherche
Pédagogique (INPP) in Paris. It was conceived as a very small group of per-
manent staff working with classroom teachers on projects that directly relate
to developments in the curriculum for school science or to problems that
arise from the existing curriculum approved by the French Ministry of
Education.
By the late 1970s the research program of the Section on the implemen-
tation of the curriculum had shifted from objectives-based teaching to children’s
ideas about various science topics, and how these can be developed towards
the conceptual ideas of science (see Appendix B under Andersson). At the
same time reports of doctoral studies in science education began to appear from
the University of Paris (e.g. Laurence Viennot, 1977). The first proceedings
of an annual conference on science education, Journées Internationales sur
la Communication, l’Education et la Culture Scientifiques et Techniques,
was published in 1979. Among others, Andre Giordan, Jean-Louis Martinand,
Victor Host, Andrée Tiberghien and Goéry Delacôte, gave strong leadership
and there was sponsorship from L.D.E.S. at the University of Genève and from
L.I.R.E.S.T. at the University of Paris. These conferences of l’Association
Didactique Innovation Recherche en Education Scientifique (DIRES), with
French as the language, have been particularly helpful in encouraging and
including researchers in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal and several South
American countries. Martinand and Giordan (1989) reviewed in some detail
the French research in its the first twenty years.

Australia
The emergence of science education research in Australia is an example of
stimulation by the North American and British curriculum development. In the
early 1930s Roy Stanhope, a science teacher in New South Wales, with a
research masters degree in chemistry, won a scholarship to go to Stanford
University to begin doctoral studies in science education. These were truncated
when his study leave was not extended, but soon after in 1932, the recently
established Australian Council for Educational Research, ACER published
the findings of a survey he conducted of the state of chemistry education in
NSW, and a standardised chemistry test he developed – a first in Australia.
This remarkable pioneer went on to play a major role in establishing in 1943
a national association for science teachers, the Australian Science Teachers
Association, ASTA. His interest in research continued and it was a cause for
 ORIGINS 27

celebration when this enthusiast for school science, in his retirement, under-
took a comparative study of science education for a research masters degree
at Macquarie University that was awarded in 1974.
In 1955 ASTA launched a journal, Australian Science Teachers Journal,
ASTJ, but none of the papers in its early issues could be described as research
studies. In Volume 10 (1964) there is, however, reference to Stanhope (for
ASTA) pressing the Australia and New Zealand Association for the
Advancement of Science to take steps towards the formation of an Australian
Science Teaching Foundation. The case was argued on two grounds, (i) the
parlous state of school science revealed in a survey, again by Stanhope for
ASTA in conjunction with ACER and (ii) the stimuli to improve school science
that were being provided in USA and Britain by the National Science
Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation, respectively.
A typical finding from the survey was that 30% of the 2,918 secondary
science teachers responding had no tertiary qualifications in science and 15%
of these were teaching science in the senior secondary years. It was as if an
unlocked, but closed door was opened. ASTJ No. 31 (May 1965) included a
research report of a survey by J.M. Genn (a lecturer at the University of
Queensland) entitled: Is there a “tough minded” science teacher stereotype?
(5–14), and a paper, Research in Science Education, (19–22) by R.P. Tisher
(also in Queensland). The latter argued for overt acknowledgement by any
Australian Science Education Foundation of an aim to foster and initiate
research in science education. In the first issue of the Journal in 1966 C.N.
Power reported a content analysis of junior secondary science syllabi in
Australia and New Zealand (31–38), and in the second and third issues N.A.
Broadhurst (5-8) and R.P. Tisher (25–36) maintained the pressure for estab-
lishing research in Australia.
There is much to be done in science education and the time
is ripe for Australians to be making worthwhile contributions
to science education research.
(Broadhurst, 1966, p. 8)

Broadhurst (17–24), Tisher (57–65), and L.L. Foster (65–73) reported survey
research studies in the issues of 1967, as did N. Wilson on What is a scien-
tist? (25–28) – a study, replicating the classic one by Mead and Métraux in
1957. Wilson’s study was carried out in association with the Junior Secondary
Science Project, an early project developing new curriculum materials in
Victoria.
In 1968, David Cohen, who had, as a school science teacher, done in 1961
a small research study on Multiphasic Assessment in Science, before going
to complete doctoral studies in USA at Michigan State University, became
editor of ASTJ. He immediately announced (Vol. 14, No. 1) that from the next
issue there would be a regular Research Section in the Journal with R.P.
28 CHAPTER 2

Tisher as its first sub-editor. This Research Section continues to this day, and
in it refereed reports of research have been published in almost all the issues
of ASTJ.

Britain
A similar pattern can be found in Britain with the School Science Review,
the journal of the Association for Science Education, the professional body
for science teachers. In 1966 Volume 47 of a very long standing journal (begin-
ning in 1920), J.F. Kerr set the establishment of the Nuffield Foundation
Science Teaching Project in 1962 in an historical review of school science
in Britain stretching back to 1916 (301–306). Hitherto, the publications in
the journal were either ideas or suggestions for teaching or elaborations of
science topics. Little had been published that could be described as serious
research studies. In 1967, just a year after Kerr’s paper, a new editor, A.A.
Bishop, published accounts by the organisers of the first three projects of
Nuffield – biology, chemistry and physics for more able 11–16 year olds. In
the next issue, No. 166, he established a new section for papers, entitled
Nuffield Section. It included a short paper by R. Whitfield (pp. 850–853)
that called for serious studies in curriculum evaluation to accompany the dis-
semination of the Nuffield materials, citing the American example and two
of its leading figures – Lee Cronbach and Ralph Tyler. In No. 167, as if on
cue, the findings of a survey study by E.W. Jenkins was published on the
Attitudes of teachers to the introduction of Nuffield Chemistry (231–242). In
the next year in Volume 49, the Section was titled more generally, Curriculum
Development Section, and continued as such until Volume 59 (1977) when it
became Science Education Notes.
In 1968 the Education (Research) Committee of the ASE itself accepted
research as one of its roles, and in Volume 51, No. 174, 1969, published the
findings from a survey conducted by C. Selmes, B.G. Ashton, H.M. Meredith
and A.B. Newall on Attitudes to science and scientists (7–22). In the same
volume the Curriculum Development Section included a report of a survey
by Baker of student attitudes to general science (176–183). The next year, 1970,
saw the first leading article on empirical science education research by Brady
in which Piagetian research on student conceptions relating to science was
reviewed (765–770). From that time onwards, the publication of research
studies slowly increased, usually appearing in the special sections, but from
time to time as one of the substantial leading articles, until they became quite
a regular feature. Indeed, in 1996 the editor abolished the special section
character of research articles, and simply published them, when worthy, among
the rather increased number of leading articles this reorganisation has allowed.
 ORIGINS 29

Thailand
Thailand is an example of a country that did not move into curriculum reform
until the mid-1970s when many of the products of the first and second waves
had had sufficient time in dissemination and diffusion to provide evidence
of success and failure. A special institute, Institute for the Promotion of Science
and Technology (IPST), was established to produce new materials for all levels
of school science and mathematics. Its first leadership group (local academic
scientists and an Australian UN adviser) established an ambitious but coherent
plan. It would equip a cadre of the younger staff of this Institute, through
doctoral studies in the USA and Australia, with research methods that could
be used to evaluate the impact of these new materials as curriculum-in-action,
and of the extensive inservice development programs for teachers that went
with the introduction of these curricula. Once again, curriculum reform led
to the emergence of a science education research culture, a pattern that was
to be repeated in other countries in the 80s and in the 90s.

Active Centres
From early in the academic expansion of research in science education, the
title, “Centre”, has been often been used to describe the organizational location
in universities where this research occurs. This usage is often to highlight their
existence and to distinguish them from the more formal structures of depart-
ments and faculties. These centres quite often embraced mathematics education,
and it is now not uncommon to find technology education and environmental
education appearing in the title as well. “Centre” in this usage does not
automatically carry with it the characteristics of high quality, viability, schol-
arly leadership, and first rate doctoral training that Rutherford (1963) called
for in the report that inspired the NARST Dream 4 in Table 2.1 (p. 15). He
had surveyed doctoral programs in the USA in the early 1960s and found,
in too many cases, that they were being attempted in isolation in universi-
ties that lacked the capacity to provide adequate support.
By the later 1990s however, when I was collecting my data, the great
majority of my respondents were in universities where they had a group of
active colleagues and a lively doctoral program. A number of these places now
regularly attract international researchers as visitors, and are sought out by new
scholars to join the doctoral programs. All but one of the countries represented
have at least one of these active centres and new ones regularly become
established. The requirements of the structural criteria, S5. Active centres
and S6. Research training have been achieved in a good nucleus of coun-
tries, but in many others these necessary conditions for good and ongoing
research are still to be achieved.
30 CHAPTER 2

Support for Research

Since the 1970s, the international establishment of science education research
has also occurred in other ways. Among these are scholarly journals, profes-
sional associations, conferences for reporting and sharing research, and large
scale comparative studies of science learning.

Scholarly Journals
In 1960, the only scholarly journal dedicated to research in science educa-
tion was, Science Education in the USA. In 1963, a second journal (see
Chapter 3) was established in that country, the Journal for Research in
Science Teaching. In the 1970s new journals, specifically for science edu-
cation research, appeared in Australia, 1971 (Research in Science Education),
in England, 1974 (Studies in Science Education), edited from the Centre at
Leeds University), and in Europe, 1975 (European Journal of Science
Education), edited from the IPN in Kiel, Germany, (and subsequently, retitled
International Journal of Science Education). Currently, at least ten are avail-
able for international reporting of research studies, with the bi-lingual
Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education,
2001, edited from University of Toronto) the most recent. In addition there
are a number of others for national reporting, for example, the Journal of
Science Education in Japan (edited from Japan Society for Science Education
in Tokyo), and the Journal of the Korean Association for Research in
Science Education, JKARSE.

Professional Associations
Associations for science teachers existed in a quite a number of countries,
but the National Association for Research in Science Teaching in the USA,
was the only professional association for researchers in science education until
1970. As activity in science education research built up, following its estab-
lishment in universities outside the USA in the later 1960s, other professional
associations on a national or regional basis have appeared.
In 1970 the Australian Science Education Research Association, ASERA
(subsequently the Australasian Science Education Research Association after
New Zealand researchers became valued and regular participants). Reference
has already been made to the associations that formed in Germany and France
during the 1970s, and numerous others have followed in many countries in
the 1980s and 1990s.
 ORIGINS 31

International Fora for Research Exchange

In the 1970s and 1980s, before the NARST conference had become the inter-
national forum it now is, several other bodies played a valuable role
internationally in bringing researchers together and thus fostering a broader
sense of a community of scholars in science education. Dr. Al Baez, as Director
of Science Education for UNESCO in the 1960s, established the Science
Education section of UNESCO as an active and innovating agency. It had
an active publishing arm and a New Trends series in each of Physics,
Chemistry, Biology and Integrated Science began to be published. It also
sponsored conferences, often in conjunction with the Science Teaching
Committee of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU-CTS)
that, although not primarily for the exchange of research, nevertheless did
provide valuable opportunities for researchers who did attend to meet and share
their current interests and work.
For me personally, these UNESCO conferences provided rewarding encoun-
ters, among others, with Margery Gardner, David Lockart, Paul de Hart Hurd,
Mary Bud Rowe, Herbert Thier, Wyn Harlen, Miriam Kraschulchik (Maryland
Conference, 1972); Jay Lemke (Nijmegen, 1978) and Svein Sjøberg, Sudhakar
Agarkar and the Salter’s group at York University (Bangalore, 1985). These
meetings also provided invaluable first opportunities for fledgling and isolated
researchers in developing countries to meet more established researchers.
The discipline-based members of the International Council of Science
Unions (IUCS) played a similar role through the periodic meetings of their
divisions for physics education (ICPE), chemistry education (ICCE) and
biology education (ICBE). In these meetings, there is, however, always an
underlying tension between the academic scientists with an interest in the
teaching of the science discipline and those whose interests are research into
education involving that science discipline. This has meant that these meetings
have tended to be fora about research into practice, rather than about issues
of research itself.
In the early 1960s the OECE (that later became the OECD) embracing
the richer nations, sponsored several meetings to share international concerns
about the teaching of physics. These led to the formation of the Group
Internationale sur Research de l’Enseignment de la Physique (GIREP) in
1966 with Professor Knecht of Switzerland as President. Since 1967 there have
been eighteen meetings of this energetic and committed group of teachers
and researchers of physics education.
For me personally, another particularly fruitful series of meetings have been
the biennial symposia of what has become known as the International
Organisation for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE). These meetings,
begun by a group of enthusiasts in Eastern Canada in 1979 had two express
intentions: (i) to bring together interested persons from science education
32 CHAPTER 2

and from technology education, and (ii) to break down the divide in these fields
that the Iron Curtain represented. Although never quite clear how to make
the first intention work, and only modestly successful in the second, these
biennial meetings quite quickly became the most internationally balanced
fora I have encountered in science education. The successive organisers have
made great efforts to ensure a strong presence from developing countries.
Participation from first world countries has been relatively small but it has
continued to include a number of significant researchers, who have been
attracted to IOSTE’s intentions and style. The rich international mix and the
blend of research, curriculum and actual practice have made these meetings
very rich and fruitful.
In 1981 another series of conferences began with a particular focus on
the educational issues relating to the participation of females (girls and women)
in science. The concern about these gender issues can be traced back to the
influence of the women’s movement on education in the 1970s, and crystallised
in science education when the first IEA Science Study in the 1970s quanti-
fied the considerable gender differences (in favour of boys) that existed in
all the participating countries for school chemistry and physics, hence limiting
girls opportunities to have careers in science. These Girls and Science and
Technology (GASAT) conferences have contributed greatly to understanding
the contextual features that underpin these discrepancies and to exploring
how school science can become more gender inclusive. They have also con-
tributed to the research agenda through their criticism of existing assumptions,
rationales and methodologies of research in science education. For example,
the body of the research has tended to stay within the given science educa-
tion scene rather than to challenge it to be radically different (see Chapter
13 for further discussion of the issues of gender research).
A number of other more occasional conferences in the 1960s, 70s and 80s
made important contributions to the international sense of the field. They
were often specifically focussed around research in relation to a particular issue
in science education. Because of this, the meetings were able to make useful
contributions to the emerging assumptions that researchers were bringing to
these issues and to the consequent methodologies that were being employed.
Examples of these are the invited symposia in Israel that have been sup-
ported by the Ba’T Sheva Foundation in Israel and those organized by the
IPN in Germany. The Ba’T Sheva conference in 1978 addressed the theme
of Curriculum Implementation at a time when independent research appraisals
of the impact of the new curricula were becoming available in a number of
countries. Likewise, the symposium at IPN on Students’ Interest in Science
and Technology in 1984 opened up an affective aspect of the field that had
been, and still is, under-addressed compared with the attention given to
cognitive aspects.
Reference has already been made on p. 26 to the very positive contribu-
 ORIGINS 33

tion the annual conferences of DIRES have made to researchers in the Latin
countries of Europe, together with others from South America. These meetings
have considerably helped to develop the sense that international research in
science education is not subservient to English language, which is the case
so dominantly in the other international fora I have been describing.
For well over a decade, political and economic developments in Europe
have been giving a new meaning to the word, European. In due course, this
began to effect research in science education in these countries. Because
many of the researchers in European countries are associated with individual
science disciplines rather than with faculties or departments of education,
the separate science disciplines were easier places to begin new forms of coop-
eration. For example, the first European Conference on Research in Chemical
Education (ECRICE) was held in Montpelier, France in 1991 and that event
has continued to occur biennially since.
Funds began to be available in the mid-1990s to support investigations
that involve several European countries, and these have helped to foster the
sense of collegiality between researchers, who previously met rarely, or not
at all. In 1995 a more complex step was taken at Leeds University, when a
meeting of European researchers decided to form a European Science
Education Research Association (ESERA). The complexity of this step for
the researchers in the many European countries was partly the matter of
language, and partly the division between those who identified with Science
in a generic sense and those who identified with its separate disciplines. It was,
moreover, complicated by the substantial differences in educational tradi-
tions across Europe – a matter that is discussed further in Chapter 10.
Nevertheless, ESERA has now held successful conferences in Rome (1997),
Kiel (1999) and Salonika (2001). Furthermore, it has taken seriously the
issue of research training by providing biennial Research Workshops for novice
and new researchers to complement their local training. These are located in
different European centres and enable the participants to interact with leading
researchers from other countries.

Comparative Studies of Science Achievement

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement
(IEA) was established in 1961, and in the early 1970s its first study of achieve-
ment in science education was carried out with 19 participating countries.
The second science study occurred a decade later in the 1980s and involved
primary and secondary students in 23 countries. A third study that included
both mathematics and science, tested students in 45 countries in 1994, and
there was a follow up repeat of this third study five years later, when the
primary cohort in 1994 had reached the level of the original junior high
school testing. The sheer scale of these cross-national studies have put a
34 CHAPTER 2

considerable strain on the methodologies of survey analysis that the IEA

uses. Each of the studies has drawn national and international attention to some
major issues about science education, such as the gender one mentioned earlier
that the first study so clearly showed. These are both internationally and nation-
ally very costly studies. While there is evidence that a few countries do respond
constructively to the findings, there is little to show more generally for the
efforts expended, beyond the educo-political reasons that cause countries to
continue to sign up to participate.
In 1998 the OECD launched a rather different comparative study, The
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The intention of the
PISA project between 2000 and 2006 is to provide the education systems of
the participating countries with information as to how well they are equip-
ping 15 year olds for life in modern society in the areas of reading,
mathematics, and science. In the testings of 2000 and 2003 science has a minor
role but in 2006 it will have the major role. For the initial testings in PISA
Science the measure of scientific literacy that was used relates to the students’
ability to apply their knowledge of science to critically appraise media reports
involving science. If the IEA studies are about what science the students know,
PISA Science is about what students can do with the science knowledge they
have.

Individual Initiative
The efforts and example of inspirational individuals, who somehow took a
research initiative, has been the origin of the research area in several coun-
tries. Norway is a case of this individual initiative. The research there began
to emerge in the 1980s through Svein Sjøberg, a physicist, who undertook
studies of a Piagetian type while associated with a sympathetic academic
physicist. The research group he has gathered in Oslo has gained much from
the associations Svein has built up with scientist colleagues in India and Africa,
who have interests in both formal and community education. Another con-
siderable fillip to the research in Norway has been through the prominent
role Svein has played in the third IEA study, TIMSS, throughout the 1990s
and his ongoing participation in the OECD’s PISA project. Another case is
South Korea, where the persistence and enthusiasm of Sung Jae Pak, Professor
of Physics at Seoul National University, in the 1990s has led to a dynamic
and rapidly expanding group of researchers.
Diane Grayson’s actions in South Africa are also an example of individual
initiative. On returning to that country after her doctorate in USA, she convened
a workshop in 1992 for persons interested in research at Castle Crag, a beau-
tiful site in the Drakensburg Mountains. As a result of the enthusiasm generated
at this meeting, it was decided to form a Southern African Association for
Research in Mathematics and Science Education (Technology was added later),
 ORIGINS 35

and annual conferences began in 1993. The use of “Southern African” is

indicative of the intention of this association to encourage researchers in the
many countries in this region of the African continent, and more than ten
countries were represented among the authors of the host of papers at the
11th SAARMSTE Conference in Swaziland, 2003. The very particular
problems of education in this region, including the overarching HIV/AIDS
pandemic, provided the research agenda for many of the papers – very dif-
ferent from those issues that most researchers in developed countries are
addressing. In 1996 the Association launched the Southern African Journal
of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. Its sixth
volume in 2002 used just “African” as its identity to reflect the association’s
liaison with the African Forum for Children’s Literacy in Science and
Technology (AFCLIST) and to promote publication and reviewing/mentoring
skills throughout the continent of Africa.
Inspirational individual leadership was also very important in New Zealand,
where Roger Osborne, a lecturer in first year physics at Waikato University
in Hamilton, was alarmed by the quality of the science learning his students
were bringing from school to their further study of physics. In the late 1970s
he, with Peter Freyberg, a Professor in Education in the university, won funding
support to establish the Learning in Science Project (LISP). The focus of
this project was the improvement of the curriculum as procedures of teaching
and learning, rather than as materials or as an intended set of content for
learning. His leadership of the persons who made up this project is further
discussed in Chapter 3.

Conclusion and Epilogue

The remarkable organisational developments of research in science educa-
tion nationally and internationally that have been illustrated in this chapter,
together with its very considerable expansion in the USA, provide enough
evidence to claim that, internationally and in a growing number of countries,
research in science education has met all six of the structural criteria estab-
lished in Chapter 1 – S1. Academic recognition, S2. Research journals, S3.
Professional associations, S4. Research conferences, S5. Research centres
and S6. Research training.
In his presidential year David Treagust (2000) addressed the development
of NARST as an international research community. He used six measures –
the structural one of name and mission, and five participatory ones: leader-
ship positions, membership papers and citations in JRST, conference
attendance, and US presence internationally. He was ‘very enthused by the
general findings of this analysis’ (p. 6), since they all, in their various ways
indicated that the Association was, indeed, becoming a more international
research community. There is certainly no doubt that the pre-existence of the
36 CHAPTER 2

research area in USA and of NARST as a developing research community have

been important models for the development of both researchers in other
countries and of the infra-structures that are needed to sustain them.

REFERENCES

Bruner, J. (1965) The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fensham, P.J. (1961/62) Educational objectives in teaching science at universities. Vestes IV(4):
32–360; Nature 194: 142–144.
Joslin, P.H. and Murphy, K.S. (1993) Highlights of the history of the National Association for
Research in Science Teaching. Paper in the 66th Annual Meeting of NARST, Atlanta Georgia,
19 April.
Kjöllerström, B. and Lybeck, L. (1978) European Survey of Masters’ and Doctors’ Dissertations
in Science Education. Kiel, Germany: IPN.
Martinand, J.L. and Giordan, A. (1989) French research in science education. Studies in Science
Education 16: 208–217.
Mead, M. and Métraux, R. (1957) Image of the scientist among high school students. Science
126: 384–389.
Murphy, K.S. (1992) History of NARST. Unpublished doctoral thesis Drake University, Des
Moines, IOWA)
Nisbet, J. (1974) Studies in Science Education 1: 103–112.
Rutherford, J. (1963) American universities policies and practice in preparing leaders in science
education – A research report. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 1(2): 104–123.
Treagust, D. (2000) Our development as an international community. NARST NEWS 43(2):
1–6.
 CHAPTER 3

THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON

They’re like stepping stones in my thinking.

Rosalind Driver, England

Rosalind Driver, England, described her publications in this very personal way
that exemplifies the claim by John Mason (1994) that the most significant
products of research in mathematical education are the transformations in
the being of the researchers.
Mason uses the term, inner research, for these transformations, to distin-
guish it from the outer research that is usually all that is reported in the research
literature. He does not see these as competing arenas of research, but rather
together they enhance the whole enterprise when the inner research, too, is
brought to the surface. The potential he sets out for transformation in
educational researchers is considerable. ‘Their questions can change, their
sensitivities can develop, their attention can be restructured, their awareness
can be educated, and their perspectives can alter. In short, their being can
develop.’ (p. 358). Mason’s strong sense of the person of the researcher stems
from his interest in Heidegger’s (1927) notion of Being-in-the-world.
In this sense, the personal effect of having participated in research does
become quite different from what is usually presented to others. Mason likens
the usual research report to describing a car journey from a helicopter. ‘Major
turns and the traffic conditions are reported, but not the views seen and the
moods experienced inside the car’. (p. 370). Only rarely are these transfor-
mations in the researchers themselves reported. Indeed, there has been a strong
tradition in the genre of research reporting in journals that discourages the
use of the personal pronouns of “I” and “we”, even at the initial point of
explaining how the personal choice was made to investigate this issue, rather
than some other one. Moreover, in any substantial research study anxieties and
joys will be experienced as the investigation proceeds, and it is rare to read
of these in the retrospectively sanitised forms, in which the study is usually,
or required to be, reported for publication.
The conduct of research involves a sequence of decisions, underlying each
stage of the study, and these decisions, as Mason acknowledges, belong very
personally to the researcher(s). These decisions are important reflections of the
researcher’s personal state and situation at the time. They are influenced by
the researcher’s confidence and experience, his/her personal conceptions of
what the issue is, and what research is needed, which dimensions of the
issues are of interest, and which methodological competencies are possessed

37
38 CHAPTER 3

or can be readily acquired. All of these aspects of the inner research in the
person of the researcher have then, in some way, to be combined with the
support that will be available from others, and from the institutional infra-
structure, so that the chosen study will be possible.
These aspects can change as a person stays actively engaged in the inter-
actions of research. If the personal change as a result of participating in one
particular study is considerable, the publication of that study has significance
in terms of the researcher’s inner research that is irrespective of the publi-
cations external worth.
In Part 1 of this chapter a rich variety of transformations of the being of
the researcher emerge from the responses many of the respondents gave to
the first of my questions.
John Mason went on to maintain that the second most important products
of research were ‘the stimuli given to other researchers and teachers to test
out conjectures for themselves in their own contexts’ (p. 357). His idea that
the report of one researcher’s work can be a stimulus for another researcher
is very much what lay behind the second question I asked about major
influences from others. With his keen interest in the personal being of the
researcher he would have been interested to hear the many respondents who
chose to respond, again in terms that were about their personal transforma-
tion. In Part 2, the range of these transformations of the researchers’ personal
being are presented.

PART 1. SELF SIGNIFICANCE

Papers can serve particular purposes for you individually that

other people don’t necessarily pick up.
Erickson, Canada

A large number of the respondents found the second of my questions (about

influential publications by others) much easier to deal with than the first one
about which of their own pieces of research were significant. Under my
gentle pressure, a number of them solved their problem of assessing the
significance of their work in the research area by choosing to talk about their
publications significance in personal terms. One of them, Rod Fawns, Australia,
explained his response to the first question.
It’s difficult because I don’t think any of the writing I have done is particularly influential, in
that sense of significant. But they can be significant for me, because they are part of my journey
of self-discovery. Fawns, Australia

He went on to elaborate what he meant by his journey of self-discovery.

The study afforded me the chance to talk with persons like yourself about issues that were of
concern to me. The bedrock of my work is to do with liberalism, the Australian version, and
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 39

with national identity. I found it (liberalism) in the struggle I was exploring. I found it in
people who engaged in it, and I’m sure it wasn’t me putting it in because it emerged in quite
different forms each time. Fawns, Australia

Self-discovery is just one way my respondents described the personal impact

of the study they chose as significant. Several others are now illustrated.

Personal Growth
The idea of a personal journey of thought came through in a number of the
interviews. Ken Tobin, USA, Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada, and David Layton,
England were among those who looked at their list of publications from the
perspective of which ones had helped to push their own thinking in new
directions.
The review paper in RER in was a great learning experience for me. To do it, I looked at
every ‘Wait time “ study I could find, synthesised them, and tried to figure out how ‘wait time’
fitted into things – a nice capstone article. Tobin, USA
My paper with Cam McRobbie in 1997 was a conceptual breakthrough for me because I really
started to understand what action meant and then I moved from action to action and interac-
tion, and it brought together the individual and social parts of the work I was doing. We’ve really
taken off with that. Tobin, USA
In both papers I will talk about (1992 and 1995), when I wrote them I thought I was taking
risks, and I sent them as trial balloons. I thought they might be rejected, because I felt they
were a bit outside the frame that was currently possible in science education.
Roth, Canada
The book, Science for the People, was significant for me because it broadened my perspec-
tives. The significance was what this publication did for my own thinking. Layton, England

Layton went on to describe how, in working on the material for that book,
he was exposed to the essentially political nature of the act of curriculum
reform. He uncovered, not only for his book but also for himself, some of
the social and political origins of that scholastic version of school science
he had encountered as a boy, as a university student, and beyond as a teacher.
It helped me recover some of the possibilities from the past, and exposed for me some of the casu-
alties in the conflict over what counts as school science. Layton, England

The invitation to write a chapter for a major research Handbook can provide
a very great challenge to one’s whole frame of thinking. I found this out
when I agreed to write on Science and Technology for the first Handbook
of Research on Curriculum (Fensham, 1992), and James Wandersee, USA,
reported a similar experience while working on his Handbook chapter.
It made me think hard and long about the significance of the alternative conceptions movement
on science education. The more that I delved into what we tried to identify as a major research
study in that area, the more I realised how much it had influenced our thinking in science
education. Wandersee, USA
40 CHAPTER 3

He was invited to write this chapter with Joseph Mintzes and Joseph Novak,
on Alternative conceptions in science for the Handbook of Research on
Science Teaching and Learning (Gabel, 1993). This was after he and some
colleagues had published Children’s biology: Studies in conceptual develop-
ment in the life sciences, as a chapter in a 1991 edited book, entitled The
Psychology of Learning Science. This hard thinking became the spring-
board for Wandersee’s research in the history of science, and its use as a
heuristic device to help teachers anticipate some of their students’ alterna-
tive conceptions. This can be done by using laboratory activities, derived
from the history of key topics, and instructional activities, that walk students
through the topic’s historical evolution in science.

A Turning Point
Sometimes the work involved in one publication causes such an appraisal of
one’s purposes for research that a quite new personal priority is recognised.
Roger Cross, Australia, described the book he published in 1992 with his
colleague Ronald Price at LaTrobe University as having that effect – a very
significant turning point in his thinking.
It had a four year gestation period and it enabled me to clarify my interest in curriculum and
to recognise the one research question I was going to spend the rest of my time addressing:
“In whose interests are we teaching science?” Cross, Australia

A Personal Thread
Mark Cosgrove, Australia, but earlier New Zealand, chose a paper, Science
in the Making, published in 1995 that covered a lot of things that ran back over
more than 12 years. It was significant because it embodied what he saw as
an important personal thread across this longish period of his life. He found
the paper very difficult, but important to write, because it gave him the chance
to let children’s vernacular discourses tell the story of how their ideas came
and went. Furthermore, he wanted to express how the coming and going of
their ideas occurred, without them necessarily having the valuation that he,
as a researcher, had given them after reading them over and over many times.
It represents part of my whole professional life that has been about trying to re-value learners
and learning, rather than the curriculum or teaching or philosophies or whatever.
Cosgrove, New Zealand/Australia

Growth Through Writing

Rod Fawns, Australia, drew attention to the expectation of writing that comes
with the move from being a science teacher to being a researcher in science
education, and to the personal growth he experienced in writing.
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 41

Another element that someone like me faced is that I had to overcome a whole tradition (as a
teacher) of not writing. Now I had to be able to write and express myself. I had to refresh
myself with the writing of quality that some authors achieve. Fawns, Australia

He was not alone in this as several other respondents spoke of the writing itself
being what was significant. Thus, Brian Woolnough, England identified his
1991 book as significant, but immediately went on to talk about the personal
significance he found in the process of the writing itself, using the phrase,
writing myself into understanding. Marilyn Fleer, Australia, likewise empha-
sised the personal sense of significance the writing process had for her.
For me the process of writing it is what is significant. I write and read together, and it begins
to just emerge. One idea will trigger another and I’ll go back through the data for that. So
what started could be different from what I finish with. The process is the most enriching part.
Fleer, Australia

Emergence of Self
Several respondents touched on an interesting aspect of personal growth. It
was associated with the researcher having the sense that this publication is
an achievement in being an expression of his or her personal self. It is possible
that a person can be carrying out research that is successful and leading to a
chain of publications, but without feeling that s/he has really been indepen-
dently been responsible. This can stem from the apprenticeship character of
many doctoral programs, and from other beginnings to a career in research,
such as an assistant to an established researcher. Extensions of the supervisor’s
or the researcher’s issue can then become the direction of new researcher’s
research for quite some time.
In the natural sciences, the apprenticeship doctorate is very common. More
often than not a doctoral student is given a problem to work on, and then is
quite closely supervised in its step by step exploration. In part this is deter-
mined by the specialised equipment needed, and by the tradition of using
doctoral students as the research assistants for projects supported by large
grants. This pattern used to be less common in the social sciences and
traditionally, I believe, was quite rare in the humanities.
As the acquisition of large external grants for research has become both a
necessity for universities and a perceived good thing, the social science situ-
ation has been moving more evidently towards the apprentice model. Research
assistants are able to combine their work with the requirements of a doc-
torate, provided they do them in association with a demarcated corner of the
large project in which they are engaged.
Joan Solomon, England, expressed this sense of carrying out research, but
not personally being in control.
42 CHAPTER 3

When I look back on what I wrote about STS, I don’t think I began to develop my own voice,
until about 1987 – a good decade after I started. Tools for thinking about social justice in
that year was the first paper I wrote that was in any way my own. Solomon, England

Dick Gunstone, Australia, completed a good doctorate in the then dominant

paradigm of a quantitative study in which he applied a sophisticated statis-
tical analysis to a remotely derived set of data.
I’d finished my PhD and was in a sort of a halfway house. I was trying to understand real learning
in real classrooms, but I was using the conventional pencil and paper things and massaging
the data with multivariate statistics. Collecting the data directly from students for the
Understanding of Gravity paper (1981), and then trying to make sense of it just led me into a
huge shift in my thinking. Gunstone, Australia

Among his numerous publications, Ed van den Berg, The Netherlands, chose
a 1995 paper as significant, because for him, it was at last, a re-emergence
of so much of his professional life that had been spent supporting science
education in developing countries.
The publication about culture and alternative conceptions in 1995 is important to me because
it relates so well to my own experiences in teaching science in different cultures.
Van den Berg, The Netherlands

Retrospective Satisfaction
The bitter, sweet memories that are almost always associated with research
that extends over a long period of time flooded back for a number of the
respondents, and gave certain of their publications, like a doctoral thesis, a
special sense of personal satisfaction.
From Armstrong to Nuffield is significant. First for me, because I’d been writing it for a long
time. Edgar Jenkins, England
My doctoral dissertation. It’s still important personally. It was the outcome of four year’s
work. The methodology and the theoretical framework I have used since, go back to this work
in 1985. Horst Schecker, Germany
My doctoral thesis, because the work for it covers six years of my life up to 1989. Working on
it provided me with the opportunity to reflect on the closeness of the relationship between what
I did as teaching practice and what I was putting in as theory in my educational research. It
was new thinking for me. Jan Waarlo, The Netherlands
The study I did for my doctorate, because it shaped a number of subsequent things I did in my
life. I got a lot of encouragement from my faculty advisers, but almost no one that I was
working with had expertise in the areas of my interest – the use of simulation to promote con-
ceptual change and interactive graphics as a help to enhance teaching and learning. So
completing the study was up to me. Vince Lunetta, USA
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 43

Affirmation and Confidence

For successful science teachers the switch to a career in research means to
begin again (usually with years of doctoral study). This is often associated with
feelings of anxiety, like those I remember when I left the familiarity of chemical
research to retrain for research in the social sciences. Not surprisingly, several
respondents chose publications that were the tangible evidence for them that
this personal change in career had been successful.
My thesis on Biodiversity in Biology Education (1992) and the subsequent publication in 1994
made me well known in Germany, and now I have much contact with other colleagues in
biology education. Mayer, Germany
The 1975 review paper on Attitudes to Science probably helped to establish my international rep-
utation in the field of attitude measurement. Gardner, Australia
Its special significance for me is that it was the first refereed publication I’d produced.
Hackling, Australia
It was significant for me in that it did get published, and I wasn’t at all sure it would back in
1979. Erickson, Canada

New Direction
A lesser change, but nonetheless one that is often associated with anxiety, is
the decision to embark on a new line of research after a researcher has become
established in one line of investigation. It would be easier simply to continue
studies in that line. The publications that several respondents chose were
their first in the new direction.
The paper with Alan McKinnon (in the Schön book): it started me thinking seriously about teacher
education problems, and the problems involved with learning how to teach, and that has been
the direction of most of my work since. Erickson, Canada

David Treagust, Australia, similarly chose a 1992 publication in the IJSE,

that marked the beginning of a new direction for his research. The fact that
its findings were essentially negative and depressing was alleviated by the
collegial zest he experienced in carrying out the study. Reinders Duit was
coming to Australia for the first time and David had suggested they do a
study together, perhaps about analogies, a new interest they had begun to
discuss. Ivo Lindauer was a visitor at Curtin University of Technology at
that time, as was Paul Joslin. The latter was interested in doing some research,
something he never had time for in his home institution. Together they designed
a study similar to the design used for the Curtin University studies of exem-
plary teachers, that Barry Fraser, Ken Tobin and David had carried out
earlier.
In four weeks between the four of us, we sat in on 54 science lessons and saw, I think, only
six examples of analogies in use. It was an informative investigation in a negative way, but it
44 CHAPTER 3

was the base from which both I (and Reinders) moved into a chain of studies of how teachers
can use analogies in an effective way in science teaching. Treagust, Australia

This account extends the personal dimension in research from the individual
to the significant others who are often part of the enterprise – certainly the
case for many of my respondents.

Collegial Links
A joy of research for some comes from the opportunity it offers for estab-
lishing collegial contacts with other researchers. Often these contacts influence
the directions and manner of one’s future research, as well as providing rich
personal friendships that extend into the future. This mix of the personal and
the professional is well summed up by Gaalen Erickson, Canada.
The paper I did with Ros (Driver) in England in 1983 was for me personally rewarding and
probably also professionally, because it provided us with the opportunity to take a hard look
at the field – the conceptual and methodological issues that were emerging rapidly at that
time. Erickson, Canada

The institutional conditions of some researchers make these collegial contacts

easier to achieve. For example, in the stage of doctoral studies in the USA
that involves a research study, the system there usually requires a doctoral
committee of advisors, rather than the arrangement of a single supervisor
that applies in many other countries. When the doctoral committee works well,
it has a considerable advantage in the personal/collegial sense.
John Staver, USA, described this stage in his pilgrimage from chemistry
teacher to established researcher in glowing terms. He had finally enrolled
at Indiana University after seriously considering Purdue University, where
he had admired Dudley Herron’s leadership of a summer institute program.
At Indiana, Dorothy Gabel was his thesis director, while Hans Anderson
chaired his doctoral committee. He was able to maintain close links with
Dudley Herron at Purdue and with Robert Karplus at Berkeley with whom
he had also made earlier rich and abiding contact.
I had four superior mentors in the research that produced this article (JRST, 1979) from my
thesis. Hans Anderson and Dorothy Gabel were up close and personal, each and every day.
Somewhat further away, Dudley Herron also provided substantial advice and support, and at
greater distance Bob Karplus added his support. Staver, USA

The regular opportunities for extended research leave throughout an academic

career, that exist, for example, in Israel and Australia, have over and over again
been marked by these sorts of collegial relations. Ruth Stavy, Israel, and I have
twice overlapped during periods of leave at University of British Columbia
and at Queensland University of Technology. In outlining the background of
her significant publications, she spoke warmly of the personal/collegial influ-
ence she had gained in Israel from Sidney Strauss in the beginnings of her
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 45

work in science education and from Ephraim Fishbein in Israel, in relation

to her more recent work on intuitions. Her interest in conceptual thinking in
children was aroused when she spent a sabbatical leave with Susan Carey at
MIT in USA.
She’s a psychologist. I learnt a lot from her about conceptual thinking and children’s perspec-
tives. After working with her during that visit, I began the studies on states of matter.
Stavy, Israel

Richard White, Australia, spoke of the importance to him of two personal/

collegial relationships in describing two of his significant publications. He
spent a study leave in Florida working with Robert Gagné whose work on
learning hierarchies had inspired his doctoral study from which he wrote an
RER article (1973) that he regards as a model review (see Chapter 4). His
relationship with Gagne blossomed and soon the latter was a visitor at Monash
University in Melbourne. This led to their joint RER article (1978) on Memory
structures and learning outcomes in which they emphasised that considera-
tion had to be given to the differences between types of knowledge. On White’s
next research leave in 1978 he went to Leeds, as a result of meeting David
Layton who had been a Visiting Professor at Monash in 1977. He gave a
seminar on his ideas about propositions, images and episodes as different types
of knowledge. After the seminar Rosalind Driver, whom White was meeting
for first time, pointed out that he had been presenting episodes as essentially
positive experiences for learning, whereas in her work she was tending to
find episodes that actually got in the way.
This was an early attempt to express the whole notion of alternative conceptions. I went away
and started to think about it – opening up the whole business of how experience is interpreted.
I don’t think before that I’d thought much about how people construct their own meaning for
experiences and events. White, Australia

This personal encounter with a colleague who became a good friend had a very
important aftermath in the following year as White went on to describe.
The sensitivity I acquired in this way in 1978 enabled me to recognise in the large program of
AERA in 1979 a paper by Audrey Champagne – one of the very early attempts to probe alter-
native conceptions. As a result she was invited to come from Pittsburgh to Monash as a visitor
and had a profound effect on the direction our research program then took.
White, Australia

The Leeds/Monash and the Monash/Pittsburgh links spawned a number of other

fruitful collegial links, and each of these institutions made similarly rich
links with colleagues in other institutions. Monash was the first university in
Australia to give the deans of its faculties complete control over an annual
total budget. Within the total, the funds were interchangeable across budget
items, as long as fixed commitments like staff appointments were covered.
Very early in the Faculty of Education’s history it was decided to give the
highest priority in the flexible part of each annual budget to bringing
46 CHAPTER 3

established researchers as short term visitors. Each section of the faculty, in

turn, had the chance to nominate the visitor, and then the cycle would repeat.
This policy had amazing value for money. For the young and inexperienced
Monash staff, it gave them the chance for in-depth contact with leading figures,
and as a result, many of them identified appropriate researchers overseas to
associate with, when their turn for sabbatical leave came around. This program
of visitors made the University and the Faculty of Education very widely
known overseas. Among the science educators who thus visited Monash
between 1970 and 1985 are David Layton and Rosalind Driver (Leeds), Robert
Karplus, Bob Yager, Joe Novak and Audrey Champagne (USA), Heidi Kass
(Canada) and Roger Osborne (New Zealand). Important collegial links were
also formed with Robert Gagne (mentioned above), Ned Flanders (USA),
and Douglas Barnes (Leeds) among the many non-science education
visitors.
Rosalind Driver, England, wrote the significant and influential book,
Children’s Ideas In Science (see Chapter 13) with two French colleagues,
Edith Guesne and Andrée Tiberghien. It was published in 1985. She described
the background that led to this trans-national collegial link.
I’d had a long time collaboration with them at a personal level. It went back to when I was
working with Jack Easley in Illinois . Jack had been in Geneva with Piaget, and Goéry Delacôte
was there at the same time. Goéry went back to Paris and found a group (Andrée and Edith
were members) there, who were developing a curriculum project for lower secondary school
students in France. Goéry wanted it to be research based, so they sent some preliminary work
on electric circuits and light to Jack, who shared it with me. When I got back to England I
contacted Goéry and was invited to be part of that group. It seemed that they, like me, were at
the forefront of developing a focus on children’s content-oriented, domain specific concep-
tions, and so the group was appropriate for me to collaborate with. Driver, England

When Roger Osborne wanted to extend his appreciation of promising new

frontiers of research, I suggested he contact John Gilbert, England, at the
University of Surrey, who had already begun to look at students’ miscon-
ceptions. This proved to be a most successful collegial link (see Chapter 8),
and one that became a rich personal friendship that did not end when Roger
Osborne went home to New Zealand.
From 1980 until 1985 when Roger died I would ring him up about once a week and just talk
about ideas. Sometimes we would write something together, but mainly just catching up. I was
so used to ringing him, I’d pick up the phone at nine in the morning knowing I’d get him
before he went home. When he died it was unbearable to put your hand out and have to put
the phone down. Gilbert, England

A culmination of the importance of personal/collegial links in research is to

be invited to be part of the production of a Festschrift volume or occasion,
in honour of a distinguished colleague. Douglas Roberts, Canada, expressed
this very personal significance of writing for a Festschrift, when outlining
the background of his 1982 paper on the idea of curriculum emphasis.
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 47

The significance of the paper on curriculum emphases was twofold. First was the occasion of
its production. It was given first at a Festschrift for Fletcher Watson when he retired. It was
given again at an AAAS meeting in 1981 and dusted up for publication in Science education
in 1982. So the reason for putting it together was a very highly personal one.
Roberts, Canada

In like manner, the two dozen friends of Rosalind Driver who had the chance
to contribute to Improving Science Education (Millar, Leach and Osborne,
2000) were very conscious of their mutual indebtedness to her and through her
to each other. That so many of us from eight countries could meet together
in York, England for a few days to discuss our draft chapters in 1999 was
an exceptional bonus.

PART 2. PERSONAL INFLUENCES OF OTHERS’ WORK

The influence of publications by others is always in the context

of one’s own biography. It comes at a critical time of one’s
development – almost as an Epiphany.
Aikenhead, Canada

Until the recent emergence of email as a quick and amazingly simple means
of communicating, science education researchers communicated personally,
face-to-face as colleagues or at conferences, and impersonally, through pub-
lished materials such as research papers in refereed journals, handbooks of
research, edited books, and occasional monographs. Either the personal or
the written word can be the source of powerful influences on what researchers
choose to study and how they go about it, and it is these major influences
my second question (see Introduction) aimed to uncover.
As with significance in the first question, when the respondents were asked
to identify two or three publications by others that had had a major influ-
ence on them, a number immediately pointed out that it was personal
exchanges, involving extended oral conversations, that were for them a more
fundamental source of influence. I accepted this and we discussed these persons
of influence. These personal interactions cannot, unfortunately, be simply
reproduced for others, whereas publications by others, in comparison, have
permanence, and hence are potentially accessible and transferable. Accordingly,
I did press all the respondents to identify publications that had exerted major
influence on them, and in these two ways a great variety of influence was
forthcoming among the 150 publications listed (see Appendix B).
To do justice to this variety, the major influences are grouped under four
headings, two of which, persons of influence, and publications that influ-
enced the researcher as person, relate to the theme of this chapter, researchers
as person, and are now discussed. The other two, publications that influ-
enced the respondents’ research, and publications about practice that were
influences are the subject of Chapter 5. Among these publications there were
48 CHAPTER 3

some that are evidence that research in science education has, indeed, begun
to meet two of the intra-research criteria in Chapter 1, namely, R6. Model
publications and R7. Seminal publications (see p. 81 and p. 87 respectively).

Persons of Influence

Personal interactions can undoubtedly have a profound influence on research,

and those researchers, who are part of ongoing interacting groups, are
fortunate to have this sort of influence and stimulation so readily available.
I know, however, that it is possible to work in institutions where the staff
members do not have such interactive patterns of professional communication.
Indeed, personal exchanges have to be promoted, since they do not always
occur automatically. Senior researchers who have had these personal contacts
can, for example, play an important role in establishing contacts between junior
or more isolated researchers and established researchers they know, who are
working in the same area, and thus could offer advice or exchange ideas.
It was because of the great potential, that personal exchange does have to
encourage research and its flow of ideas, that the Rutherford Report in the
USA in 1963 (see Chapter 2) recommended that doctoral programs should only
occur in centres that had a viable nucleus of researchers. The recommenda-
tion was overtaken by the expansion of higher education that occurred in many
countries in the later 1960/70s. Nevertheless, the issue of concentrating research
into a small number of centres continues to surface periodically. It is in the
air again now in the debates about the crises in higher education, partly because
of the cost of maintaining all the universities that now exist as both teaching
and research institutions, and partly because of the collegial sense that lay
behind the Rutherford Report’s recommendation. Certainly, when many uni-
versity institutions have only one or two science educators with a research
orientation and inadequate library resources, it is very difficult for them to
provide adequate research training. Moreover, it is important for these isolated
researchers to have the chance to attend conferences and make visits to other
institutions that will give them personal contacts with other researchers and
better libraries.
The persons of influence fell into four categories of relationship to the
respondent.

Supervisor

The relationship between supervisor and research student is a very special type
of educational relationship. It has a one-to-one character that is not usual at
other levels of formal education, and it is extended over a substantial period.
When I was in chemistry I was at the liberal end of the supervisory spectrum,
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 49

offering a new graduate student two or three topics from which to choose.
When I moved to Monash in the Faculty of Education, such a degree of
direction and control of a research student’s topic was unknown. The culture
of supervision was very much the humanities one in which the supervisor is
a wise mentor with general, rather than specific advice about topic, possible
sources and methods. Such supervisors provide a critical commentary on the
style and logic of the thesis drafts, but not on the detail of its substantive
material. In this culture much more distinction is possible between one thesis
and another (see also Chapter 5).
Supervision in the field of science education has, I believe, evolved to be
generally somewhere between the two cultures I have just described. Many
supervisors have students of both types. Now in a number of countries there
are research groups, who for some years focus on different aspects of the
same issue. On the other hand, most supervisors will have more than one
interest so that new students can make that sort of choice of a topic. Doctoral
students in science education are often older and have experience of teaching
science, compared with their counterparts in the sciences, and many are
carrying out their study on a part time basis. Their choice of topic is natu-
rally constrained by the data sources their dual roles make possible. Others,
before enrolling, have become interested, through their reading or by their
engagement in certain professional experiences, in a topic or issue they have
already begun to formulate, and now wish to pursue. For them, it is a case
of finding a supervisor to fit the student’s interest.
Both Rosalind Driver, England, and John Clement, USA, recalled with
gratitude the inspirational help they received from Jack Easley Jr during their
doctoral studies at the University of Illinois. Clement identified Easley’s paper,
The structural paradigm in protocol analysis, in JRST as one publication
that reflects the wisdom and advice they both received.
It summarised the methodologies he had developed at that time for doing qualitative research.
It suggested also the need to get at mechanisms of students’ thinking, not just the summative data,
and that it is possible to actually map the cognitive structure students had before, during and
after instruction. Clement, USA

In Peter Reinhold’s case, he perceived his supervisor, Wilhelm Woltze, as influ-

ential because of the quality of the ideas he presented about cognitive systems
in the learning process for science. As they worked together with groups of
teachers, Woltze’s difficult theoretical ideas became clearer and Reinhold
became convinced of their importance. Woltze’s work was based on the Russian
approach of cultural historical activity theory. It was very theoretical and
abstract and not easy to read. Reinhold determined that he would work for
his doctorate in an area that would help to make these ideas concrete.
From the idea of activity, of doing, I arrived at the experiment. This was a way of doing
science, and strong in the activity theory is doing an activity and reflecting on it, in order to
50 CHAPTER 3

proceed further to get better knowledge and better routines. This was my start and then I got
the idea it should be open experimenting so that I could observe how they proceeded.
Reinhold, Germany

Marcia Linn’s, USA, graduate adviser was Lee Cronbach. She described his
influence in threefold terms – his rich methodological thinking, his making her
believe that she could work in three different areas, and in always looking
to see where what you are doing fits into the history of research.
The cognitive science group were fascinating because they acted as if they had personally dis-
covered learning and instruction for the very first time. Why I look at the world in the way I
do was due to Lee making it perfectly legitimate to do so. Linn, USA

Mentors
In addition to the rich supervision, John Staver, USA, received from Hans
Anderson and Dorothy Gabel at the University of Indiana, he had ongoing
support and influence from Dudley Herron at Purdue and Robert Karplus at
Berkeley as mentors, then and thereafter.
In a similar vein to Staver, a number of the respondents spoke of the
influence of established researchers who, though not responsible in the sense
of a supervisor, acted as wise advisors or mentors for them as their research
careers proceeded.
Doris Jorde, Norway, came to her present post at the University of Oslo
from teaching university microbiology and her doctoral study in the USA.
She found herself, with just one other person, responsible for teaching in
Norwegian all the courses in science education. After a number of rather
overwhelming years, she went to a British Council course at Leeds led by
Rosalind Driver.
And suddenly all of these pieces came together in some strange way – the philosophy of science,
the learning theory, constructivism, and how we choose topics in science. Just having two
weeks with her when I didn’t have to teach, and to speak Norwegian, and when I was just able
to think about it all. It was really important for me. Jorde, Norway

The group at Cornell University in the 1970/80s was a rich source of men-
toring. Pinchas Tamir, Israel, described the coming of Joe Novak when he
was well on with his doctoral study as very, very influential. Later he was to
meet Lee Shulman, when he was involved with medical education, and found
in him another influential, ongoing mentor.
James Wandersee, USA, spent many summers at Cornell after his doc-
torate with Joe Novak, and gained much from the contact that these visits
allowed with Bob Gowin. He spoke of how invaluable the mentorship at
Cornell was for the personal jump he was making from a teachers college
to a research university.
In Germany, several of the respondents referred to the personal mentoring
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 51

role that Walter Jung of Frankfurt University played in that country in the
1970/80s, in addition to providing models for the conduct of research through
the publications from Jung and his group (see below).
Adri Verdonk was a mentor for Wobbe de Vos, The Netherlands. Verdonk
was initially a researcher in chemistry, and then to his colleagues’ surprise
he began research in chemical education. He encouraged de Vos, despite his
20 years of teaching chemistry, to consider afresh his conceptual understanding
in chemistry, and to reanalyse what you have come to believe about it.
What is the real colour of litmus? Can a substance have two colours? What frustrated me was
that in all those years of teaching I had not noticed this problem. De Vos, The Netherlands

Collaborating Colleagues
It will have been noted that many of the significant publications that have been
mentioned in the earlier chapters are jointly published. There are two reasons
for this. The first is that supervisors in science education research now do
commonly publish with their students the research that was completed for a
masters or doctoral degree. When I began my research in the social sciences
and in education more specifically, the practice of jointly publishing with one’s
research students was not at all common, although I was very familiar with
it from my times of research in chemistry.
One good reason for the shift in science education to shared publication
is that many of the teachers and others doing research in this field, once their
thesis is finished, are preoccupied with other priorities. Without a major
contribution from their supervisor in the writing of paper, the findings of a
number of good studies would remain unavailable. A second reason for joint
publication is the healthy pattern of collegial cooperation that is now a common
feature of the research area. In my own case, after I ceased to be the dean
of the faculty at Monash, I appreciated very much the experience of preparing
and publishing papers with Paul Gardner, Richard White and Dick Gunstone,
three senior colleagues and friends. With the last two I was also able to edit
a major book, The Content of Science Education.
The influence of colleagues is not restricted to collaboration in a partic-
ular research study. It can take the form of a critical friend against whom
one can bounce ideas and get a thoughtful response. The great thing about
critical friends is that their comments can be heeded or ignored, but either
way they are helpful. Marcia Linn, USA, describes just such a collegial rela-
tionship when she spoke of Carol Gilligan.
Carol Gilligan is a dear friend and a profound influence on me because of her willingness to
embrace the possibility that there may separate forms of reasoning by gender. I don’t agree
with her about that, but I admire her bravery and the richness of interviews she shared with
me. She is willing to look at something from every angle that you’ve never thought of, and
that contributes to my thinking. Linn, USA
52 CHAPTER 3

Joan Solomon, England, spoke similarly of the continuing influence of John

Ziman. His collegial support was there when she was developing the SISCON
curriculum materials and thinking very much in a teaching mode. Then he
has been a collegial source of ideas and a useful sounding board for her
research, as that became more the priority of her attention. Two of Ziman’s
books were also listed among her influential publications.

Key Persons in the Field

If centres with more than a nucleus of researchers is important for the
development of a field of research, then the leaders of some of these will
turn out to exert personal influence on others that somehow goes beyond the
place and immediacy of first rate professional leadership. I am sure that a
number of the researchers that NARST has recognised over the years by its
Distinguished Researcher Award would be such persons in science educa-
tion.
I have experienced the influence of three of these key persons – Joseph
Novak, Roger Osborne, and Rosalind Driver. Reference has already been made
to the influence of Joe Novak, USA, on several of the respondents who have
spent time with him at Cornell. In 1974 I sent him a paper that Leo West
and I had written, following West’s doctoral study involving advanced
organisers in the learning of chemical equilibrium (West and Fensham, 1974).
At the NARST meeting the next year I met Joe, and immediately after the
meeting I found myself at Cornell for exchanges that blossomed into a special
professional friendship. West then went as a post-doc to Cornell, and that
association had one very important outcome. This was the book, Cognitive
Structure and Conceptual Change, edited by West and Pines (1985), and
published by the scientific publisher, Academic Press – a milestone in the
maturity of the research field.
In 1980 I arranged for Joe Novak to come to Australia, and with his warm
evangelistic fervour to share the ideas in his book, The Theory of Education
and an early version of Learning How to Learn in the many centres he visited
on that trip
As both Roger Osborne, New Zealand, and Rosalind Driver, England, alas,
died in the full flight of their professional lives, it is not inappropriate to single
them out as two other examples of these key persons. They both reappear in
the last section of this chapter as authors of seminal publications in the field.
During the 1970s, Roger Osborne who was responsible for first year physics
teaching in the University of Waikato in New Zealand had become increas-
ingly aware of the inadequacies in these students’ understanding of quite
basic concepts, despite their good scores in school physics examinations.
Towards the end of that decade a Learning in Science Project (LISP) was
launched under his and Peter Freyberg’s (one of the Education Professors)
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 53

direction. Soon after, Osborne spent a short period with John Gilbert at the
University of Surrey that proved remarkably fruitful for methodology in the
field of science education (see Chapter 8). Dissatisfied with merely accumu-
lating the very arresting and novel data that then began to flood the Working
Papers of LISP, and to appear as research papers in leading journals, Osborne
then joined forces with Merl Wittrock at UCLA in Los Angeles for another
quite short time. They produced the paper, The generative learning model
and its implications for learning science, which rapidly became an impor-
tant theoretical reference for many researchers in the area.
After completing a physics degree in England with distinction, and after
teaching physics in schools for a few years, Rosalind Driver moved with her
husband, Geoff, to Bolivia on a teaching assignment for the World Student
Christian Federation. They then moved to Urbana/Champaign for doctoral
studies. The study for her thesis under supervisor, Jack Easley Jr., began in
the Piagetian tradition, then becoming known in the USA. In their work
together, Driver and Easley went, however, beyond this tradition. Their report
of it in Studies in Science Education, after Rosalind returned to England,
opened for research a whole new realm of how children think about scien-
tific phenomena, and how they conceive of the concepts that are science’s ways
of generalising about what is observed.
At Monash, we were fortunate to have had both these exciting scholars as
visitors in the early 1980s, thus establishing the close personal links for me
and my colleagues that led on to many fruitful professional developments.
Vince Lunetta, USA, provided a warm testimony to two of these key
persons.
Part of my problem was that I was interested in conceptual development when it was not per-
ceived as important. I wanted a theoretical organiser for my interest and eventually Ros Driver
(Driver and Easley ) came along. Both she, and later Joe Novak, were influences, because
they had models that they stuck with, and helped to develop over a long period of time. In a
field of research that’s supposed to be so important, we have had so few people putting long term
efforts together and building something for an extended period. Lunetta, USA

I trust readers will feel invited to think of others who should be added to
this pantheon of key persons in the field.

Publications of Influence on the Researcher as Person

Many respondents, particularly those beginning in the 60s and 70s, listed
among their publications of influence ones that came from outside science
education. Some of these made a direct contribution to their research in the
various ways that are listed in Chapter 5. Others, however, contributed in a
more general way to the researchers as persons – their personal understanding
and their perception of what research in science education could and should
involve.
54 CHAPTER 3

A Philosophy of Education
John Dewey’s books on philosophy of education date back a century, but
they still exert considerable influence in education. The fact that Dewey did
address science education specifically in a number of his books, more or less
assured that he would be recognised by a number of the respondents as an
influential author. It is perhaps an indication of a dominance of psycholog-
ical thinking in the area that he was not mentioned by more of the respondents
in the USA.
David Wong and his colleagues (2001) in the Dewey Ideas Group at
Michigan State University have recently reminded the science education
community that the lead article in the very first issue of the General Science
Quarterly in 1916 (which subsequently became Science Education) was by
John Dewey. It was about Method in science teaching. In it he said: ‘Method
means a way to a result, a means to an end, a path to a goal. Method there-
fore varies with the end to be reached. Without a clear notion of the end we
cannot proceed intelligently upon the journey towards it.’
Gaalen Erickson, Canada, affirmed that this giant of progressive educa-
tion is now being revisited in important ways, and Marcia Linn, USA,
acknowledged Dewey as the greatest influence on her thinking about instruc-
tion. She pointed out that, as a philosopher, rather than a cognitive psychologist,
he did not go into the details that are now of concern to science educators,
but he did recognise a number of themes that have again come to the fore in
the field.
You can’t jump quickly to conclusions about complicated processes, and he drew attention to
students being responsible for their own learning – self-monitoring or meta-reasoning as we
call it. He did these things brilliantly and long before others and considerably more aptly than
Vygotsky, whose book did inspire my dissertation. Linn, USA

Linn went on, however, to say what an important catalyst for American
education, Vygotsky has been. His Thought and Language (1986) and Mind
in Society: The development of higher order psychological processes
(1978), have drawn the attention to issues, prevalent in Russian psychology
and earlier in American progressivism, that had been lost in the onslaught
of behaviourism.
Stephen Toulmin was the other general philosopher who was identified as
an influence by several respondents. In Chapter 7, his influence on Joseph
Novak, USA, through the way he treated concepts in the book Human
Understanding, will be mentioned. Several other respondents expressed
another debt to him for his discussion of the type of argument that occurs
in science, and which now informs and encourages their current studies of
argumentation in science classrooms.
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 55

A Theory of Learning
Five authors who have been concerned with theories of teaching and/or learning
were identified as important influences among my respondents. Publications
from each of the three psychologists of influence on the big curriculum
developments in the 1960/1970s, were listed: Robert Gagné, Conditions of
Learning (1965), and Jerome Bruner The Process of Education (1960) and
Towards a Theory of Instruction (1966) and Jean Piaget (see Chapter 2).
So many respondents referred to Piaget – positively, negatively, and in a
sense of an influence now passed beyond – that this research giant, part of a
Swiss circle in the 1920s that included Einstein, must be accorded a very
special place of influence. Among these respondents there was unanimous
recognition of the influence of his clinical methodology, and of the founda-
tion he laid by asking children about situations involving science.
Much later, Bruner’s 1990 book, Acts of Meaning, was an important
influence for the researchers who are now focussing on the learning that is
influenced by the discourse in classrooms (see Chapter 15). David Ausubel’s
Educational Psychology: A cognitive view (1968) provided a fourth major
psychological influence in the years to 1980 (see Chapter 7). From the 1980s
onwards, Anton Von Glaserfeld’s many writings on personal constructivism
have had a very widespread influence on researchers in science education
working on concept acquisition in the science classroom, and on conceptual
change. In their published research he is regularly cited as a general source
for constructivist learning.

Teaching as Communication
The ascription of major influence to Douglas Barnes (1976) slim volume, From
Communication to Curriculum (Middlesex: Penguin) slim volume, by five
of the respondents is a remarkable tribute to a teacher of English and a
pioneer researcher of subject teachers in classrooms, only a few of whom were
science teachers. This book was available long before the current spate of books
on classroom discourse. Its discussion of transmissive versus interpretive
classroom communication struck a deep chord with several researchers in
the early 1980s, who were beginning to be concerned about the way meaning
was being communicated in science classrooms
It’s going to be a book that will still be around long after Heinemann stops keeping it alive. It
was a tragedy when Penguin dropped it. The book is the most amazing synthesis of new per-
spectives, reaching out to cover so many bases. It’s all just remarkable.
Tom Russell, Canada
56 CHAPTER 3

A Deeper Understanding of Science

About one fifth of the respondents listed a publication of influence from the
history and philosophy of science. With the limit on the number of publica-
tions it was quite surprising that so many rated these publications so highly.
The general reason given was the respondents’ sense of needing to deepen their
own understanding of the nature of science, if they were to conduct research
into its teaching and learning. However, only two of these respondents were
researchers who began after the 1980s. It will be ironic if, at the time when
more attention is being given to the nature of science in the school cur-
riculum, the researchers in the area have less commitment to this aspect than
their predecessors had.
James B. Conant, Thomas Kuhn and Joseph J. Schwab were the authors
who were multiply listed. Conant’s writings on science, for example, On
Understanding Science (1947), Science and Common Sense (1951), and
the Harvard Case Histories of Science (1957), all date from before the
great curriculum reforms. They are not as well known now as they should
be among later researchers, for whom the science itself often tends to be
overlooked in their zeal to explore its education. Conant was influential in
establishing the climate that led to the great curriculum reforms in the USA,
and because of the influence he had on his student, Thomas Kuhn, it is good
that his work was so warmly endorsed.
On Understanding Science is clearly the second publication. It was extremely stimulating and
forced me to think about the relations between science, technology and society – to explain
them. A decade later I came across the Harvard Case Histories. My ideas and the perspective
I have developed clearly dates back to Conant’s writing. John Keeves, Australia

Thomas Kuhn’s writings about the nature of science were acknowledged by

a number of respondents. The well-known Structure of Scientific Revolutions
was always cited, but some of his other writing were also noted.
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the few books I’ve reread several
times . . . It was extremely helpful in my thinking with all sorts of implications for teacher
education and everything I did. Glen Aikenhead, Canada
In the book, The Essential Tension there is an essay, A function of thought experiments, in
which he refers to some of Piaget’s work on kids, their conceptions of heat and parallels it
with Galileo’s work – a lovely essay. Gaalen Ericksen, Canada

Joseph J. Schwab’s writings in the 1960s on The Teaching of Science as

Inquiry (see Orpwood) and on The Practical; A language for curriculum
(see Kass) were very important contributions during the years of curriculum
reform, and fortunately they were gathered together in the book, Joseph J.
Schwab: Science, curriculum and liberal education (see Roberts), edited
by Westbury and Wilkof in 1978. Both Rod Fawns, Australia, (see Chapter 13)
and Graham Orpwood, Canada, referred to the influence on their work of
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 57

the political character in the writing of this philosopher of science and science
education.
The thinking about science education that underlay my conceptualisation of the Science Council
study was described in Schwab’s series of three papers on The Practical. They were quite the
most significant papers I ever read in that respect. I visited him at home after designing the study,
but before starting it. He was generous and warm and gave me some tips. After the study he
sent a note saying how much he had enjoyed it. To read stuff that is so impressive and then to
meet him face to face was indeed a privilege. Orpwood, Canada

Less well known in the Anglo-American orbit, but exercising a similar

influence in Germany is Martin Wagenschein, whose book (in German), The
Pedagogical Dimension of Physics, draws together philosophy, pedagogy and
psychology to argue that physics only offers one facet of the world outside
– to learn physics is to reduce the world view. His writing was cited by
several respondents. Wagenschein was also noted because Walter Jung, another
source of major influence in Germany, was one of his students.
He gives the example that a Beethoven symphony can be described as the changing impedance
on a disk, but that loses very much. He was also very oriented to the student. He was not a
constructivist, but he was very oriented to students’ ideas. He has a nice story about a missionary
trying to teach people in Africa why there are phases of the moon, in terms of the sun, moon,
earth, rotation, etc. They learnt it, but they did not believe it! Duit, Germany

William Kyle, Jr., USA, listed the more widely known German scholar, Jürgen
Habermas, as his influence about the nature of science, and specifically referred
to the use Habermas made in Knowledge and Human Interests of the notion
of the constitutive interests of knowledge. He also listed Joseph Bronowski’s
Science and Human Values because of the emphasis this author gives to
imagination and creativity in science.
Bronowski claims that what makes rational behaviour different is a creative process, the
exploration of likenesses; and this is has sadly tiptoed out of the mechanical worlds of the
positivists and the operationalists. He asserts that the hallmarks of science are linked to inde-
pendence, originality, and dissent. Kyle, USA

Leif Lybeck, Sweden spoke very warmly of the insights and influence he
gained from the Swedish philosopher of science, Hakan Törnebohm, in person,
and from his writing such as Inquiring Systems and Paradigms. Jonathan
Osborne, England, referred to the influence of Ron Harré’s Varieties of
Realism, because its argument for modest realism provided him with an
antidote for the extremes of confidence, he saw some researchers and cur-
riculum developers placing in constructivism.
Finally, Mark Cosgrove, Australia, listed Mary Hesse’s two books in 1974
and 1986 as being among these philosophical types of influence. He particu-
larly enjoyed the way she contrasted the English and the European schools
of thought about physics at the beginning of the twentieth century – the
58 CHAPTER 3

abstractness of the French, and the concreteness of the English, provided her
with a reason why so much was achieved in atomic physics.

A Sense of the Culture of Science

One book stood out as an influence about the culture of science and that was
Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The construction of scientific facts.
It, and Mulcahy’s Science and the Sociology of Knowledge are commented
on later in this chapter. David Layton, England, and James Gaskell, Canada,
were both indebted to Jery Ravetz’ book, Scientific Knowledge and its Social
Problems. After analysing the nature of scientific knowledge, Ravetz goes
on to emphasise, in his discussion of the industrialisation of science, that
science is not just one thing, but something that has many versions and alter-
native forms.
It summarised for me a great deal of understanding about scientific activity in a very provoca-
tive and interesting way. He offers, I think, a powerful critique of the institutional structures
of science. Layton, England

John Ziman has already been mentioned and both his Teaching and Learning
about Science and Society, and An Introduction to Science Studies; The
social and philosophical aspects, were specifically listed. The manner in
which J.D. Bernal’s book, The Social Function of Science, influenced Roger
Cross, Australia, has been described earlier in this chapter. This book and
The Limitations of Science by J.W.M. Sullivan (listed by Glen Aikenhead,
Canada, as an important influence) were just two of the series of science
writings, published by Penguin in the 1940s with blue covers, that I was
profoundly impressed by when I read them as an undergraduate chemistry
student.

The Process of Enculturation

When a person established in one area of professional work changes to another

area there is a steep learning curve to climb that is usually accompanied with
anxiety. I can still remember quite vividly the doubts and feelings of anxiety
I had in 1954 when I embarked on studies and research in the social sciences
after a successful post-doctoral year as a physical chemist. Some of the respon-
dents talked in similar vein about their introductory period in science education
research and identified particular publications that had been a great help in this
enculturation process.
Elizabeth Whitelegg, England, chose both her publications of influence
for the helpful role they played in this enculturation process. One of these
was David Woods’ 1988 book, How children think and learn.
 THE RESEARCHER AS PERSON 59

It was very influential because I had come into science education without being a school
teacher. It was a lovely read, very accessible compared with other books I was reading at that
time. Whitelegg, England

Enculturation is assisted by encouraging signs that the area being entered is

indeed one that has worthwhile goals, and holds the promise that quality
contributions are possible. Persons in this stage also are on the look out for
ways to make a start in the new area. Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands, provides
an example of a scientist considering science education as a research area
he is about to enter. He remembered reading the review by Gilbert and Watts
in Studies in Science Education in 1983. It presented a very balanced opening
to the new area, encouraging him to think that it held promise of findings
that may be comparable to the developments in the sciences with which he
was familiar. He was fascinated and embarked on more reading to see where
he might begin to make a contribution.
Thijs’ two other publications of influence were chosen because they directed
him to goals that seemed very worthwhile. The first by Jim Minstrell in The
Physics Teacher was on objects at rest, the forces on objects at rest, and
explaining the rest condition of an object.
Very brief, but so open and direct. You could recognise very simple questions and answers of
students in class in terms of something interesting. In the Netherlands we often make things
too sophisticated. It really offered me the possibility of showing teachers that research is relevant
to their practice. Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands

The second was the report in 1981 of John Clement’s studies (see Chapter
9) on teaching approaches to overcome learning problems.
After all the collecting of “butterflies” in those years of alternative conceptions, here was someone
saying, Now we’ll try to make use of them. The idea of capitalising in that radical sense on
students’ ideas had great appeal. Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands

Admiration of Achievement
A few of the publications cited as influential were quite simply admired for
what their authors had achieved. This esteemed personal recognition was
invariably by those who were working in the same area and so were well placed
to make this judgement. An example was the choice by Heinrich Stork, himself
a very substantial scholar in the Piagetian tradition, of the publication by Philip
Adey and Michael Shayer of Really raising standards: Cognitive inter-
vention and academic achievement in 1994.
They impressed me. You know the great theoretical debate is about formal thinking. Is it a
homogeneous power of thinking or is it given in this field but not in another field. I think Adey
and Shayer’ astonishing results from their long experiment over five years have proved that it
is a homogeneous power. At least it is possible to transfer what you have learnt in physics
and chemistry to mathematics and even to English. Stork, Germany
60 CHAPTER 3

REFERENCES

Fensham, P.J. (1992) Science and Technology. In: P. Jackson (Ed.) Handbook of Research on
Curriculum. Chicago, IL: Macmillan.
Millar, R., Leach, J. and Osborne, J. (2000) Improving Science Education: The contribution of
research. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Wong, D., Pugh, K. and the Dewey Ideas group at Michigan State University (2001) Learning
science: A Deweyian perspective. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 38(3): 317–336.
 CHAPTER 4

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH

I wrote that one because it seemed to me that I’d done enough

– and other people had done enough – at that time, 1984 when
I started writing, to try and start to pull it all together. My
head was clear enough to say something about how kids learn,
what it means to understand and what implications these
have for teaching.
Richard White, Australia

When I asked the respondents my first question about publications of their own
that they felt were significant, I deliberately left the interpretation of the phrase
significant publication in my first question to the respondent researchers. In
Chapter 3 I have discussed the quite personal interpretations a number of
them chose. Many others, however, interpreted the phrase in ways that related
it to the research field generally and a range of these are described in this
chapter. The interpretations that can be related more directly to the five specific
intra-research criteria for a distinctive field of research are discussed in
Chapters 6–10. Finally, those respondents whose interpretation was in terms
of the impact or potential impact they saw their publication having on the
practices of science education itself are described in Chapter 11. There they
become evidence for the output criterion, O1. Implications for practice.

EXTERNAL SIGNIFICANCE

Authors become aware of the importance of one of their publications to other

people in several ways. Interest and compliments can be directly expressed,
and for some of the respondents there was compelling evidence of this sort
of external acclaim. They had been repeatedly told in person, or in corre-
spondence, of the worth of a particular publication.
One paper (with Filosha Haslam, 1987) has probably had 10 times as many reprint requests
as any other I have published. Treagust, Australia

They can also observe how commonly other researchers at conferences or in

their papers make reference to one of their publications.
My paper with Anne Peterson on sex differences in 1985 was published in Child Development.
It’s a kind of root paper in gender, standing in the fields of developmental psychology, cogni-
tive psychology, science education and mathematics education. It has been cited since in all those
areas and in literally every discussion. Linn, USA

Again, a publication may have been given a peer-assessed award, as occurred

61
62 CHAPTER 4

for Pinchas Tamir, Israel, when the best of my papers on cognitive prefer-
ences in the American Education Research Journal in 1975 brought me an
AERA award. Likewise, a paper that Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands,
published in Interchange in 1988, had gained an award from the Division
of Teaching and Teacher Education when he had earlier presented it at AERA.
In a few cases, the external interest was so great that the publication has
been translated into other languages.
The Learning How To Learn book is having a big impact. The Arabic edition makes the eighth
language and French and Portugese are now in process. Novak, USA

Sometimes these translations come to the attention of the author only by

chance. This was the case when Richard White, on a visit to Japan, discov-
ered that his book, Learning Science, had been translated into Japanese.
A more specific, positive response can come from a target group whom
the author had in mind to influence. The above paper by Wubbels, as well
as gaining the AERA award, was in use in every institute for teacher educa-
tion in The Netherlands. This latter recognition was, for the author, an even
more telling indication of its worth..
A number of the respondents refer to teachers as one such specific target
group. For Hans-Jurgen Schmidt, Germany, his target group of chemistry
teachers in Germany’s schools are directly accessible through conferences,
in-service workshops, and teacher journals, and he uses all these means to
present his research findings. Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands, also has teachers
as his ultimate target group, in his case science teachers in developing
countries. He had been an overseas project worker himself, so he judged his
publications in terms of their impact or likely impact on the views of project
officers in the developing countries The Netherlands is supporting. Such project
workers are intermediary targets to the ultimate target, the classroom teachers.
Its significance lies in assisting to change the views of those who commission the research –
in our case project staff in overseas developing countries. If we could model students’ alterna-
tive answers into some main patterns it could be very helpful to them in their work with teachers
as they could then concentrate on these underlying patterns. Thijs, The Netherlands

Jan Waarlo, The Netherlands, is among a small group of respondents whose

doctoral theses were republished in a form that made it widely accessible
far beyond the research community. His Health Education and Biology
Teaching: Innovation in Biology Education, a means of inservice educa-
tion, was widely disseminated among influential people in the field of
curriculum policy and among biology teachers at the time the biology cur-
riculum was being debated and revised. In Sweden, Björn Andersson had a
similar chance in 1989 to produce a book, The Compulsory School Science
Research Results and New Ideas, based on a chain of his research studies.
It was written at the request of the National Board of Education in Sweden
for teachers and teachers in training.
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 63

I did not attempt to popularise in a simple-minded way. I wrote about the studies, the tests
that were used, the results and some implications of them. I don’t think it’s written in a dogmatic
way, but rather ‘Think about this as a possibility and perhaps you can develop it’. Teachers
have said they are encouraged by it. Andersson, Sweden

David Treagust, Australia, is a respondent with a very strong sense of teachers

as a target that extends far beyond Australia. He has had considerable success
in reaching this ambitious target with the publication (with Filosha Haslam)
mentioned above. Thirty percent of the steady stream of requests for it are from
practising teachers in many countries.
When I became interested in students’ conceptions, I was also aware that teachers are not making
use of this exciting new information. My idea was to put the information into tests that teachers
use as part of their teaching. We developed the two-tier tests, first in biology and then in
physics and chemistry. In the paper we say, “If you are interested in getting a copy of the
instrument, write to the authors.” and people did, and are still doing so.
Treagust, Australia

Elizabeth Whitelegg, England, had a target audience for her article, The
changing experience of women, a section in a text for a Women’s Studies course
at The Open University in England. The students were essentially a non-
scientific group, comprising mostly humanities and sociology students from
developing countries. She was trying to make them aware of the sorts of
changes that had occurred in education in the sciences for girls, and how
girls could be motivated to learn science through the use of more context-based
approaches.
Because these non-science persons found my part of the course and my article understand-
able, when earlier parts had been very difficult. They hadn’t been put off because it was science,
so I felt it could have been influential. Whitelegg, England

INTERNAL SIGNIFICANCE

Many of the respondents did not have such clear external evidence of the worth
of their publications. They chose their significant publications in terms of their
own assessment of what a particular publication had contributed to the corpus
of research in science education.

Being Ahead-of-Time
For some there was a real sense of satisfaction in a publication that, they
saw, looking back, as foretelling ideas and directions that became more widely
recognised some years later. Vince Lunetta, USA, published such a paper in
1974 in The Physics Teacher.
In the late 1960s, at the University of Connecticut I was interested in the role of the labora-
tory in promoting conceptual understanding in certain areas of physics, and in looking at
64 CHAPTER 4

computer simulation as a medium for conceptual change. People were not concerned about
concept development at that time, and it was main frame computer time sharing – no micro-
computers then. Lunetta, USA

Joseph Novak, USA, spoke confidently in this same way of his book, Theory
of Education, two decades after it was published.
The value of what I did in the book in 1977 is just being realised, because the idea of theory-
guided education is an idea that’s time is just round the corner. Novak, USA

Again, one of the significant publications of Tom Russell, Canada, was an

article in a small book, Seeing curriculum in a new light, that was rather
reluctantly published in 1980 by the Ontario Studies in Education (OISE) after
commercial publishers had rejected it. Its articles were reports of small studies
being done by graduate students of Douglas Roberts in Toronto in the 1970s.
We were doing (with Doug Roberts) qualitative research in science education before the water-
shed of 1980 when Elliot Eisner and others of like fame stood up in a ballroom, full of people
trained in quantitative methods, and said it was OK to do qualitative work. Russell, Canada

I encountered another ahead-of-time example in the doctoral thesis by Leif

Lybeck, Sweden at the Univeresity of Gothenburg in 1979 entitled Archimedes
in the Classroom. In the late 1980s an attempt was made to have this work
published in English, and when I read the draft translation I was amazed
how many of the newer aspects of the research scene had been included by
Lybeck in this monumental piece of research. There were examples of artic-
ulated alternative conceptions, the ambiguity of science discourse, the role
of context, the importance of peer-peer minds-on engagement, the primacy
of content and the situating of cognition – predating by years many of the ideas
and concepts I will describe as the progression of this sub-area of science
education research in Chapter 9. Alas, it still remains unpublished.
As I read over responses like these, I realised that it was this sense of
being ahead-of-time what made me choose a small paper in Science Education
in 1983 as one of my own two significant publications. In it, I had fore-
shadowed aspects of both alternative conceptions research and the emergence
of technology and its relation to science, that have become of great importance
in science education research and in the curriculum of science education.

Challenge to Orthodoxy
For some, the fact that their publications challenged existing orthodoxy was
the ground for it being significant. The orthodoxies were both within science
education and in education more widely. David Layton, England, Joan
Solomon, England, and Robert Yager, USA, provided examples of challenging
orthodoxies within science education.
The work for my book, Science for the People, was done in the late 60s and early 70s when
there had been a decade of big national curriculum projects. An air of disillusionment was
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 65

growing – they had not delivered as was hoped. To me the prevailing emphasis in science edu-
cation seemed to be incredibly narrow and embedded in a psychological frame. Working on
the book exposed and analysed the essentially political character of curriculum reform. It was
a much more complex phenomenon than certainly the earlier curriculum developers had
anticipated. Layton, England

In the early 1980s when alternative conceptions studies were beginning to

appear in the literature, Joan Solomon, England, produced articles about how
children think in two different domains. She had recognised that adult
physicists, like herself, have ideas about energy and force, which they apply
in the random way people do in everyday life, but in the physics domain
they would make a discontinuous jump to use these concepts in the orthodox
way in which they are defined in that domain. Her paper in 1983, Learning
about Energy and how children learn in two domains, in the European Journal
of Science Education provided evidence that children likewise can learn to
operate in different domains with different conceptions of the same phenom-
enon. A decade later, her ideas that children could, and perhaps should, operate
in a similar manner, became a new orthodoxy among those attracted to situated
cognition and to the important role context plays in science thinking.
It was the beginning of the children’s learning, children’s science movement, and I was saying
something different to those who were concerned with using cognitive dissonance to bring
about conceptual change. I was saying then that you might have two quite different sorts of
knowledge to be used under different circumstances. Solomon, England

The well known book, Science/Technology/Society as Reform in Science

Education, edited by Robert Yager, USA, in 1996 had two precursors. In
1992 the International Council of Associations for Science Education (ICASE)
published a book he edited on the status that STS had around the world at
that time. Then in 1993 he agreed to have The Science, Technology, Society
Movement, with its evidence for this approach to teaching science, pub-
lished by the National Science Teachers Association in the USA as Volume
7 in its series on What Research Says to the Science Teacher. The head
of this large and influential organisation was opposed to the STS approach
and deliberately included opposing views to those Yager was promoting. To
have had his publication included at all in this NSTA Series, and with a title
that did acknowledge that research does have a role in curriculum matters,
were reasons enough for Yager to list it as significant.
Examples of significant publications that challenged wider orthodoxies
are the paper, referred to earlier, by Marcia Linn, USA, (and Anne Peterson),
and a publication that Marilyn Fleer, Australia, deliberately generated. The
former paper involved a meta-analysis of a large number of studies on gender
and spatial ability, and showed that the orthodox belief that boys had better
spatial abilities than girls was no longer sustainable.
It was quite a turning point for a lot of people who had to abandon the view that there was a
simple explanation for spatial ability. Linn, USA
66 CHAPTER 4

In the case of Fleer’s publication, she had organised a symposium with a variety
of invited speakers from various perspectives who were asked to address an
issue about which there was a prevailing orthodoxy in early childhood
education in Australia, namely, developmentally appropriate practices (DAP).
She edited the papers that were presented, and the resulting publication has
been instrumental in making this orthodoxy at least a matter of lively and open
debate.
The early childhood field had locked into developmentally appropriate practices (DAP). The
source of it is based in Piaget. The publication I have chosen is made up of papers by people
who were specifically invited to consider DAP from different perspectives. It worked well, and
opened up a real debate. Prior to the symposium, if you were to critique DAP in Australia in
any way, you were labeled as not understanding. Fleer, Australia

Overturning cultural orthodoxies is an even bigger task, but that is what

Sudhakar Agarkar, India, believes his book, Talent and Nurture among the
Underprivileged, began to achieve when it appeared in 1985. In it, he showed
that students belonging to the Scheduled Tribe could perform well in science,
if given inputs that were specifically designed to relate to their specific
educational needs.
Now I could challenge the belief that these students are born to fail – that they were outside
the range of education. Agarkar, India

An Important Problem
Some respondents referred to a publication as significant because it was their
attempt to provide a solution to what they perceived to be a very important
problem in the practice of teaching science in school. John Staver, USA, set
the publications he chose as significant in the context of a general problem
he had recognised in his years as a high school teacher. It was in part to gain
more insight into this problem that John took the big step to retrain for an
academic position in which research was expected.
During my years of teaching, I was continuously puzzled and sometimes frustrated when my
students worked hard to learn, and I worked very hard to teach them chemistry, and they did
not achieve learning as well as I thought they should, given that all of us worked so hard.
Staver, USA

Many of the respondents, who had had extensive experience in teaching science
in primary or secondary schooling, would concur with his description of this
all too common and perplexing phenomenon.
The problem’s importance may be associated, as in the case of Louisa
Viglietta, Italy, with a key topic in the curriculum. She had seen research papers
that reported studies that showed how difficult Efficient use of energy was
to teach, but not ones that offered solutions. In 1990, in both Physics
Education and the IJSE, she published papers that did offer a solution.
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 67

Important Findings
John Keeves, Australia, is one of the few researchers among my respondents
who have had a close involvement with the large scale, comparative studies
of student achievement in science that have been conducted across many
countries in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by the International Association for
Evaluation in Education (I.E.A.). As co-author with Comber of the report
(1973) of the First Science Study in 1970/71 (19 countries) and as director
of the Second Study in 1983/84 (23 countries), it is not surprising that John
Keeves’ significant publications involve findings from them that he saw as
important. These findings resulted from his use of various statistical methods
to analyse these data, beyond the simple analyses in the official reports. In
his 1975 paper he used the statistical technique of path analysis on the data
from the first study to show the pattern of inter-relationships between home,
school, and peer group and student achievement in science and attitude to
science.
His second publication (1992) is a small book in which Keeves draws
together findings from the first and second studies and in doing so, high-
lights most of the key relationships in these I.E.A. studies – effect of retention
rate, opportunity to learn, time of teaching and learning, and students’ achieve-
ment, the various attitudinal relationships, and the findings on practical skills.
Although academic science educators have been involved in each of these
I.E.A. Science Studies in advisory capacities (I was a member of the science
advisory committee of the Third International Study of Mathematics and
Science, TIMSS – 45 countries), the project’s actual management and design
has been the responsibility of professional testing organisations. Given the
vastness of the data pool that is collected in each of these projects, there has
been a notable lack of interest in it among academic researchers. This suggests
that their sense of the value of these studies is low, or that they are, in
ignorance, missing an opportunity to do the further analyses of these data,
that the I.E.A. does genuinely welcome, and that Keeves has shown can be
done.
A very different example of important findings (and a novel design and
methodology) is to be found in the book, Inarticulate Science, by David
Layton, England, and some of his colleagues at Leeds University. Its findings
included several ideas that were quite new and which hence, invite much
more research. The book describes some case studies of groups of persons
in society who were faced with a problem that required them to learn some
science. The previous research approaches to public understanding of science
have usually found that the majority of persons are inarticulate about scien-
tific knowledge. When one reads the title of this book a little more slowly,
one realises that it is the Science rather than these persons that is now inar-
ticulate. This finding, along with the conditions the studies found that scientific
68 CHAPTER 4

knowledge had to meet to satisfy these persons’ pressing needs, has many
implications for the research that is concerned with the social and personal
relevance of science and the contemporary quest for a curriculum that will lead
to scientific literacy.

Reality Checks for Curriculum

Several significant studies provide a reality check on some of the grand aims
that are commonly included in science curriculum. The study that has just been
described by Layton et al. is a case in point. Translated to the level of a
school science for scientific literacy, it is not easy to see how the curriculum’s
teaching and learning could regularly meet conditions like urgent need to know,
trust of source, and relative social value of the knowledge that were the keys
to the scientific literacy in the case studies.
The development of investigative skills is often an explicit intention of
contemporary science curricula. It is in relation to this intention that Mark
Hackling, Australia, saw his 1992 paper with Pat Garnett, in Research in
Science Education in 1992 is important. The study is set in the novice/expert
paradigm and traces the investigative skills of students in different years of
secondary schooling, and in university study, and the exercise of these skills
by expert practising scientists. Its findings provide a research basis for the
design of a progression for the teaching and learning of these skills, that is
different from the assumption of curriculum designers who tend to see these
skills as being on a simple developmental continuum.
Until you characterise this expertise in the domain of professional work, you cannot really see
where the curriculum should be heading, and what the focus should be for the work we do in
schools to develop these skills and confidence in learners. Hackling, Australia

John Clement’s, USA, significant publication, Learning via model construc-

tion and criticism: Protocol evidence on sources of creativity in science,
addressed the related curriculum aim of problem solving. It appears as a chapter
in a 1989 publication that he described as ‘more theoretical’. It describes
how an expert scientist solved an unfamiliar problem about springs. He gen-
erated a number of analogies, some plausible ways of reasoning and eventually
constructed a model of how a spring works, and hence of the problem involving
springs. When the model turns out to be totally wrong, the scientist has to
criticise and revise it. This is all done without experimentation – using thought
experiments based on experience. In a section at the end of his chapter, Clement
makes connections between the expert’s reasoning and model construction and
what is intended to go on in students’ heads in science classrooms. The same
processes can be there – partial trial and error construction processes that go
in cycles, rather than in a monotonic progression. This processing has been
called abduction to distinguish it from induction and deduction. When under-
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 69

stood in this way it is a tough and unfamiliar call for science teachers, the
majority of whom are still very monotonically transmissive in the practice
and conception of their task.
A lot of skills of criticism are involved that I don’t think we pay much attention to in science
education. In my own scientific training I’m not sure I was ever asked to criticise anything,
never asked to discuss about anything, and never required to have a dialectic about anything.
Clement, USA

Need for Coherence

The quotation at the head of this chapter was how Richard White, Australia,
described the significance of the contribution he set out to achieve with his
book Learning Science in 1988. He went on to say the book could perhaps
have been called simply Learning, but he wanted to use examples from his
own long experience of teaching secondary school sciences. Furthermore, he
did believe that different disciplines and different sorts of content require
somewhat different learning theories – a theme he revisited when he argued
for a theory of content and began to suggest what it might contain (White,
1994)
A number of other respondents expressed a similar sense of needing to
produce a coherence across what they saw as a hitherto disconnected number
of studies and ideas. The publication was significant when it met both this
personal need and the wider research’s need of coherence.
Paul Black, England, had been involved with the Assessment of Performance
(APU) program for science throughout much of the 1980s. In his paper in
the School Science Review in 1990 he made a synthesis of the lessons that
stemmed from that long investment of work.
Externally, it’s important because it makes clear some very important lessons about the aims
of science education and the nature of assessment which are still too little realised by policy
makers and, in the wider sense, by people in the field who need to know them.
Black, England

The first lesson, he suggested, is that, if you wish to know how pupils are doing
in some important activities like practical science investigations, there are
no surrogates. You’ve either got to study them doing the task or not do it.
To pretend that you can get an accurate representation through something
cheaper like paper and pencil does not work. That means for external account-
ability purposes some of the most important aims of science teaching has to
be in the hands of their teachers whether they like it or not. The second
lesson is that to get a reliable picture of a pupil’s capacity to perform tasks
and to respond to presentations of them you need a wide range of them, because
the variation of performance in the processes studied in the APU was so
dependent on context. For him personally, the publication of this review was
70 CHAPTER 4

significant because it is a base he finds himself going back to as a reference

point.
A much quoted paper on philosophy of science and science education
appeared in Studies in Science Education in 1985. It was by Derek Hodson,
now Canada, but then England, and not surprisingly he chose it as signifi-
cant, because of its contribution to coherence.
I was trying to sort out some of my thinking I’d written kinds of fragments, such as a piece on
Observation and another piece on Theory in Science. I tried in that paper to pull these frag-
ments together and get some degree of coherence. Hodson, Canada

He followed up this paper in 1988 with another one (published in Science

Education) that applied this more coherent philosophical framework directly
to the curriculum of science education.
The coherence Elizabeth Whitelegg, England, sought to achieve in her
section of the book, Challenges and Opportunities for Science Education,
was quite different. She set out to collect articles that would not normally
be put together. They were all science education articles, but now together
in this volume were articles about children with special needs alongside articles
about the issues of gender and ethnicity. By doing this, she aimed for and,
indeed. was able to reach a wider audience than one of just future main-
stream science educators.
I was pulling together this collection which had a coherence because, from a Learning for All
framework, their purposes, though separately different, were in fact together similar.
Whitelegg, England

Publications that meet this need for coherence serve a similar, but subtly dif-
ferent purpose from a larger group of publications that provide a summary
of where the research is going or what it has achieved thus far and it next needs
to do.

SUMMARIES OF RESEARCH

The accessibility of the research publications in education, though improving,

is still considerably less than in the physical sciences, where the leading general
and specific journals are well known, and where there are also very compre-
hensive abstracting services that cover a large proportion of the national as
well as the international research journals. The ERIC service in education
makes a welcome bibliographic contribution to making educational research
accessible, but it is simply not yet as comprehensive of the world’s research
as, for example, Chemical Abstracts is for research in chemistry
Accordingly, as the community for research in science education has
developed, it has created, with the aid of journal editors and publishers, its
own ways of summarising what has been achieved from the collective effort
of its members. The earliest style for doing this was bibliographical, the pattern
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 71

set by the famous Curtis Digests (mentioned in Chapter 2) where research

studies were reported, but not comparatively or analytically discussed.

Bibliographies
Bibliographies that collect together the scattered research on a particular
sub-field have played an important role. For example, Bryan Wilson in 1981
compiled a bibliography of studies and reports that included social and cultural
aspects of science education that predated by more than a decade the current
strong interest in culture and science education. At the time it was very useful
because his sources were located in a range of publications that is beyond
the reach of most libraries. His bibliography opened a window on the further
research that was needed at a time when the evidence was emerging that science
curricula and curriculum materials do not usually export well.
Probably the best known and most used bibliography in science education
is the one by Pfundt and Duit (1994) of research into alternative conceptions
that has gone through four editions since Pfundt began to collect these refer-
ences in 1979. Its significance will be highlighted in Chapter 9 where this
sub-area is further discussed.
As the community of researchers becomes larger and more disparate, and
the research itself is more differentiated, different purposes for these summary
perspectives become important. The maturity of the researchers, their access
to journals, and the training needs of new researchers all raise different needs
for scholarly summarisers to meet.

Self-Initiated Reviews
The form of summary that occurred most often among the publications of
significance and those of major influence were the self-initiated review. These
summaries of an a sub-area of research are undertaken by one or two or three
researcher authors who then submit their work for publication in one of the
journals that is subject to the standards of blind peer reviewing. Studies in
Science Education, the journal edited from the Centre for Studies in Science
and Mathematics Education at the University of Leeds in England is still the
only journal dedicated to reviews of research, but it is not uncommon for
substantial reviews to be accepted by the other leading journals.
The role of a number of these reviews as a source of influence is dis-
cussed in the next chapter, so it will suffice to give here to give as one example
that was seen by its author as significant. The review Ken Tobin, USA, pub-
lished in Reviews of Educational Research, in 1987 covered the research
studies on the wait-time that teachers allow for students to respond to their
questions in science classrooms. His interest in wait-time research was kindled
by the three papers on the topic that Mary Budd Rowe published in JRST
72 CHAPTER 4

in 1974. He described one of these ‘as easily the most influential article for
me – a seminal paper’.
It was both a capstone article on the idea, and a great learning experience for myself because
it involved looking at every study I could find, synthesising them and figuring out how wait-
time fitted in. Tobin, USA

Handbooks
Another form of summary or review that did attract some attention from my
respondents is the invited long review in one of the prestigious Handbooks that
have been published about a decade apart by the American Education Research
Association (AERA). A distinguished editor invites leading figures in par-
ticular areas of educational research to write a critical review that is to be a
definitive statement until the next Handbook a decade or so later. Science
education has now had such a review in each of the four editions of the
Handbook of Research on Teaching. Fletcher Watson (1963) wrote the
chapter on Science for the first Handbook. For the second, third, and long
awaited fourth Handbooks the Science chapter have been co-authored or
written by scholars from outside the USA, a mark of the international char-
acter of science education that no other area has yet reached. This international
recognition was extended when the AERA decided to embark on another
decennial series of Handbooks of Research on Curriculum, and I was asked
by the editor to write the chapter on Science and Technology (see Fensham,
1992).
Pinchas Tamir, Israel, one of these non-Americans, did choose his chapter
with (Lee Shulman) in the Second Handbook (1973) as significant. He
considers it presented the ‘foundations of science education’, and it was cer-
tainly referred to by many researchers for years after it was published.
During the 1990s two other Handbooks have appeared that have been
generated within science education itself. The first was commissioned by the
National Science Teachers Association in the USA and was edited by Dorothy
Gabel (1994). The second was more international in character and appeared
in 1998 in two volumes edited by Barry Fraser and Ken Tobin, and pub-
lished by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Each consists of a large number of
chapters written by different authors on particular aspects of sub-themes that
had their own sub-editors. The chapters in both these Handbooks are now
regular references in research papers, and their individual essays are excel-
lent starting points for graduate students embarking on research. The multiple
authorships, and the time of production of such complex publishing under-
takings, do make it much more difficult for these edited handbooks to have
the qualities of coherence and appraisal of what has been achieved, and what
is now needed, that have been hallmarks of the AERA Handbook chapters
with their single or partner authors.
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 73

My interviews were too early for the longer influence of the reviews in these
two Handbooks to be reasonably assessed. Only Pinchas Tamir, Israel, and
James Wandersee, USA, among a number of respondents who were authors
of chapters, identified their chapters as significant publications. Tamir’s review
(co-authored with Lazarowitz) in the Gabel Handbook on teaching and
learning in the laboratory was a summary of research in this sub-field, where
Tamir has been the leading figure and an inspiration to many persons like Vince
Lunetta, USA, for so long.
I really wanted to have a better sense of how to assess, and utilise, the laboratory. My work
with Pinchas (Tamir) was very influential. Pini and I published a series of papers relating to
the role of the laboratory and the nature of student behaviors in the laboratory.
Lunetta, USA

Wandersee’s review in the same Handbook was on the research on alterna-

tive conceptions and it is discussed in Chapter 9.

Edited Books
There has been a great rise in the edited book as another form of reporting
about the research in sub-areas of the overall field. Two small edited books
of this type have had great influence because they made accessible the research
studies of a pioneering group of researchers at a time in the 1980s when
these studies were largely unknown internationally. Each of them opened a
new sub-area of science education to research in a quite novel and coherent
way. These are the Pupil as Scientist by Rosalind Driver and her French
friends, Edith Guesne and Andrée Tiberghien , and Learning in Science:
The implications of children’s science by New Zealand’s Peter Freyberg
and Roger Osborne which quickly drew the attention of researchers in many
countries to the Learning in Science Project at the University of Waikato in
Hamilton.
The Pupil as Scientist was one of those paradigm changing books which I read as a science
teacher. It transformed my understanding of what was involved in science teaching and what
some of the problems were. Osborne, England
Freyberg and Osborne’s book influenced me and others in Santiago very strongly, framing
our research and also our curriculum development. Jimenez-Aleixandre, Spain

Subsequently, edited books of a rather different character began to appear. They

are, I suspect, primarily evidence of the structural establishment of the research
in a sub-area and only secondarily of its substantive character as a new frontier.
For these edited books the initiative may be taken by a researcher or by a
publisher with technical advice from an established researcher. Either way,
what results is a book containing a number of chapters by different authors
who have been invited to address a particular theme or issue, which becomes
the raison d’être for the book, and is usually evident in its title.
74 CHAPTER 4

The chapter authors are invariably chosen because they are known to the
editor(s) from their previous published work as having something to contribute
to the theme. The invitational nature of this authorship does ensure some
level of quality, but does not guarantee how the theme will be addressed.
Sometimes the authors take the opportunity to write about new work on the
theme that has not been published already; but this is less usual than the
invitation being used to produce a synthesis of the work they and others in
the sub-field have already published. Most editors of these books do have a
form of review and revision of the draft chapters that the authors produce,
but they are not subjected to the same rigorous reviewing that the blind peer
refereeing in the better journals provides.
There seems to be almost an insatiable market for these edited volumes.
They can be very useful for persons entering the field who require easy and
reasonably comprehensive access to where a particular sub-area of research
was a couple of years before the book actually becomes available (the
inevitable wait time of writing, editing and publishing). The range of views
and the breadth of research presented in these books can make them very
manageable and suitable as a textbook, at least for a time, for a graduate or
even undergraduate course – the hoped for outcome of the publishers.
In writing references and assessments of colleagues for promotion or
appointments, I have been surprised how many of these chapters occur in
the publication lists of many established science educators. Thus it was
paradoxical that, of the many respondents who have written such chapters, only
two of them cited such a chapter as a significant publication, and there was
a similar lack of recognition of these sorts of chapters by the respondents,
as having been a major influence on them. I suspect this says something
about the role these volumes play in the science education research commu-
nity and in the author’s stage of development as a researcher.
In the chapters that follow Chapter 5, where the parallel interpretations of
major influence in my second question are discussed, a number of other inter-
pretations of what makes a publication significant are exemplified.

REFERENCES

Fensham, P.J. (1992) Science and Technology. In: P. Jackson (Ed.) Handbook of Research on
Curriculum. Chicago, IL: Macmillan.
Fraser, B.J. and Tobin, K.G. (Eds.) (1998) International Handbook of Science Education.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Gabel, D. (Ed.) (1993) Handbook of Research on Science Teaching. New York: McMillan.
Pfundt, H. and Duit, R. (1994) Bibliography: Students’ Alternative Frameworks and Science
Education. 4th Edition. Kiel, Germany: IPN.
Wilson, B. (1981) Cultural Contexts of Science and Mathematics Education. Leeds: Centre for
Studies in Science Education.
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH 75

NOTE RE MULTIPLE PUBLISHING

Many of the natural science fields have such clearly defined specialist journals that recogni-
tion and worth among ones colleagues is associated with publishing in this journal, rather than
that one. In the general field of education, the non-specific character of many well respected
journals is a contrast, and the broad or rather lax definitions that even apparently specialised
journals have, enable authors to multiply publish. The same study has appeared in several journals.
The same piece of research, with only very minor changes to the text to make its primary
direction seem appropriate, can quite often be found in several quality journals. This multiple
publishing is not confined to newer scholars, who today are under considerable pressure to
build a list of published work. It is also quite common with established researchers. I find myself,
as a referee, for a wide range of journals having, more often now than earlier, to be pointing
out to an editor that this study has already been published elsewhere.
One rather weak defence for such multiple publishing is that educational research is still so
diffuse that there is not yet an established hierarchy of publications. as exists in the natural
sciences. Another more credible one relates to the complexity of educational issues and situa-
tions. A study that engages with this complexity may well produce findings that are worth
reporting in several journals with different readers, provided these different aspects are empha-
sised.
There is a good reason for re-publishing research studies that bear on the practices of
teachers and their students, the work of educational administrators, and on making of policy
by educational bureaucrats. Since the data for these studies are largely only available to the
researchers by the goodwill of these practitioners, there is a strong ethical, as well as the prac-
tical reason why researchers should communicate their findings in a manner that is accessible
to these persons and the wider audiences they represent. This is less a case of multiple research
publications, since the audience of teacher readers usually means that the report of the research
study needs to be substantially recast towards their interests. Furthermore, the appropriate journals
and other channels for communicating to practitioners are often not counted in the research index,
although they should certainly count in any assessment of a scholar’s professional contribution
to education.
 CHAPTER 5

MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH

Certain things you read take some time before they then form
themselves into usable ideas. They can also trigger a way of
seeing things in a new light or being able to capture the key
points of an argument.
Rosalind Driver, England

Part 1 of this chapter describes the publications by others that were identi-
fied by the respondents as major influences on their research. They touch on
what seems to be every one of the stages and processes that are involved in
the conduct of good studies. In a number of cases, the respondents had such
a strong orientation to the practices of science education, that their major
influences were publications that reported good or striking practice and, in turn,
these persons tended to assess their own contributions in similar practical terms.
Not surprisingly, among those who entered the field earlier there were
more references to publications from outside the field, than from inside, but
these external sources of refreshing ideas are still found among newer
researchers’ major influences. It was gratifying to find that some of the pub-
lications from within science education were being seen as ‘models for
research’, and that those described in Part 2 of the chapter were so interna-
tionally acclaimed that they can be described as ‘seminal publications’.

PART 1

Stages of Research

Goal Setting
The 1984 report of the Science Council of Canada, Science for All Canadians,
and its accompanying publications provided Reg Fleming, Canada, with the
goals he needed when he was beginning his research career. Among the spate
of major national reports about science education in the early 1980s, only
this one was listed as having major influence, probably because it involved
active and not just passive research about the state of science education (see
Chapter 13).
The publications of the Science Council’s study have really maintained me. It still amazes me
how relevant they are after more than a decade. The report itself and Glen Aikenhead’s mono-
graph, Teaching Science in a Social Context, as part of the study, together were really
impressive. Fleming, Canada

76
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 77

The educational and research goal to which Horst Schecker, Germany, was
attracted resulted from his reading of papers in a 1981 volume edited by
Duit, Jung and Pfundt, which raised the issue that a science like physics is
not in fact what students think it is. He was particularly fascinated by the paper
by Böhma who argued that students think physics describes the real world
around them. Whereas, from an epistemological view, physics does not describe
what is really there, but starts from observing a phenomenon, and then con-
structs a theory that becomes more abstract as more phenomena are included.
The aim is generality rather than a richer description of a specific reality.
This mismatch and its resolution in the teaching and learning of physics became
Schecker’s goal.
This is something students have to learn about physics. We haven’t found the bridge yet. We
cannot simply tell them, but we can try to give students time to work on a physical problem
sufficiently long that they are in a position to compare their findings with how physics deals
with that problem. Schecker, Germany

Methodologies to Use

Many respondents chose publications as major influences with research

methodology in mind. For example, Barry Fraser, Australia, who has done
so much to develop methodological instruments to measure the social char-
acter and climate of science classrooms, was encouraged methodologically
by the person and publications of Herbert Walberg. As representative of this
influence, he chose Walberg’s article, Evaluating educational performance,
from the book, Evaluating Educational Performance: A source book of
methods, instruments and examples, that Walberg edited. The other publi-
cation of influence for Fraser was Evaluating Educational Environments,
a book by Rudolf Moos, who worked in the 1970s in both educational and
medical settings. Moos used methodological tools that inspired the instruments
Fraser was later to develop and refine for use in evaluating the various types
of science classroom environments, that have been proposed as likely to
enhance learning.
In contrast, finding alternative methodologies to those in use within the
quantitative paradigm that was dominant in science education research in its
early years was important for several respondents. One of these was Reg
Fleming, Canada, who described the influence Latour and Woolgar’s book,
Laboratory Life: The construction of scientific facts, had in legitimating for
his use in science education of the anthropological methodologies these authors
had used in their studies of scientific research.
They legitimised the notion that you could study science from an anthropological perspective and
with anthropological methods. That gave me cause to think that then you could also study science
education from that perspective. Fleming, Canada
78 CHAPTER 5

The same publication was an influence on several other respondents, as were

two others that influenced Fleming – Mulcahy’s Science and the Sociology
of Knowledge, and Latour’s subsequent book, Science in Action.
Publications involving qualitative methodologies were also cited by two
other Canadians, Gaalen Erickson and Wolff-Michael Roth. Erickson was
indebted to Jack Easley’s 1982 paper in JRST, Naturalistic research and
case studies for examining the quality of teaching, in which he was alerting
researchers not to be overly prescriptive in case studies.
It has not had the coverage it deserves. Easley laid out some really provocative ideas, acknowl-
edging the influence of Piaget on him, but arguing now for a search for mechanisms, but not
the old kind of learning models of mechanism. Erickson, Canada

Roth, like Fleming, was impressed by the ethnography of Latour and Woolgar
and by several other ethnographic studies of science. He highlighted Jean
Lave’s book as being both theoretically and methodologically influential,
and added Lucy Suchman’s book, Plans and Situated Actions, as one more
influential publication for these methods.
She has ethno-methodology in her background, so that history is very strong. Also her approach
to studying the pairs of secretaries trying to make sense of an “intelligent” photocopier. All these
influenced my research methodology, although really it is that my research questions need
ethnographic work. They cannot be at this point studied quantitatively. Roth, Canada

One of my own two publications of influence fits into this interest in

qualitative methods. It is the small book, The Fortunate Man, by John Berger
and Jean Mohr. It is an account, beautifully illustrated with photographs by the
latter, of a doctor who goes to live and work in a small rural community, As
time passes, he slowly gains the trust of the villagers and in turn, he comes
to appreciate the wisdom they have about so many things. I read it first in
1978, just a year after Lawrence Ingvarson and I at Monash had won what was
probably the first funding support in Australia for an ethnographic study of
science classrooms using participant observers. The book is a powerful analogy
for educational research using anthropological methods. It also is a reminder
to participant observers of the patience they must have, if they are to gain
access to what the teachers and students would say to each other about their
classrooms, rather than to the responses they create for a researcher’s benefit.
At one point the doctor describes himself as the amanuensis of the village and as the clerk of
its knowledge, writing down the knowledge the people have that they don’t even know is impor-
tant. Fensham, Australia

For me personally, the book brought back memories of experiences I had during
my doctoral study in social psychology, when I was carrying out an anthro-
pological study of a factory community in Essex, that was undergoing
technological change. Paramount among these memories was the long time
it took me to gain the trust of the factory personnel, and how my patience
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 79

was affirmed after some of the management group had spent a morning filling
in a questionnaire for a psychologist from the National Institute of Industrial
Psychology. The next day one of this group told me he had yesterday learnt
the difference between a psychologist and a researcher (the label they knew
me by). The former asks questions and provides you with his answers to choose
from. The latter waits until he knows you before asking questions, and then
waits even longer to hear the answers.
Recognition of these qualitative methodologies for research is still quite a
surprise to persons whose background is in the more quantitative sciences.
Randy McGinnis, USA, a relatively recent researcher, recalled the shock he
got when he read the paper by Nussbaum and Novak in Science Education
in1976 on children’s concepts of the earth.
As I began my doctoral program in 1990, I was amazed that the field published research that
was interview based. I admired the way the researchers combined theory with innovation in
classroom science teaching practice. I was reminded that young learners are conceptually dif-
ferent from adult learners. McGinnis, USA

He went on to identify several other publications that influenced him

methodologically as his research progressed. The manner in which multiple
perspectives and methodologies had been applied to understanding science
practice in the 1990 book, Windows into science classrooms: Problems
associated with high level cognitive learning in science, by Tobin, Kahle,
and Fraser encouraged him to be eclective in his own work.
The contrast between qualitative and quantitative methodologies was striking, as were the
difference between the qualitative perspectives that were determined by the standpoints of the
researchers. McGinnis, USA

Finally, he found inspiration for how to report his own research in the 1994
paper, Constructing science teaching in the elementary school: The sociali-
sation of a science enthusiastic student teacher, by Abell and Roth in JRST.
This was a candid and refreshing way to examine an induction year, and the qualitative first
person methodology helped me see how to portray myself in literature as well as incorporating
my participants’ voices in the narrative. McGinnis, USA

The Provision of a Theoretical Framework

The importance of a theoretical framework among the respondents was very
variable. Some of them asserted that without a theoretical framework, or at
least the aim of producing one, a research study is not really research. At
the other end of the scale there were those who argue that educational settings
are too complex to have neat theories of the type that are so useful in the natural
sciences.
In between there are a number of possible positions. There are the
researchers who use terms like “grounded theory”, and for whom theory
80 CHAPTER 5

belongs to the actors in the drama as much, or more than it does to the
researcher/producer. Some researchers saw a meaning for theory, but in a sense
that is bounded by context or situated. My own nurturing for research in the
social sciences was by Oliver Zangwill in Cambridge, who held another in-
between position with respect to theory. He believed the social sciences had
to live through a much longer adolescence of careful observation (as natural
sciences like chemistry and biology had done), before they could hope to
have significant theories. It was this view that led him to encourage me so
strongly to link with the social anthropologists and engage in a very extended,
ethnographic case study for my doctorate.
A number of researchers in science education carry out their studies in ways
that suggest that theory has little importance for them. If they do use the
word, it tends to be as a source of descriptors for their findings, rather than as
something beyond the findings that their studies are designed to refine or refute.
Some respondents at the strong end of the theory dimension did acknowl-
edge their indebtedness to authors who had provided them with powerful
theories. Four examples of explicit indebtedness for theory follow from
researchers working in rather different sub-areas of science education.
Jean Lave’s book, Cognition in Practice, about situated cognition is the one that done most in
terms of theoretical advance. She shows quite lucidly what it means for cognition to be situated
and she gives examples. She doesn’t sacrifice the research question to methodological issues
but uses a variety of methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to find out what it means.
Knowing in school and knowing in everyday life, and why everyday knowing is so much more
stable, and school knowledge is so fragmented. Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada

My science background is such that I have always been very theory-conscious. I want to know
what the theory is that makes sense of whatever ideas/observations are under discussion, and
I was at a loss as to how to think about the cognitive issues of culture and science in some
more systematic way. Kearney’s (1984) logico-structural model in World Views, provided that
theoretical framework for me. William Cobern, USA

Timothy Leary’s Interpersonal diagnosis of personality was important because it gave us the
possibility to describe communication in the classroom from what we saw as a theoretically sound
perspective adding much more than Flanders, Galton and Eggleston. It was, for us, a whole
new way of thinking about communication in the classroom and provided a basis for 15 years
research work. We first thought his framework would be directly applicable to education but a
year later we realised we had to adapt it for use in educational settings. In doing the adapta-
tion we found a lot more in that book that was important. Kinds of behaviour that are provoked
by the teacher, and there may be differential effects on different types of kids.
Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands

A videotape I saw on BBC of an Horizon program was about Gerald Adelman’s attempt to explain
the working of the brain as a Darwinian machine “The man who made up his mind”. It gave
me the ultimate theory I needed. I had come to science education with a localised reasoning
view of the mind, heavily influenced by Minsky. That view has been replaced by one great big
neuronal network. The brain, as Darwinian, works by selecting often fired neural nets rather
than as a camera that takes pictures that are never processed. The video has been absolutely
seminal in my present thinking and in my research group. Mark Cosgrove, NZ/Australia
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 81

Piagetian theory provided the framework for the work of three of the respon-
dents – Heinrich Stork, Germany, Björn Andersson, Sweden, and John Staver,
USA. As well as their debt to Piaget, each of these authors acknowledged other
Piagetian researchers. Stork listed the 1994 book by Adey and Shayer, Really
Raising Standards, and Andersson and Staver listed the books about the
Science Curriculum Improvement Study, in which Robert Karplus and
Herbert Thier described that first Piagetian-influenced curriculum project in
USA. More details of the work of these three is provided in the chapters where
their significant publications are discussed.
Rosalind Driver and her Leeds colleague, Phillip Scott, both England,
independently identified Acts of Meaning by Jerome Bruner and Common
Knowledge by Edwards and Mercer as important framing influences, as their
research focus moved to the discourse in science classrooms. It is unclear
whether they would see the valuable framework of ideas these authors offer
as a theory, although Scott certainly used the word, theory, in relation to
Vygotsky, as did Marcia Linn, USA.

Models for Research

Several publications were identified as major influences because they provided
models for research in science education. Some of these models relate to the
design of a research study and some (often linked to the first) are concerned
with the writing of research.
The design of a research study will, of course, depend on the question being
asked and the methodology that has been chosen to seek an answer.
Recognition of this specificity is evident in the clear reason Mark Hackling,
Australia, gave for choosing a 1983 paper in JRST by Osborne and Cosgrove
as influential. He saw this paper as being an absolute classic in the way the
interview about events methodology was used to elicit data from the students,
and how these, in turn, were used to enrich the way the paper was then written.
In addition, the science topic with which this study dealt, namely, the partic-
ulate nature of matter, lies for him, at the heart of all the science disciplines,
and confirmed even more strongly his sense that this paper and the study it
is reporting is a classic in the field.
Every one of my students is required to read that paper. To follow through a fairly broad field
of knowledge in that way has been a classic illustration of how to do research and how to
write it up. Hackling, Australia

The work of Walter Jung and his colleagues in Frankfurt was in the same sense
identified by Horst Schecker, Germany as models for the conduct of research.
The book, Vorstellungen von Schülernüber Begriffe der Newtonschen
Mechanik, reports a number of these research studies concerning students’
conceptions relating to Newtonian mechanics.
82 CHAPTER 5

It was important to me because it was a real research program. It showed how they started
with theoretical concepts, how they were worked them out, and then how they applied them in
an empirical study to further develop the ideas and then make more empirical studies.
Horst Schecker, Germany

Randy McGinnis, USA, was another who described his publications of major
influence in terms of their worth as models, either for his research or for his
writing of research. Since these publications were primarily acknowledged
for the way they shifted his research focus, they are described below under
that heading.
Like McGinnis and many science teachers who become researchers, Rod
Fawns, Australia, found himself having to overcome a tradition of not needing
to write. In this new research role he was required to write and express myself,
and he found personal refreshment in the quality of the writing of persons
like Richard Gregory (Discovery of the Spirit and Service of Science) and
Edgar Jenkins’ (From Armstrong to Nuffield). In this sense they were models
of writing for him.
Apart from the reference to Gregory all these model publications are from
within the field and hence provide at least some evidence for the intra-research
criterion R6. Model publications.

Ideas or Questions for Research

John Mason (1998) (see Chapter 3), from his perspective of the researcher-
as-person, claimed that the second most significant products of research in
mathematics education are the stimuli it provides to other researchers and
teachers to test out conjectures for themselves in their own contexts. Among
the publications of influence from the responding researchers there are a
number of examples of this sort of stimulation in science education.
Indeed the commonest reason given among the respondents for why a pub-
lication by someone else had had major influence was that it generated ideas
or questions for the researcher to pursue.
Mark Cosgrove, New Zealand/Australia, was nurtured into research in
New Zealand with Roger Osborne as mentor, and was very familiar with the
Osborne/Wittrock theoretical paper on generative learning. He wanted to go
beyond it, to explore what is happening during this type of learning, and not
simply to explore the before and after learning states, that he felt that psy-
chology had been doing for almost 40 years. Gick and Holyoake’s paper on
Schema induction and analogical transfer in Cognitive Science stimulated him
about how to move forward.
It is there I first got the notion that this business of learning is in the brain of the learner and
the teacher has got to provide the right conditions for generativity to occur. We can import analo-
gies but then I thought maybe there is something in the learner generating their own analogies
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 83

and refining them. It was a big idea 12 years ago but now its commonsense in the field. So I
no longer regard analogy as an inferior form of logic. Cosgrove, Australia

Ephraim Fischbein, (1987) a psychologist with interests in mathematics

education at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, published Intuition
in science and mathematics: An educational approach. This book and the
personal discussions Ruth Stavy, Israel, was able to have with him stimu-
lated her to explore the idea that at least some student misconceptions in
science may results from certain underlying intuitions.
He brought the idea of intuitions into my thinking. Ruth Stavy, Israel

As a report of this new line of studies Stavy with Dinesh Tirosh, a mathematics
educator, published in 2000 the book, How students (mis-)understand
Science and mathematics: Intuitive rules.
Pinchas Tamir, Israel, was a powerful personal influence on Vince Lunetta,
USA, who benefited from working with him on a number of occasions. Lunetta
began by following Tamir’s work on cognitive preferences, but more influ-
ential for him, and a number of his graduate students, were Tamir’s studies
of the role of the laboratory in science education, in some of which they
were able to collaborate. These studies, conducted over many years, are con-
veniently summarised in the chapter Tamir and Lazarowitz wrote in the
Handbook edited by Dorothy Gabel in 1993.
They were indeed model studies, especially because he was in the position of being able to control
the factors like the curriculum and the assessment, that so often undermine the possibilities in
practical laboratory work. Lunetta, Israel

After Paul Gardner, Australia, Alex Johnstone, Scotland, and others in the
1970s had opened up the role that misunderstood words plays in school science
learning, Clive Sutton (1980) in England and Gerhardt Schaeffer (1980) in
Germany reported studies of the associations students had for certain key words
in science. This work was a bridge to the alternative conceptions research of
the 1980s and 1990s, in which a fuller sense of the meaning students attach
to these words was sought. Two of the key words Schaeffer explored were
Health and Environment, and his publications provided important ideas for Jan
Waarlo, The Netherlands.
When I started my PhD I was very much influenced initially by Schaeffer’s work on associa-
tions, the international comparisons and the separation of the cognitive and affective dimensions
of concepts. Later on I thought he was not elaborating the work, and I needed to move beyond
those ideas. Waarlo, The Netherlands

The book by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson, entitled The Pragmatics of

Human Communication Aspects of Human Communication, provided for
Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands, the important idea that there is a distinc-
tion between the relational aspect and the content aspect of communication.
84 CHAPTER 5

I think that in science education we usually look at the content aspect and, of course, that’s
important. But I wanted to do things that others weren’t doing, so I selected the relational
aspect that is also important, and a particularly good one for beginning teachers to work on.
Wubbels, The Netherlands

In the late 1970s Goéry Delacôte, one of the pioneers of children’s thinking
about science, gave a talk in Gothenburg, Sweden, about the curriculum work
he and his group in Paris were doing to include students’ content-oriented
reasoning. This talk and the papers about the work he subsequently sent had
a great influence on Björn Andersson, Sweden.
They were a few small pieces of informally published reports of what students think about electric
circuits, about lights, and so on. But they triggered for us a really large project.
Andersson, Sweden

Kim Ik Jung, S.Korea, was influenced for his doctoral study on conceptual
change by a paper by Hashwey in the European Journal of Science
Education, another example of a research paper having a singular impact
on one of the respondents.

Affirmation of Ideas
When a researcher has embarked on an idea that seems largely to be self-
generated, there is often a sense of anxiety about the sensibility of what is
being done. Several respondents identified publications of influence, not
because of the ideas they produced for the respondent, but because they
provided affirmation, or a legitimation of the respondent’s ideas and actions.
Beverley Bell, New Zealand, described as ‘pivotally important’ the sense of
affirmation she gained, during her post-doctoral experience in the CLIS group
at Leeds, and from John Gilbert’s work and his visits after her return to New
Zealand. Another example of affirmation was given by Glen Aikenhead,
Canada, in describing his indebtedness to Thomas Kuhn’s, Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.
It did not change my mind, because I already had some of the ideas as intuitive feelings. Kuhn
was very important in articulating them for me. Aikenhead, Canada

Roger Cross, Australia, referred in a similar way to Science for All Americans,
the AAAS publication about Project 2061, and its Benchmarks as hopeful
signs that the science curriculum was not entirely locked into the form that
powerful conservative forces have given it.
It was a prop to my own position – if you like a higher authority – a different scale of authority.
Cross, Australia
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 85

Ideas for a Change of Direction

A number of the researchers chose publications that were major influences
when there was a change in direction, or a shift in focus, of their research
or when their experience and confidence in the area was such that they felt
ready to move to a different sub-area. Others identified their progress in
research, in terms of stages and each of these stages had a clear publica-
tion(s) of influence.
Ken Tobin, USA, had such a staged way of outlining his research contri-
butions. A very major influence on the first stage were the articles written
by Mary Budd Rowe and published in 1973/74 in JRST.
They were easily the most influential papers for me – seminal ones that were good conceptu-
ally and really helped my research program. Tobin, USA

When he moved into ethnography after 1984, Fred Erickson’s review,

Qualitative methods of research on teaching, in the Third Handbook of
Research on Teaching was very important.
I thought it was a spectacularly influential article and not only just the article, but Fred himself
was a big influence. Tobin, USA

Metaphors we live by, by Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), was also

influential on Tobin, and he was among a number who referred to Anton von
Glaserfeld and his writings on constructivism as thinking that influenced me
probably more than anyone.
The publications chosen by Harrie Eijkelhof, The Netherlands, also very
clearly followed shifts in his research focus.
Depends on the topic I’m working on. Now I’m involved with technology curriculum so David
Layton’s book with Open University is useful. Eijkelhof, The Netherlands

For his work on the understandings and responses of various groups to the
issue of radioactivity at the time of the Chernobyl disaster in the 1980s,
Eijkelhof was influenced by a paper in German by Riesch and Westphal (1975).
It is not a very strong paper but it does report confusion among students about radioactive
materials, radiation and radioactivity. I built on their work. Eijkelhof, The Netherlands

In relation to his interest in the issue of perspectives of risk and acceptable

risk he was impressed and influenced by the research done by Fischof, Slovic,
and Lichtenstein, that was reported as Lay foibles and expert fables in
judgements about risk, in a book edited in 1981 by Riordan and Turner,
Progress in Resource Management and Environmental Planning.
For his more recent involvement in curriculum development, he noted as
influential David Layton’s Technology’s challenge to science education,
and for the public understanding of science project Michael Matthews’ 1994
book Science Teaching: The role of History and Philosophy and his paper,
86 CHAPTER 5

Discontent with constructivism, in the same year in Studies in Science

Education.
I found Matthews’ book rather provocative, but interesting to read because he looks at the
whole of science education from this historical-philosophical point of view which helps me in
the stage I am now in. Eijkelhof, The Netherlands

Beverley Bell, New Zealand similarly spelt out her three publications of great
influence in relation to the sequence of her research life. Her initial phase
was influenced by the Freyberg/Osborne book and her second phase by the
Osborne/Wittrock paper in Studies in Science Education. The influences in
her current phase, in which she is exploring social constructivism, are Kenneth
Gergin’s The Saturated Self and Peggy Lather’s writings such as Getting
Smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern.

Publications about Practice

Several of the publications of influence on research were reports of good
practices in the science classroom. The example of Paul Black, England, being
so strongly influenced by the account of biology teaching in Epstein’s book,
A Strategy for Education, is discussed in detail in Chapter 11 where the
research/practice relationship is the focus. Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands,
and John Clement, USA were both much influenced by Jim Minstrell’s 1982
paper in The Physics Teacher about the ‘book on the table’. This paper was
part of a Teachers’ Guide that suggested to teachers a teaching approach that
explicitly involved students’ preconceptions in mechanics.
We interacted with Jim about his use of analogies in large group, classroom discussions to
get the students thinking at the level of “image-able models” of what tables are like and the
forces involved. We were then able to take that lesson as a sort of paradigm, adding a few
things and generalising it as a teaching model for other lessons. We called it “the use of anchoring
intuitions”, that become analogies for starting points in the teaching model. Clement, USA

This paper initiated the elegant chain of studies that are referred to in Chapter
7. The reports of these in the literature were chosen by more than one of the
respondents as influences on them. John Clement and his colleagues were deter-
mined to get more substantial evidence that might encourage more teachers
to heed Jim Minstrell’s advice to spend at least a period on the qualitative
question, Does the table push at all? ‘If the teachers would let the students
run with it, there will be a lot of mileage out of it that will be very useful later.’
They were aware, however, that such time budgeting is hard for many teachers,
because they are anxious to get on to the equations that represent Newton’s
laws.
Certain textbooks and other curriculum materials were influential on a
number of respondents. The most mentioned was Harvard Project Physics
because if offered such a different and human form of physics to the abstracted
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 87

conceptual character of the PSSC project. It was a second wave curriculum

project in the USA during the 1960s that was led by Fletcher Watson, Gerald
Holton and James Rutherford. The materials produced in the project contrasted
strongly with those of the earlier Physical Science Study Committee’s project,
PSSC Physics, and it was this contrast that had such a major influence on
the thinking of several of the respondents (see Chapter 11).
Glen Aikenhead, Canada, was one of the other respondents who was
strongly influenced by Harvard Project Physics. He had not only read these
exciting materials, but after his doctoral studies at Harvard, he had joined
the team evaluating the project’s materials in action in classrooms – an
experience that influenced markedly the work he has done in assessment/eval-
uation and in curriculum development (see Chapters 8 and 11). Aikenhead went
on to add the curriculum materials of the Dutch PLON Physics project of
the 1980s – derivative in a sense from Project Physics – as another influen-
tial source of this practical type.

PART 2

Seminal Publications
As any field of research develops a small number of its publications take on
an authority that most of its publications do not have. They are recognised
as of major influence by a number of established researchers across more
than their country of origin, and they are recommended to new doctoral
students as one of the literature pieces they must read to orient them to the
field. They can be described as seminal publications. That they do have this
status among established researchers is an indication of the maturing of the
field.
These seminal publications are, of course, regularly cited in reference lists,
but their special importance is often lost among the plethora of other listings.
Furthermore, what it is that makes them so special is not easy to identify. It
may be that they first brought to the attention of others an idea or issue that
then became particularly fruitful for other researchers to pursue. It may be
that they conceptualise an idea that previously had been diffusely defined. It
may be that they report in a convincing way a type of study that had not
been undertaken before. It may be that they offer a theoretical perspective
that makes sense of the findings reported in many earlier studies. It may be
that they provide a philosophical or epistemological framework that becomes
on overarching reference point for researchers as they immerse themselves
in smaller and specific research studies. Somehow they are more than a very
good review or a model study.
Examples of seminal publications within a research field need, of course,
to be related to particular aspects of it. Those that were identified by my set
88 CHAPTER 5

of respondents (that is, by several respondents from three or more countries)

would, no doubt, be added to, if a larger or very different set of researchers
was questioned.

Historical Studies
David Layton’s 1973 book, Science for the People, is the first of these seminal
publications. It convincingly presented a new way to study science educa-
tion.
I have great admiration for Science for the People. In the book he opened up for me insights
into, I suppose, the interactions of individuals, organisations, positions of power and educa-
tion systems in a quite profound way. It made me think in a different way about what was
going on in other contexts. Jenkins, England
Layton’ book gave me the idea that there was a political and ideological slant on the cur-
riculum. When I taught physics I had no idea I was involved in a political battle.
Woolnough, England

Alternative Conceptions
The Driver paper with Easley in 1978 in Studies in Science Education,
together with her book, The Pupil as Scientist, in 1983 really established
the importance of children’s views about scientific phenomena and concepts,
and these authors grounded these views in a constructivist orientation for
science education.
The paper with Easley was hailed for its transcendence of the narrower sense
of constructivism that Piaget’s work represented in relation to science contexts.
It was very interesting indeed. The ideas in it were so new. Joan Solomon, England
I chose to go to Iowa to do a Piagetian study for my doctorate. We were required to immerse
ourselves in Piaget’s books. We dug into his work and tried to reproduce what he had done.
But we never criticised Piaget. Subsequently, in a post-doctoral year at Michigan State I came
across Driver and Easley. Here was the broader picture. This was where all the questions,
that I had but couldn’t formulate because of my Iowan straitjacket, were allowed and addressed.
I was enriched. Treagust, Australia
I had pretty well rejected Piaget and stage theory by 1978, not particularly on scientific grounds,
but on the political ones that it seemed to say if persons were defined as concrete operational
they couldn’t have access to ideas which were deemed to demand formal thinking. Then I read
Driver and Easley, and it had a very profound effect. Their studies really made all my concerns
and anxieties concrete, and made it clear that you had to look at specific content topics.
John Gilbert, England

Doris Jorde, Norway, Reinders Duit, Germany, Audrey Champagne, USA,

Jonathan Osborne, England, and Harry Eijkelhof, The Netherlands, indepen-
dently (and together) affirmed the widespread influence of the Driver book
in this duo of seminal publications.
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 89

The references to Roger Osborne’s writings as seminal also embraced both

his pioneering book with Peter Freyberg in 1985, and his paper with Merl
Wittrock in 1985. The book’s rich accounts of the work undertaken by a
number of researchers in the Learning in Science Project (LISP) at Waikato
University, became a source book that interested not only researchers, but
also curriculum developers. For example, Maria Jimenez-Aleixandre, Spain,
recalled how interesting her group of developers had found these reports
when they, a decade later, embarked on curriculum reform. Audrey Champagne,
USA, Reinders Duit, Germany, and Marilyn Fleer, Australia, a rare early
childhood science educator, all echoed this comment
The seminal status of Osborne and Wittrock’s paper is because it provided,
for many science education researchers in the field of alternative concep-
tions, access to a science-related version of generative learning theory, at a
time when the explosion of these studies desperately needed a theoretical home.
It is a paper that underpins what I have done. It helped provide me with a powerful theoret-
ical framework in understanding of information processing psychology, and linking processing
psychology to a more constructivist view. Mark Hackling, Australia
Next I would list the Osborne and Wittrock paper, which was written at the time I was doing
my PhD, because they really put up theoretical notions and my study gave them examples that
supported these theoretical ideas. Beverley Bell, New Zealand

Robert Yager, USA, a researcher who followed this new burst of research
studies with great interest, but who was not heavily involved in them strongly
endorsed these assessments of the importance of all four of these publica-
tions.

Conceptual Change
The paper by Posner, Strike, Hewson and Gertzog in Science Education in
1982 about conditions for conceptual change probably also met the criteria
for seminal status. Its significant and somewhat paradoxical role in science
education research will be discussed at length in Chapter 7.
I’d been interested in conceptual change without quite knowing what I was interested in. The
paper crystallised some of my earlier ideas. I’ve used its ideas in a number of studies over the
years . . . Since working in the area I’ve read the literature further back, and now realise
what was around before their paper. Treagust, Australia

The paper by John Clement in JRST in 1993 on the role of bridging analo-
gies and anchoring intuitions in teaching for conceptual change was also
accorded seminal status. As will become clear in Chapter 9, this was very
due recognition of the way it brings an elegant and extended series of studies
to a strong and positive conclusion.
90 CHAPTER 5

Gender and Science Education

One publication was so commonly identified by the respondents with an
interest in the gender issue in science education that it also has seminal status.
It is Alison Kelly’s The Missing Half which, when it appeared in 1981, became
the springboard for a decade of vigorous research and activity on the many
ways in which gender biases appear in science and science education.

Technology and Science Education

Respondents in four countries referred to David Layton’s book, Technology’s
Challenge to Science Education, as an influence on them. Its arresting feature
for them seemed to be the way Layton saw personal and social values being
integral to technology, and hence essential and very natural elements of
technology education. Here Layton is similar to Bernal (see Chapter 13) in
seeing teachers, now of technology rather than science, as one group of stake-
holders who are free of the cut and thrust of technology in action in society.
Thus they are free to include the value dimensions that are so often hidden
or presented in biased fashion in the everyday world. These value dimen-
sions are part of the challenge the title of his book presents to science
education, because the latter has never been so clear or so comfortable about
including values in its traditional teaching.
Readers will, I am sure, think of other research publications in science
education that merit seminal status, and the list will slowly grow. However,
to have even the eight I have listed above is indication enough, that intra-
research criterion R.7 Seminal publications for a field of research has begun
to be met.

Types of Publications of Influence

The great majority of the publications listed in Appendix B are authored books
and papers in research journals. There are a few research theses, some con-
ference papers, and a chapter or two in Handbooks of Research and edited
books.

A Previous Thesis
One of the theses of major influence, the one by Wilhelm Wolze for Peter
Reinhold, Germany, has been described in Chapter 3, and the influence of
the other one by Rosalind Driver is included in Chapter 8 as the springboard
for the research of John Clement, USA. into students’ alternative concep-
tions.
I remember the role the theses of earlier research students played for me
 MAJOR INFLUENCES ON RESEARCH 91

when I was doing my PhD in physical chemistry. The research group was large
and we read these theses to understand what was required of us in due course
– how had the research topic been introduced, how had the literature been
discussed, what experimental details were given, how were the results pre-
sented, and what was the discussion? Because the research topics were all
related to solid state chemistry, and had been suggested to us by our super-
visor, there was a sameness about the theses that we would, in due course,
emulate. One or two were obviously written better than others, and I remember
one that made the sequential nature of the individual studies more clear, and
hence set them out as part of a bigger picture that hopefully was what resided
in the mind of our supervisor.
Thesis topics in science education are not usually as controlled or coherent
as they are in the natural sciences. As research in science education has
developed, supervision in the field of science education is now commonly
somewhere between the culture of the natural sciences that I have just
described, and the culture of independent scholarship common in humani-
ties. As a result of these changes in the research culture of science education,
it is now more common for theses to provide a model for other students to
emulate. Thus, many research groups are now at a point where a previous thesis
of high quality substantively, and written well, can certainly exert an influ-
ence on subsequent research students. It can also suggest a next topic that is
worthy of study, or what is a deeper level at which to investigate an issue.
The latter influence occurred in my own group when three successive theses
in the 1970s made real progress in understanding the relation between the
cognitive and affective aspects of learning senior secondary physics in an
educational system, where physics was a gateway subject to high stakes courses
at university.

REFERENCES

Fischbein, E. (1987) Intuition in Science and Mathematics: An educational approach. Dordrecht,

The Netherlands: Reidel.
Matthews, M.R. (1994) Science Teaching: The role of history and philosophy of science. New
York: Routledge.
Matthews, M.R. (1994) Discontent with constructivism. Studies in Science Education 24:
165–172.
Schaeffer, G. (1980) The concepts of “health” and “environment” in future biology teaching.
Proceedings 8th Biennial Conference of Asian Association for Biology Education, Osaka,
259–276.
Stavy, R. and Tirosh, D. (2000) How Students (mis-)understand Science and Mathematics.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Sutton, C.R. (1980) The learner’s prior knowledge: A critical review of techniques for probing
its organisation. European Journal of Science Education 2: 107–120.
West, L.H.T. and Fensham, P.J. (1974) Prior knowledge and the learning of science. Studies
in Science Education 1: 61–83.
92 CHAPTER 5

West, L.H.T. and Pines, A.L. (Eds.) (1985) Cognitive Structure and Conceptual Change. Orlando,
FLA: Academic Press.

NOTE

Multiple Referencing

There is what seems to be a growing tendency to list more and more other authors in the
reference section of research papers. This may in part be driven by the rather mindless way, in
which the funding of research in universities everywhere has become more and more driven
by research indices, that involve quantity of publication and citations rather than more valid
measures of quality. It may, however, also be an unfortunate product of the information era in
which reference lists are compiled by the click of a computer mouse from a researcher’s stores
of references that have been previously noted as generally related to the topic of the paper in
hand.
Relating one’s research to the work of others is one of the more difficult aspects of research
that new researchers have to learn. A research student is expected to demonstrate the ability to
access and make use of the research literature. It is appropriate that graduate students should
be encouraged to read widely and deeply. Indeed, it is a usual requirement of a doctoral
program, that they present their reading of the research of others in a literature review of the
broad area, in which their own particular study is set. It is not inappropriate for this review to
be more like a bibliography than a critical review. In this sense, the natural tendency of graduate
students to include a reference to everything they have read can be justified. This general
review of literature, however, should always be distinguished from that part of the review, that
relates to the particular study itself. The literature review of a research student’s study should
make clear how this study is intended to be a substantive contribution to the field, and justify
why its particular design and methodology have been chosen. A simple test is the presence of
these authors again in back referrals in the Discussion section of a thesis or paper.
The distinction between these two aspects of the use of publications by others is not easy,
and it is one of the weakest features of many of the theses I have supervised and examined.
The failure to appreciate this distinction is also very evident in a large number of references
that some researchers cite in papers they submit for publication. A number of them simply sit,
quite uncritically related to the work in hand, and since they do not reappear in the Discussion
section in the paper their passive role remains undisclosed.
 CHAPTER 6

ASKING QUESTIONS

Can individuals simultaneously have two different knowledge

systems (about things in science like energy) that they use
under different circumstances?
Joan Solomon, England

The stage is now set to begin to consider the respondents’ significant publi-
cations as evidence for science education as a distinctive field of research,
when the intra-research criteria that were established in Chapter 1 are
considered.
As researchers turn their attention to a social phenomenon as complex as
science education, it is to be expected that the particular aspects they choose
to investigate will be quite varied. Their choice will be constrained by the
position from which they undertake their studies, and the strengths and
weaknesses in their backgrounds to conduct research. More importantly, it will
be determined by their own conceptions of the nature of the phenomenon,
and hence of the questions they ask about it. If their questions are good ones,
the research to find answers should have an impact on the research area, so
that the issues regarding the phenomenon are progressively clarified and our
understanding of it is deepened. In other words, the maturing of the research
area is dependent on how its researchers ask and address its questions.
In this chapter, the evidence among the respondents’ significant publica-
tions that relates to research criterion R2. Asking questions is considered. A
number of the respondents did claim a publication as significant, in part,
because it raised new questions or new ideas for research in science education.

IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

Joan Solomon, England, was asking the question that heads this chapter before
most researchers had come to grips with the new and exciting frontier of the
role of alternative concepts in children’s thinking about science. In the 1983
paper already referred to in the section in Chapter 4 on challenges to ortho-
doxy, she provided. as a preliminary answer to it, some evidence that the
role of context was more important, than the researchers who were exploring
approaches to conceptual change were assuming. Her question was ahead of
time when she asked it, but some years later it was to become a major issue
for research in science education, as context in various meanings was recog-
nised to be a key factor in science learning. Furthermore, when the answer

93
94 CHAPTER 6

to Solomon’s question is positive, a new educational task emerges, more like

conceptual addition than conceptual change. With the learning of multiple con-
ceptions comes the learning to correlate them with the contexts or domains
to which they belong, and in which they make sense.
It was the beginning of the children’s science movement and I was saying something different.
That’s what made these papers important. Solomon, England

One of those who took up the challenge of context is Jinwoong Song, S. Korea.
His paper, with Paul Black, in the IJSE in 1991 reports his study of the
effect of task context on students’ performance of science process skills. It
opened up for him the notion of contextual dimensions and a series of further
research questions.
The research on context dimensions has so far usually concentrated on the cognitive side of
science learning, but my other paper (in Journal of Korean Physical Society) is a first step for
me to investigate the affective aspect of contextual dimensions. Song, S. Korea

PROGRESSION IN QUESTIONS

Richard White, Australia, described the significance of the first of his RER
reviews, Research into Learning Hierarchies, as ‘a model of a review’. He
went on to explain that he meant a review should be ‘very taut, analytically
critical of a body of work, and then leading on to positive recommendations
of what ought to be done next’. In other words, the questions that have been
recently answered about an issue or topic should be critically appraised; and
the new questions that thus arise should be spelt out.
Reinders Duit, Germany, in choosing his paper on the role of analogies in
Science Education in 1991 as significant, concurred fully with these features
of a good review, but went a step further. He saw them applying not only when
the review is written primarily for others, but also as a necessary exercise a
researcher should carry out when he/she is about to embark on a new line of
inquiry. After an intense but exhilarating study of the lack of analogies in
science classrooms while in Perth in 1988 visiting Curtin University, he decided
to study analogies seriously. Before he could decide what question about
analogies in science education he would investigate, he had to find out from
the many earlier studies, what had been done and what was known. Only
then could he assess what questions he himself would pursue.
It was a start into my own work on analogies, but its importance for me lies in that it sug-
gested what I should now empirically study about analogies in physics education.
Duit, Germany
 ASKING QUESTIONS 95

SUGGESTING A NEW DIRECTION

A number of respondents chose a study they had done (and its publication)
as significant, because they felt it did open a new direction for the research
community, that would move the research attention forward from where it
was to some further point of understanding. The examples that follow illus-
trate the considerable variety of new directions that were identified.

CHILDREN’S VIEWS ABOUT SCIENCE

In their review, Pupils and Paradigms, in Studies in Science Education,

Rosalind Driver, England, and Jack Easley Jr., USA, did rather more than White
and Duit saw their reviews of an active sub-area doing. The questions they had
asked about the importance of children’s’ views about scientific phenomena
set out a whole new frontier of importance for the research community in
science education. In their questions they were giving a novel twist to Piaget’s
studies by suggesting that ‘their importance for science education could lie
in what they told us about the content of children’s scientific reasoning,
rather than about the form of their reasoning’. The research that has followed
from this paper has been truly remarkable and much more will be said of it
in later chapters.
At a very early stage in the exploration of this new frontier of research,
Beverley Bell, New Zealand, asked the question, When is an animal not an
animal?, and then published a paper in the Journal of Biological Education
on the answers she obtained from children. The significance she attached to
this paper is based on the comments of other researchers, who found that its
biological content, and its clear statement of the method of data collection,
made this new frontier of children’s views accessible in a way the other early
reports on physics topics had failed to do.
More and more researchers began to work on this frontier, studying
children’s views of a range of traditional topics from the school science
curriculum and contrasting them with the official or accepted science view.
The educational notion behind these studies was that if a student’s view of a
topic was identified, then the educational task of changing it to the science one
would somehow be made easier.

LINKING CONCEPTIONS AND PEDAGOGY

As papers began to appear setting out the fascinating views children often held
about science topics, an obvious next question to ask was: How can these
findings be linked to pedagogy? Several of the respondents chose publica-
tions as significant because they saw them as helping to open this important
question to research.
96 CHAPTER 6

Ruth Stavy, Israel, believed her paper in 1980 in Science Education

pioneered the possibility of making use of knowledge of students’ concep-
tions in new teaching strategies for more effective science learning. By this
time, however, John Clement at the University of Massachusetts had embarked
on the most persistent investigation of this idea that has yet been undertaken
(see Chapter 9). His work, in due course, became known to Stavy and she cites
it as one of her major influences.
Hans-Jurgen Schmidt, Germany, and Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands, were
both concerned that the great interest among researchers in students’ alter-
native conceptions needed to be moved on from simply more and more studies
of one science concept after another. The question they were asking was, Is
there any pattern in the way the alternative conceptions affect the students’
responses to questions within broad topic areas of science? For the cases of
chemical stoichiometry (Science Education, 1997) and of electricity and
mechanics (JRST, 1990), they respectively used an analysis of popularly
chosen distracters in multiple choice tests to discern not only the students’ con-
ceptions, but also the patterns of response that seemed to underlie these
alternative conceptions.
The studies show that students in many cases have logical reasons for making mistakes, and
the findings can give teachers a more positive image of their students. Teachers who are aware
of these patterns will be more able to discuss with their students their misconceptions, which
are often only deviations from accepted ideas. Schmidt, Germany

HPS, ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTS AND PEDAGOGY

Randy McGinnis, USA, chose his paper (with Oliver) in Science and
Education because he found that his study of the history and philosophy of
sound, as a specific topic in science, led him to gained insight into how it might
be more effectively taught in school. This led him in the paper to suggest
that the interaction between these usually rather discrete areas of research is
a new direction that holds promise.
I hold hope that this piece will start a new research program in our field that combines the
foci of science content with pedagogy. McGinnis, USA

This hope is an echo of what James Wandersee, USA, was suggesting in his
significant paper in JRST in 1986. Like McGinnis, Wandersee had been
looking into the history of a specific science topic (in his case, photosynthesis),
and had also seen how this could be related to what was known about the alter-
native conceptions students have about this phenomenon and to design teaching
that may lead to more effective learning.
HPS can really open windows of understanding for improving science education.
Wandersee, USA
 ASKING QUESTIONS 97

The research energy that has since gone into the now regular international
conferences and the journal, Science and Education, that promote these
interactions is vindication of the worth of the questions that underlie these
researchers’ studies.

CONTENT AND PEDAGOGY

McGinnis’ comment above refers to ‘combining the foci of science content and
pedagogy’. Much earlier, Ian Mitchell, Australia, had been asking questions
that drew attention to the need for research into how these two features of
science education interact. For more than a decade he clung stubbornly to
the belief that it was important for his academic teaching and research that
he continue as a regular classroom teacher of secondary school science. Thus,
despite some problems for his administrators, he continued to divide his time
between a high school appointment and a series of university roles.
I deliberately ranged over grades 7 to 10 in my teaching and taught many topics in General
Science. So I had I think a data base to draw on that was probably not available to anybody
else at that time. Mitchell, Australia

In a paper (with John Baird) in Research in Science Education in 1986,

Mitchell connected Baird’s earlier finding of a set of poor learning tenden-
cies with the content of science being taught. Their proposal was that different
science content within a subject or between science subjects can present
different sub-sets of poor learning tendencies. Mitchell saw, for example,
that physics had a number of topics, which were rich in what he called com-
pelling situations, that is, where there are two competing explanations that
predict different concrete and observable outcomes. Chemistry on the other
hand had few topics of this kind and therefore need a different teaching
sequence.
This was, indeed, early recognition among Anglo-American science edu-
cation researchers of an importance that content had for pedagogy. It predated
Shulman’s (1987) launch in USA of content’s importance as pedagogical
content knowledge, and was six years before an international panel of leading
researchers recommended to some of Mitchell’s colleagues that an urgent theme
for a book about research in science education was science content. The
Content of Science, edited by Fensham, Gunstone and White, was published
two years later in1994, but while its authors identified particular content in
their discussions of pedagogy, only White (1994) asked the question: Does
science education need a theory of content?
98 CHAPTER 6

TEACHER EDUCATION

Sometimes the good next question is recognised by the researcher for their
own next direction. Tom Russell, Canada, had studied how science teachers
can, for good pedagogical reasons, leave incomplete the point of a lesson
they had planned on a science topic – the empirical authority for the claims
in its content. He noticed this gap is then filled by default with the authority
of the position the teacher holds as teacher. He and Hugh Munby (see Chapter
9) recognised that, by analogy, there is an issue about authority to explore
in the context of initial teacher education.
The authority of position is here that of the teacher educator who will often talk of his own
experience of teaching, but without ensuring that the student teachers must not by default allow
that to stop them gathering their own personal experience of teaching. Russell, Canada

In a paper in the Journal of Teacher Education they began to investigate

the degree to which their student science teachers, by virtue of their years as
undergraduate students in the sciences, expect to be told how to teach and
are quite unprepared for the notion that they have to take note of, and learn
from, their own experiences of teaching.
Also in the context of initial teacher education Peter Reinhold, Germany,
published, first in German in 1994 and then in English in 2000, a study that
involved students in physics teacher education in open experimentation to
explain certain physical phenomena that were not easy to think through, and
that did not have direct recipes for their investigation. The results were very
positive with respect to the future teachers’ discussion and awareness of sci-
entific methods of investigation. They were rather less, but still encouraging,
in enabling them to reflect on the physics content, and they showed clear
positive motivation among these physicists, after their many years of more
directed experimental work. He and his student teachers then discussed the
potential that open experimenting might have in schools. Reinhold saw that
potential as an important next research question to investigate, particularly
in light of the widespread interest in curriculum circles in improving students’
understanding of the nature of science. The questions: How would such an
approach work in the upper secondary level of the German schools? and Could
it be used at all in the lower secondary levels? were now his research agenda.

GENDER AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Else-Marie Staberg, Sweden, and Jim Gaskell, Canada, have independently

published in 1994 and 1995 respectively studies of gender and the science
classroom, that challenged the now orthodox aim of gender neutrality. With
different foci and methods for their research, both these respondents see gender
sensitivity in the classroom as a next issue for researchers to study and under-
stand if it is to be a goal for teachers to try to achieve.
 ASKING QUESTIONS 99

Treat everybody the same and then it’s OK. One of the girls said, ‘There’s no discrimination
here, everybody’s treated the same, but of course there’s some, but you don’t see it’. So we
set out to make that aspect visible. To make gender visible we had to talk about it in the class-
room. Gaskell, Canada

SOCIO-SCIENTIFIC ISSUES

Reg Fleming, Canada, studied how students in a science classroom approached

social issues in science and technology, and published his results in JRST in
1986, early days internationally for the STS movement. This type of study was
pioneering quite new ground in science education in 1984, exploring his
questions concerning the value perspectives that students took on different
issues, and analysing them in terms of what Fleming then called, moral rea-
soning, personal reasoning and social reasoning. By 1995 when he was
interviewed, so much more research on students discussing socio-scientific
issues had occurred, that Fleming could see both the significance of his original
papers, and also that there were now new frameworks he could use to analyse
in more depth the sort of data he had generated.
It’s a piece of work to go back and redo, given what has been published since. I made an arti-
ficial bifurcation between various kinds of reasoning, but at the time it was the best I could
do. Fleming, Canada

CURRICULUM REFORM

A publication that really challenged the research community to tackle more

fundamental issues is the 1992, Special Issue of JRST on the theme of Science
Curriculum Reform. In it, William Kyle Jr, USA, (with James Shymansky)
wrote a paper in which they set out to synthesise a number of critical issues
and questions associated with the reform of the science curriculum. From
this synthesis they went on to set out a research agenda that would address
these issues. This article and the entire Special Issue have commanded a
great deal of attention among the wider science education community.

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Cliff Malcolm (1999), a first world science educator who has now spent five
years working in the new South Africa, reviewed the monumental, two volume
International Handbook of Science Education, edited by Barry Fraser and
Ken Tobin. He wrote very positively in general of what had been achieved
in the Handbook and how the past research has been built upon, pushing
out the boundaries. He then sets out to look more closely at how well the
research in chapter after chapter (72 in all), its issues and its underlying
questions address what he sees as the big questions and issues in a devel-
100 CHAPTER 6

oping context like South Africa. More often than not he found the treatment
in the Handbook is from, as he describes it, ‘within the square of the tradi-
tional educational contexts of the developed world’. Some of the burning issues
facing South African science education do not exist in this square and so the
Handbook is silent on them. He concludes that this is not so much a criti-
cism of the Handbook, with its brief to present the ‘state of the art’ in
science education research. Rather he pleads for the ‘art’ itself to start ‘to think
outside the square, if it is to lead innovation internationally’.
In the same year William Kyle Jr, USA, as the editor of JRST established
a theme issue on science education in developing countries, sub-titling his own
piece in the issue as Challenging first world hegemony in a global context.
It is as if these two authors had collaborated, which I know they did not.
I had a personal goal to broaden the international perspective of the Journal. Its readers
ought to be aware of the issues and challenges that educators and learners in developing coun-
tries address on a daily basis. Kyle Jr, USA

These two authors, and those researchers who are now actively participating
in the several networks with an interest in culture and science education,
may be signs that the dominance of the interests of the first world is, hope-
fully, no longer as strong on science education research, as it is in so many
other economic, social and environmental aspects of what we pretend is a
global village!
These examples of questions and directions for research in a number of
sub-areas of science education represent enough evidence for a strong case
for intra-research criterion, R2. Asking questions. That is, among the research
studies in science education there are a number in many of its sub-areas that
are raising substantial questions that move the research on to deeper encoun-
ters with the phenomena associated with the teaching and learning of science.
In the next chapter, the focus shifts to the third intra-research criterion, R3.
Conceptual and theoretical development.

REFERENCES

Fensham, P.J., Gunstone, R.F. and White, R.T. (1994) The Content of Science: A construc-
tivist approach to its teaching and learning. London: Falmer.
Malcolm, C. (1999) Inside the square and outside. Studies in Science Education 33: 134–140.
Shulman, L. (1987) Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of a new reform. Harvard Educational
Review 57(1): 1–22.
White, R.T. (1994) Towards a theory of content. In: P.J. Fensham, R.F. Gunstone and R.T. White
(Eds.) The Content of Science: A constructivist approach to its teaching and learning, pp.
255–262. London: Falmer.
 CHAPTER 7

T H E R O L E O F T H E O RY

My scientific background is such that I have always been

very theory-conscious. I want to know what the theory is that
makes sense of whatever the ideas/observations there are
under discussion.
William Cobern, USA

If the existence of theory and its development is a hallmark of a mature research

field there is some evidence that the research in which my respondents have
been engaged in science education has reached this point. On the other hand,
the role that theory plays in the respondents’ research was so variable that it
is not possible to attach this hallmark in a simple way to much of their research.
A number of them make explicit reference to the existence of the theory or
theoretical frame they are using to shape and discuss their research, but there
is less sign they are interested in the development of this theory.

BORROWED THEORY

It is very common in science education studies to find that the theoretical frame
their authors use has been borrowed from another research field, and this is
the case for a number of the respondents’ significant publications. In Chapter
5 some of the sources of these borrowings from outside have been identified
in the publications by others that have been major influences. This borrowing
of theory was rather inevitable in the 1960s and 1970s, when research in
science education itself was in its infancy, and researchers were working
more in isolation than is now the case. With so much research since those early
days, it is reasonable to expect that there should be signs of theory emerging
from the research, if some of its sub-areas are maturing in this theoretical sense.
Borrowing theory has, however, continued and, in each decade since the
1960s, new borrowed theories have appeared in the published reports and
conference presentations of science education research. This borrowing can
have the healthy effect of bringing new insights to bear on the problems of
science education, but it can also lead to superficial descriptions that do not
seem to be pushing for deeper understanding.
In Chapter 6 I have already referred to two examples from Gaskell, Canada
and Staberg, Sweden where a borrowed theoretical framework provided
insights that led on to questions and research that would not occur to
researchers who did not adopt this framework. These two researchers’ studies
had a strong theoretical frame with a gender dimension that caused them to

101
102 CHAPTER 7

seek gender effects in science classrooms that to the other researchers would
have been observed as gender neutral. Likewise, if one adopts the strongly
political framework for curriculum that emerged in Science for the People
by David Layton, England (see Chapter 12), the factors that are expected to
have an influence on science teaching and learning are very different from
those, that researchers without such a political framework will expect.
When I was teaching physics I had no idea I was involved in a political battle. Then the Layton
book shouted it out to me, and the battles in the 70s between physics/chemistry/biology and
general science made sense as political struggles about high status knowledge.
Woolnough, England

In some of these cases of a borrowed theory, the researchers seem simply to

be attempting to superimpose the concepts of this theoretical frame (and
perhaps, relationships between them) on the data they have about situations
of science education. The use of theory in this way is unlikely to provide
anything more than a descriptive framework for the researchers’ data and its
analysis. Since the theory was developed in a quite different social or physical
context, it may be that not all its significant features make sense in the context
of science education. Without them, the theory is incomplete, and likely to lack
any explanatory power. The chance of the research testing or extending the
theory is thus very low or impossible.
On the other hand, it is possible to translate, or adapt the key features of
some borrowed theories sufficiently well to some science education contexts,
that the theories can benefit, and be developed by the exploration that a suitably
designed study can provide.
Such a case is described by Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands, who found
Timothy Leary’s book, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, gave him a
theoretically sound perspective to describe communication in science class-
rooms adding much more than the mapping procedures like those of Flanders
and Galton and Eggleston had provided.
It provided a whole new way of thinking about communication in the classroom, and provided
a basis for 15 years research work. We first thought his framework would be directly applic-
able to education, but a year later we realised we had to adapt it for use in educational settings.
In doing the adaptation we found a lot more in that book that was important. Kinds of behav-
iour that are provoked by the teacher, and there may be differential effects on different types
of kids. Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands

SOCIAL THEORIES

In Chapter 4 the comments by Reg Fleming, Canada, about his attempt to

describe and analyse the discussion of socio-scientific issues in science
classrooms, and his interest in anthropological methods of investigation (see
also Chapter 8), reminded me of the debate in the social sciences when I moved
into them from chemical research in the mid-1950s. There was a strong belief
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 103

and practice at that time that it was possible to study and analyse social sit-
uations in terms of a positivist model, analogous to those in use in the
biological or agricultural sciences. Factors or variables were identified and
relationships between them were sought. Actual situations were recognised
by these researchers as multi-variate in character, but nevertheless, the rela-
tionships between these variables could be revealed, provided good measures
of the variables were made and suitable statistics were applied. Some others
even believed that essential relationships in real situations could be observed
in the controlled and simpler simulations of them, that they were creating
artificially in experimental groups.
Another group, including my supervisor in Cambridge, Oliver Zangwill,
believed, again by analogy with the natural sciences, that it was too early in
the development of the social sciences to expect that the important factors
would yield up so easily. This school of thought saw the research that was
needed as being extended systematic observation of the complexities of actual
social situations, in the hope that this would yield valid descriptions of the
multiple perspectives and consequent actions of those involved, and just
possibly some tentative generalising assertions
Accordingly, after two years as a persistent observer of a small factory
community in which a major change in the technology of their production
conditions and procedures was occurring, I provided such a description of
the case and one or two very cautious assertions about it (Fensham and Hooper,
1964). One of these, I remember, was that the social groups whose internal
cohesion increased, accepted the changes more positively than those groups
whose cohesion was lessened. At first glance, this looks like a relational
hypothesis that could now be tested by surveying a number of other factory
communities undergoing other major technological changes, and there were
many of them in Europe at that time of post-war reconstruction. The snag
was that there was no way of telling, without conducting case studies like mine,
which groups in each factory should be asked about their actions and views
that would indicate their social cohesiveness. It certainly was not, in my
case, the groups that were identified in the formal structure of the factory.
In other words, the important social functioning was highly contextualised.
To support my study I was advised to attend the classes at Cambridge in
social anthropology. In them I found yet another theoretical position which
accepted the same aim of valid and rich accounts of complex social situa-
tions, but made use of structural words like kinship and status to help
communicate the findings. It accepted that social situations are so contextu-
alised and complex that, the better the research study, the more this rich
complexity would be described, rather than it being reduced to a few powerful
conceptual variables and relations between them. In retrospect, I believe my
study was more in line with this position, than it was with the pre-mature
scientific one I adopted at the time.
104 CHAPTER 7

A decade later when I moved again from chemistry to education, I was

surprised to find how pervasive the positivist research paradigm of variables
and relationships was, and how this oversimplified the complexities of class-
rooms and schools, let alone educational systems. Only historians and
philosophers of education seemed to be immune from this dominance. By
the time I did my interviews for this book, however, alternative paradigms
for research in education were well and truly established, as will be apparent
from a number of my respondents.

Cultural Theory
William Cobern, USA, whose need for a theory heads this chapter, is an
example of a researcher who had an intense interest in developing a theory
that would make sense of ideas and observations he had in relation to edu-
cation and culture, after working in teacher education in Nigeria. After more
than a decade reflecting on his work with the Fulani people in general teacher
education and in science teacher education, he eventually found that World
View theory met his need. He was able to adapt it in his 1996 paper in
Science Education to contribute to the developing ideas about conceptual
change in science education.
I was at a loss to know how to think about cognitive issues of culture in a systematic way until
Kearney’s logico-structural model or worldview provided me with a theoretical framework.
In my paper I briefly explain my ideas about worldview and how worldview is related to
concept change in science. It expresses my interest in what might be called fundamental ideas
that people have and that powerfully influence learning. Cobern, USA

His early thoughts about education and culture were published in 1983, and
these remain a foundation on which he still works. Ten years later he used
Contextual constructivism as the main title for a chapter in the book, The
practice of constructivism in science education, that was edited by Ken Tobin
(1993). In this chapter he extended into science education the things he had
learned in his work with the Fulani.
Because of the different roles theory has among the respondents, I will
next discuss the first part of the hallmark above, namely the existence of theory.
Then in the last part of the chapter I will discuss the evidence for the second
part of the hallmark above, the research’s contribution to the development
of theory. The former relates to intra-research criterion R3. Conceptual and
theoretical development and the latter to this criterion and to intra-research
criterion R4. Progression.
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 105

OTHER BORROWINGS

From Cognitive Science

Alex Johnstone, Scotland, rather unusually for a science educator in the Anglo-
American tradition, was located in the Chemistry Department of Glasgow
University. He chose a paper with El-Banna in Education in Chemistry
because it was the first experimental beginning of his long affair with
Information Processing Theory and its consequences for learning. This led
to a simple model, which allowed him to plan research in undergraduate lab-
oratories, lectures, tutorials, and in assessment that yielded demonstrable gains
in learning. Theoretically, he found Ausubel’s theory a useful starting point,
but ‘pretty turgid and unnecessarily complicated’.

Baddeley’s ideas of working memory and later Norman’s ‘good common sense’ provided us
with a more applicable theoretical framework for the many studies that flowed from the group
in Glasgow. Johnstone, Scotland

From Psychology
In Chapter 2 I referred to the early examples of the borrowing of psycholog-
ical theories of learning by the curriculum developers in the 1960s and 1970s,
for example, Bruner, Gagne and Piaget. The influence of these borrowings
is better described as the lifting of slogan-like ideas from these theories,
rather than suggesting that the theories were used with any rigour to deter-
mine the way the development of new curriculum materials occurred. Big ideas,
discovery learning and the spiral curriculum (Bruner), hierarchical learning
(Gagne), and stages of reasoning (Piaget), each had an influence, and were
quoted as part of giving credence to the new suggestions for school science.
This is not to say that each of these theories of learning was not explored
more seriously by science education researchers. Indeed, they played impor-
tant roles in enabling the early researchers to begin to think theoretically about
their fledgling field. Much of value was gained, as we shall see later in this
chapter.
As the theoretical ideas of project teams became publicised and some of
their materials appeared, it is not surprising that the looseness of the use of
these theories made them vulnerable to the critique of those with other theories.
David Ausubel (1968) made a quite vitriolic attack on the notion of learning
the concepts of science by discovery. His complex, but more elaborated the-
oretical model of learning with its neurological metaphors attracted Joseph
Novak, USA, one of the young revolutionaries of NARST in 1963 (Chapter
2). Over the years, Novak has stayed faithful to the dream that was formu-
lated then, that theories in science education would be developed that have
106 CHAPTER 7

predictive and explanatory power, just as theories in the natural science have.
When he found David Ausubel’s (1968) book, Educational Psychology; A
cognitive view, it was just what he needed. His data were consistent with
the ideas in Ausubel’s quasi-neural theory of meaningful learning, and its
biological associations were comfortable to the biologist Novak. He found it
was possible to design science instruction that would build the anchoring
concepts (or powerful subsumers), the theory predicted would facilitate science
learning throughout life. In due course, Novak collaborated with Ausubel in
a revision of his original text.
I didn’t even hear of Piaget until I was out of graduate school. Minnesota was so bedrock
behaviorist that Piaget was not allowed. I was quite taken with his writing when I got into it.
But the problem I had with Piaget was one that persisted. Development, for me, centers around
building conceptual frameworks, not these mysterious cognitive operational capacities. Even
though Piaget used explicit knowledge in his interviews, he was not looking at the conceptual
frameworks that made up that knowledge. Ausubel’s book in 1963 completely turned me around.
I’d been working earlier with a cybernetic model, but it lacked explanatory power. In fact our
data was not really consistent with the cybernetic model. Ausubel’s model was just what we
looking for. Our data fitted its ideas, so we started to design instruction that would build these
anchoring concepts in learners so that they would have these powerful subsumers for subse-
quent learning. In our 12 year study we demonstrated that the theory worked. Novak, USA

The twelve year longitudinal study he and Misonda reported in the American
Educational Research Journal in 1991 was for him the ultimate confirma-
tion that the theory worked.
Novak became, in quite a missionary sense, the apostle of Ausubel’s
theoretical gospel to science education, initially preaching to students and
colleagues at Cornell like Pinchas Tamir, Israel.
You see I came to Cornell in 1964 to do my PhD and I knew exactly what I was going to do.
I was interested in the long-term effects of high school on students when they come to the uni-
versity. I had very unusually good conditions in which to do my research. . . . But I did not
have any theory. I was doing things intuitively. My supervisor was an excellent teacher and
teacher educator, but he was not a researcher. So he let me do what I wanted and I was happy
with that, but in another way I was not very happy . . . In the summer of 1967, Joe Novak appeared
at Cornell, and the next year I was his first assistant. I took his course on David Ausubel and
I suddenly found I had a theory for my research. This was very, very influential on me in this
respect. Tamir, Israel

Novak then set about presenting the message more widely in North America
through the conferences of NARST, where many science educators, like Vince
Lunetta, USA, as a graduate student, heard his strong advocacy of this
theoretical position.
I was always interested in trying to find some kind of theoretical organiser on which to hang
my work, and feeling frustrated when I couldn’t find one. I was interested in exploring the
effects of graphics in helping students understand the nature of concepts at a time and place
where most people did not think that was a very useful thing to do. I admired the role Joe
Novak took. He was somebody who managed to stick with a theoretical model, and help it develop
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 107

over a long period of time. I didn’t agree with all I saw him doing, but I really valued his
putting long-term efforts together. Lunetta, USA

Grand Theorising
Novak is the only respondent who can be said to have theorised for a grander
stage than science education. In 1977 he published his own book, The Theory
of Education. It is rooted in his research in science education, but it presents
a learning theory that is applicable to, but not restricted to science educa-
tion. His great interest in the history and philosophy of science meant he needed
to have a philosophical dimension as well as the psychological one he
inherited from Ausubel. The solution came for him again from outside science
in the form of Stephen Toulmin’s (1972) Human Understanding.
Here was a cornerstone I could build on. He talks about concepts as things that people create,
as things that grow and develop, and sometimes become extinct – describes them like species
and populations. With my biological interests these metaphors really made sense.
Novak, USA

Novak found that the theoretical ideas of Ausubel and Toulmin fitted, respec-
tively his data and his thinking about learning in science. He was also able
to interpret and translate them into operational forms that he and Bob Gowin
published in 1984 as Learning How to Learn for use in science and other
areas of instruction.
Novak’s writing did much to spread these theoretical ideas beyond North
America, and Cornell became a Mecca for many overseas researchers, including
myself and my colleague Leo West. West, who with Leon Pines (a doctoral
student at Cornell), subsequently edited in 1985 what was probably the first
substantial and theoretically based book in science education, Cognitive
Structure and Conceptual Change. Three conferences were organised at
Cornell under the title of Misconceptions and Educational Strategies in Science
and Mathematics. These meetings did a great deal to promote and advance
the research on alternative conceptions, conceptual change, and their associated
theoretical ideas – a sub-area that is discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.

Piagetian Theory
Heinrich Stork, Germany, was one respondent who did maintain his belief
in Piaget’s theory of developmental psychology. He chose as one of his
significant publications the 1984 report of an empirical study he did with
Wolfgang Gräber. In it they used the Lawson Test to establish the Piagetian
level of a large group of students taking a formal chemistry unit that dealt with
acid/base, oxidation/reduction, etc. The students were then tested after a
chemistry unit using items that were about topics that had been covered but
often involving considerable reasoning.
108 CHAPTER 7

There was a clear correspondence. The formal thinkers averaged 12 correct, the concrete thinkers,
3.9, and those who were transitional, 8.5. These students are in the years when Chemistry is
introduced to them in Germany, and I think much of what is taught to them is too difficult.
Stork, Germany

CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS THEORY

While none of the other respondent’s claimed to theorise on the grand scale
of Novak, a number of them did selected a publication as significant because
they saw it as making a contribution to theory.
An example can be found in the third of Heinrich Stork’s significant
contributions. Again with Gräber, he wrote a chapter on the use of language
in science teaching for the book, Cognitive Development and the Learning
of Science, that set out to provide the meaning of some of Piaget’s ideas to
chemists.
It’s theoretical initially, but at the end I give chemical examples so that one can see what is meant
by the theory. Stork, Germany

Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada, had conducted a series of studies on the use

of concept mapping in classrooms. As a result he was able to produce a paper
on The social construction of scientific concepts, that was published in 1992
in Science Education. In it he gave a description of social construction – what
it means when a concept is constructed by more than one person and then taken
on by the individuals.
This paper helped me to think through the notion of social construction in a very deep way.
Concept mapping was the context in the study, and thinking about the concept map having a
function other than just representing the knowledge – a construction device and a tool for
social thinking. The importance though is that I went beyond a simple description of social
construction and put it into a more theoretical framework. Roth, Canada

A number of respondents present their work as being a step on the way to a

theory. They modestly recognise that much analysis of the various situations
of science education is necessary before a theory with much power can emerge.
The examples they gave come from an interesting range of sub-areas of science
education

Pre-Theory
There is a clear sense of pre-theory in much of what several respondents see
as the significance of their work. They had a hunch that something impor-
tant has not been considered in their own or others’ earlier work, and so they
set up, or planned studies to check this hunch about a new factor or dimen-
sion to build into an ultimate multi-factored model for science education.
Jinwoong Song, S.Korea, thus describes a paper he published in the Journal
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 109

of the Korean Physical Society about student preferences for different

contexts.
The context dimension is really important for me. Research on it has so far usually concen-
trated on the cognitive side of science learning, so my second paper is a first step to investigate
the context dimension in relation to the affective domain of science learning. Song, S. Korea

A Theory of Content
For some, Richard White’s review (with Robert Gagne) in RER about the
four different types of knowledge and their links with memory, might serve
as their theoretical framework. For him it was a mere beginning of a theory
of content, which fourteen years later he still saw as a task ahead.
I was a little disappointed that people don’t seem to have picked up the key point in the review,
namely, that it’s important to look at the different sorts of knowledge. When you read Ausubel,
Gagne, and others, they write about subject matter as if it is some sort of homogeneous paste.
Only gradually do you realise that Ausubel is on about learning what I call propositions, and
Gagne was about what he calls intellectual skills but might better be called algorithms.
Richard White, Australia

A Theory of Conceptions
Ruth Stavy, Israel, had contributed substantially to alternative conceptions
research, before she was influenced by Ephraim Fishbein (see Chapter 5) about
intuition. This led to a fruitful collaboration with Dinah Tirosh in a series of
studies to test the theoretical idea that a number of alternative conceptions
in different topic areas may have common roots in some commonly held
basic and intuitive notions. In a paper in the IJSE in 1996, and in the book,
How Students (Mis-)Understand Science and Mathematics: Intuitive rules,
they now propose a “theory of intuitive rules” (Stavy and Tirosh, 2000).
Many of us were starting from Piaget or some kind of general thinking. Then we went deeply
into very specific concepts and misconceptions in say, physics, and now I’m coming back to a
general view, but a different one. Ruth Stavy, Israel

A Theory of Curriculum Involving Power and Ideology

A quite different type of theorising is involved in the paper by Leif Östman,
Sweden, in the Journal of Curriculum Studies in 1996. A line of Swedish
researchers that have looked at the curriculum in terms of power relations
and ideas of reproduction influenced him. He adapted their approach and
applied it to science textbooks to see firstly how ideological reproduction
was occurring through the text, but also to find how the means of reproduc-
tion change over time. In his article he attempts to put forward a theoretical
framework and some procedures for discussing the questions, What counts
110 CHAPTER 7

as science education? How are ideological meanings reproduced in science

education? and How are these meanings changed? In doing so, he argues
that the curriculum in general, and the curriculum of science more specifically,
are caught up with the processes of reproduction of societal power and
privilege (as other sociologists of knowledge have argued so persuasively). But
they are also caught up with how the ways of reproduction themselves
change.
When power relations change in society and in the community of education, then what counts
as science education would or should shift. Östman, Sweden

A Theory of Teacher Education

Beverley Bell, New Zealand, describes her paper with Barbara Cowie in
Science Education, and the book she wrote with John Gilbert (1996), as moving
towards a model of teacher development which includes social, personal and
professional development.
These two publications continue the debate about constructivist views of learning as applied
to teacher education, moving it forward from personal into social constructivism, including
what it means to be a science teacher on a collective basis. This, is I believe, a new and hence
significant contribution, Bell, New Zealand

Science-Technology Relations
Paul Gardner embarked on an extensive exploration of the literature on the
relation between science and technology. In his long paper, Science-Technology
Relations: Some historical and philosophical reflections, in the International
Journal of Design and Technology Education he draws, from a very dis-
persed literature of examples of technology, a set of ways these two great fields
of human endeavour are, and are not related to each other. In the sense that
he generalises and proposes categories of relationships from individual cases
this may be seen as an embryonic theory. When others find these categories
useful for describing their own studies of science and technology it begins
to act as a theory.

DEVELOPING A BORROWED THEORY

The following example of borrowing is interesting, because it also serves as

a bridge to the last part of this chapter and the matter of the development of
theory.
A number of the respondents refer to the paper by George Posner, Ian Strike,
Peter Hewson and William Gertzog (1982) as providing the theoretical frame
for their research on conceptual change, and they discuss their findings in terms
of the four conditions for change this paper introduced. It is possible to question
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 111

to what extent any of the four authors would recognise their paper as including,
or being a theoretical frame or model.
Peter Hewson, USA, agreed that this was a significant paper among his
publications, because it has attracted such great external interest over the years.
To him, however, this paper was simply one of the papers from an early
stage in his, and his colleagues’ thinking about conceptual change in science
and in science education – thinking that then went on evolving through a
number of further studies and papers for almost a decade. The conditions in
the paper were ideas that needed to be explored, not only in the context of
student learning, but also in the context of teachers learning to teach science.
In 1984 he (this time with Nana Hewson) published a paper, The role of con-
ceptual conflict in conceptual change and the design of instruction. Then, as
a result of their work together in teacher education, the pair published in
1988 another paper entitled An appropriate conception of teaching science.
Meanwhile, a series of studies by his graduate students were investigating ideas
like conceptual ecology and status. These led to a more refined view of the
conditions for conceptual change, conditions that Hewson and Richard Thorley
published in a paper in the IJSE in 1989. Hewson identified this paper as a
‘significantly more mature expression of the conditions of conceptual change’.
Okay, what we really need to do is to be explicit about status. That realisation came along through
the work of graduate students who were all interested in conceptual change and status and
how that plays out in the classroom, and how you can actually use that in teaching science.
Hewson, USA

For the other respondents who referred to the four conditions of the 1982 paper
as providing their theoretical frame, it has been a case of borrowing a theory,
albeit this time from within science education. It served for them as a useful
frame to discuss the findings of their own studies, but in no sense were they
trying to extend, test, or redefine its features.
Since the four conditions have proved so attractive and useful to many
researchers, it is of some interest to ask how they were derived. Hewson
explained that he was fairly new to science education when he came to Cornell
University, and there Posner and Strike introduced him to literature on
conceptual change (see Posner et al., 1977). Hewson suggested using the
learning of conceptual change in science itself might be an analogy for the
process in science education (Hewson, 1980 and 1981), and he recalls the
four conditions coming largely out of the interest the four authors had in the
history and philosophy of science. Before the famous paper, there were thus
several precursors that included the idea of four conditions and even referred
to status. At this time Hewson had begun to interview the students in his
freshman physics class and an individual graduate student in physics. He found
in the former an embryonic form of conceptual ecology, and in the latter
epistemological beliefs that had had a significant effect on his learning of
physics.
112 CHAPTER 7

When I was captivated by students’ conceptions, I spent time telling teachers about them,
expecting them also to be captivated by them and to want to change their teaching accord-
ingly. Of course that didn’t happen. So we had to recognise that we could draw analogies between
kids learning science and teachers learning to teach. Hewson, USA

THEORY FOR PRACTICE

If only a few of my respondents referred to their work as theory building or

even as theory testing, there were others for whom theory was important in
another sense. James Wandersee’s interest in theory was very much about
how his research could contribute to putting a theory into action in the class-
room. At a very formative stage of his career from being staff in a teachers’
college to becoming a university researcher, he encountered not only Joe Novak
at Cornell, just as the Theory of Education was finished, but also Bob Gowin,
the philosopher, who was writing the book, Educating. With such a nur-
turing in theory-based education, it was not surprising to find him referring
to the influence of Richard Duschl’s Restructuring Science Education, a book
that is concerned with the importance of theories and their development.
To represent my work on students’ alternative conceptions about key topics (like photosyn-
thesis) in biology, and to see such studies as vehicles to elaborate learning theories and hence
to improve biology learning in the classroom, I have chosen, Children’s biology studies on
conceptual development in the life sciences, which is in the book, The Psychology of the Learning
Sciences. Wandersee, USA

Although a number of other respondents did not explicitly use the words
“theory” or “theoretical”, I found myself noting that their responses about
the significance of a publication were similar to this one paper by Wandersee.
That is, they are a subset of the category Research into Practice that is specif-
ically concerned with Theory into Practice.
Concepts and theories enable deeper questions to be asked. To answer these
questions appropriate methodologies for research studies are needed. Chapter
8 is concerned with how methodology was discussed by the respondents.

REFERENCES

Ausubel, D. (1968) Educational Pyschology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt Rinehart and
Winston.
Bell, B. and Gilbert, J. (1996) Teacher Development: A model from science education. London:
Falmer.
Duschl, R.A. (1990) Restructuring Science Education: The importance of theories and their
development. New York: Teachers College Press.
Fensham, P.J. and Hooper, D. (1964) The Dynamics of a Changing Technology: A case study
in textile manufacturing. London: Tavistock Publications.
Gowin, D.B. (1981) Educating. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press.
Hewson, P.W. (1980) Learning and teaching science. South African Journal of Science 6:
397–403.
 THE ROLE OF THEORY 113

Hewson, P.W. (1981) A conceptual change approach to learning science. European Journal of
Science Education 3(4): 383–396.
Posner, G. and the Cognitive Structure group (1977) The Assessment of Cognitive Structure.
Research Report No. 5. Ithaca, NY: Department of Education, Cornell University
Tobin, K.G. (Ed.) (1993) The Practice of Constructivism in Science Education. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Toulmin, S. (1972) Human Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 CHAPTER 8

METHODOLOGY

For any research an equally important element is the method-

ological one.
Hackling, Australia

Methodologies are much more transferable across fields of study in the natural
sciences than are substantive concepts or theories. Likewise in the social sit-
uations, that are the locus of studies in education (and in science education),
it is not surprising that many of the methodologies used by its researchers
are ones that are in common use in other social science fields. Survey analysis
was commonly used in the earliest period of research in science education, and
it is a good ongoing example of such a shared methodology.
Individual sciences do, however, have methodologies which have been
developed specifically in response to their distinctive questions about the
natural world. These methodologies help each scientific field to achieve its
identity. There is, thus, a possibility, as research in science education develops,
that this may occur. That is, as its researchers ask new or more penetrating
questions, they may need to invent methodologies, or to refine borrowed
ones so that they meet the specific purposes the researchers have in mind.
In this chapter I am concerned with these methodological issues and, in par-
ticular, with whether the evidence from the respondents about research
methodology warrants research in science education meeting in some of its
sub-areas the intra-research criterion, R4. Research Methodologies, for a
field of research.

METHODOLOGIES FROM SCIENCE

Many of the persons, who move into science education research, have had
backgrounds in the sciences and mathematics. This makes it relatively easy for
them to operate in a quantitative and positivist research paradigm, that uses
pre-prepared instruments to gather data, statistical procedures to analyse these
data, and often builds into a study’s design an experimental sense, like the
one that applies in some agricultural and biological studies. Thus, one group
of students, who experience a teaching innovation, are regarded as the exper-
imental group to be compared on some output variable with a control group
who do not have the experience.
My training in Cambridge for social psychological research had made me
skeptical of the simplistic superposition on social situations of a paradigm

114
 METHODOLOGY 115

that been developed for agricultural and biological systems. Furthermore, I had
had the experience, described in some detail in Chapter 7, of working in the
very different paradigm of qualitative ethnography. Nevertheless, it seemed
sensible when we were beginning research in science education at Monash
to encourage the quantitative strengths that my first graduate students brought
to their research studies, particularly since educational research in Australia
more generally was predominantly quantitative and positivist in character in
the late 1960s.
Three of the first five doctoral students in science education not only carried
out well designed studies in this paradigm, but actually published method-
ological contributions about how to refine measurement instruments or about
the statistical analysis of resulting data. An example of the former was Paul
Gardner, Australia. He had been invited to work with John Keeves at the ACER
(see below) and a Monash colleague Lyndsay Mackay, on setting up measures
of attitudes to science in school.
I read Thurstone and the classic paper by Likert in 1932, but it was reading about his scaling
rather than the paper as a whole that was the influence on me. Gardner, Australia

Gardner then developed instruments to measure with more confidence

students’attitudes to physics – a measure Mackay had previously found to
be anomalously related to their cognitive achievement. This led Gardner to
publish two review papers in 1975, one long (in Studies in Science Education)
and one short (in Educational Research) on measurement of attitudes to
science and the common methodological errors that were appearing in the
literature about measuring affect more generally. The long review was seen
as significant, because it has attracted great external attention and has been
very widely cited, whereas the short, more specifically methodological one
registered much less attention.
The errors I was pointing out in attitude measurement are still persistent today. I think mis-
conceptions about how you do educational measurement are persistent and many people launch
into using measurement techniques for curriculum evaluation purposes without really under-
standing the principles of psychometrics. Gardner, Australia

A lot of research in science education has been underpinned by a belief that

can be stated as follows. Science learning (or science teaching and its impact
on science learning) is affected by factors, that students (or teachers) have
in their person, or that derive from the social milieu they are in, or have
been in. Since it is not clear which of these factors are more significantly
related, measures of a number of them that seem likely to be involved are
sought, and appropriate statistical methods are then applied to show where
the weight of the relationships lie. This is a theoretical position that says
that Xi is related to Yi, where the Yis are desired educational outcomes and
the Xis are the possible factors, the influence of which can be determined. It
is both an overall faith statement that education can be defined and measured
116 CHAPTER 8

in terms of such discrete variables, and a statement that personal and social
factors are important in education.
In other words, although this position acknowledges the social complexity
of education, it also believes that this social complexity can be unraveled in
terms of factors that have a stable definitions and are measurable, if sufficiently
large samples of students are studied. Many science educators remain method-
ologically within this paradigm, and some of them have been able to extend
its capability considerably, as will be evident from the examples that follow
from some of the respondents.

Quantitative Methods
Barry Fraser, Australia, chose an article, Evaluating educational performance,
by Herbert Walberg as a publication that exemplified the major influence
Walberg had had on him. This article appeared in 1974 in a book, Evaluating
educational performance: A source book of methods, instruments and
examples, that Walberg edited after his experiences as evaluator of the
implementation of the Harvard Project Physics curriculum and materials.
Walberg, as an exponent of the positivist paradigm and its quantitative method-
ologies, included in these evaluative studies several measures of the learning
environment in classrooms that were using these curriculum materials.
Walberg’s work gave me lots of ideas, as did the work of Rudolf Moos (1979) who primarily
worked in the medical area, but who had also studied classrooms. Fraser, Australia

Fraser had already begun to synthesise these two independent approaches to

classroom research, when he had the chance to work with Walberg, gaining
even more experience of measuring classrooms. These experiences provided
the methodological and conceptual foundations that have underpinned the
extended series of studies of classroom environments, that Fraser, with his
students and colleagues, have carried out over the years. His choice of sig-
nificant publications from this large volume of work was made on the basis
of the importance of one particular study and of the papers that stemmed
from it.
I looked along the time line of my long program of work on classroom environment to see
when the most significant study was done. It turned out to be fairly close to the beginning, but
not at the beginning. It was about the third one I did, and it built on the first two. I was strug-
gling to come to grips with the field, and you need to do a couple of studies before you know
what, and how the next study needs to be. These papers were significant because it built on
the ones before. Fraser, Australia

There is much wisdom for new researchers in this comment. Fraser’s signif-
icant study led to two papers with Daryl Fisher – one in 1982 in the American
Educational Research Journal, and one in 1983 in the Journal of
Educational Psychology. Publication in these prestigious journals meant, as
 METHODOLOGY 117

Fraser pointed out, that through the reviewing process other professional
experts had recognised the quality in this particular piece of research.
It had many enhancements on what I and others had done previously. Conceptually, it included
the preferred environment, a fairly new trend then. From a measurement point of view, it also
provided some advances. We had an individualised classroom environment questionnaire with
preferred forms, etc.. These two papers have stood the test of time, because they are cited as
definitive studies in the area. Fraser, Australia

In terms of his longer program, Fraser explained that this refinement in

methodology meant they were now in a position to conduct other studies. They
had a very big sample, and a design sophisticated enough to enable them to
use different units of analysis, etc.
We became more sophisticated in conceptualisation, in measurement and in methodology and
analysis. Fraser, Australia

The work of John Keeves, Australia, has already been noted in Chapter 4
for its important findings. Here it is considered as a fine example of method-
ologies for collecting quantitative data and analysing them. This work also lies
within the positivist paradigm as applied to the complexities of factors inside
and outside of school that affect learning achievement. Keeves has had a
very long association with the International Association for the Evaluation
of Education (I.E.A.), and has engaged in much analysis of the data from
the first and second IEA Science data. He chose a paper published in Science
Education in 1974 as exemplary. Firstly, the inter-relations between home,
school, and peer group on student performance and attitudes are presented.
Secondly, path analysis is used to reveal the sequence of operation of these
influences. Finally, canonical analysis enabled a more complex modeling of
these influences to be obtained. These are statistical tools of analysis, that
are more sophisticated than the ones to be found in most of the studies by
science educators working in this paradigm.
Quite often researchers who work in this paradigm fail to see that the narrow
scientism behind their work has serious limitations in the face of the complex
realities of science education across schools, across educational system, and
across countries. Edgar Jenkins, England, was critical for this reason of many
of those who review publications for chapters in Handbooks or other major
reviews of research for overlooking this limitation on the findings in the studies
they are reviewing.
I become worried that so many persons seem to think that complex educational questions which
are almost always multi-dimensional can be answered by some fairly straightforward empir-
ical test. I am also bothered that the researcher so readily moves from a particular context in
Israel or New Zealand to claim really strong generalisations. Jenkins, England

A science educator who has tried methodologically to overcome these short-

comings in individually reported studies is Marcia Linn, USA. With Ann
118 CHAPTER 8

Peterson she undertook perhaps the first use in science education of the
advanced statistical method of meta-analysis to review a very large number
of individual studies from different situational contexts on the role of gender
in spatial ability. Their paper, in Child Development in 1985 broke new ground
in its insistence that evidence, not opinion or tradition, should be the ground
on which this gender issue must be understood. Their evidence was indeed
strong, but Linn still remembered receiving letters admonishing her for ‘her
haste to round off the third decimal place – such is some people’s belief in
the numbers these quantitative procedures produce’.
I found when I looked at how some people were talking about gender and participation in science,
that they would explain such a broad thing in terms of a special ability that was gender dif-
ferentiated. That made me angry. I did have earlier studies that occasionally showed gender
differences on certain scientific reasoning tasks, but the pattern was uneven. I would give talks
in which I showed ten results, and people would pick on the one and say, ‘See the men did
better on that one’, and I would reply, ‘Isn’t that because you just know men are better at science’.
Linn, USA

QUALITATIVE METHODS

Some other researchers take a different view of the social complexity of

education. They recognise this complexity, but see it in a more holistic sense,
which means they turn to other methodologies to study it. For them, the more
direct methods of observation, interviews with individuals and groups of
students about the whole experience, its component events, and their meaning,
are the methods to use to explore how the social factors interact and intertwine
with teaching and learning. These methods of data collection make descrip-
tive portrayals possible, and may perhaps allow some assertions to be made
about why things interact in that given context.
When Reg Fleming, Canada, began he could find relatively little method-
ological help in the literature of science education research for the questions
he wanted to ask about science classrooms.
Because when I started (mid 1980s) most of the research was quantitative and highly statis-
tical, and I wanted to do observational and interview work, the sociology and anthropology books
on these methods were critical in allowing me to conduct field work – they offered me academic
justification. Then Michael Mulcahy’s Science and the Sociology of Knowledge and Latour
and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life legitimised the notion that you could study science anthropo-
logically. So then I felt I could study science education in that way. Fleming, Canada

Later researchers like Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada, had no such a legitima-

tion problem. with respect to qualitative methods. During the intervening years
there were many examples in the literature of research studies that used qual-
itative methodologies. Roth was also influenced by Laboratory Life, and
by books by Jean Lave and Lucy Suchman in the technical sense that they
provided exemplars of ethno-methodology.
 METHODOLOGY 119

The rapid movement in the 1980s that pressed for the acceptance of qual-
itative research methodologies as orthodoxy in science education caused some
anxiety and distrust in Douglas Roberts, Canada. Roberts was himself perhaps
the earliest pioneer of such methods (see Chapter 4). Reflecting on his long
and influential involvement in science education research he chose as a sig-
nificant publication, one that followed from a plenary address he was asked
to give at the NARST conference in 1981. He had been asked to speak on
qualitative research, a methodological direction he had already espoused for
himself and his students. Furthermore, he had argued for it on the editorial
board of the JRST in its early days, and remembered discussions in the board
about what percentage of an issue could be devoted to qualitative research –
an interesting quantitative way of addressing the more fundamental and dif-
ficult question, How to evaluate the worth of qualitative research? It is this
basic question that Roberts addressed in his paper in JRST in 1982. The frame-
work he used was the four world hypothesis of Stephen Pepper (1942), and
the difference between a formist/mechanist kind of metaphysics and the
contextualist/organicist one when each of these lies behind the qualitative
research. This paper has been used as important reading for doctoral students
in a number of programs. Fifteen years later, Roberts suggested that the issue
of qualitative research and its evaluation is one that science education
researchers need to continue to review.
One of the things that seems to me to be happening now that qualitative approaches to research
are accepted, is that there is more and more misunderstanding of what constitutes a piece of
research. What I’ve seen happen is that a lot of the manuscripts coming in to journals are
stories – they aren’t studies they are data. Roberts, Canada

A Personal Note

Apart from the early bias to qualitative methods that was associated with my
original induction into the social sciences (see Chapter 6), several events led
to, and confirmed my own return to these methodologies in the later 1970s.
In 1977 Lawrence Ingvarson and I obtained funding support for a project in
which we used two skilled research assistants to observe and record as much
as was possible of the school life of four junior secondary science teachers
in two schools. Incidentally, this may have been the first educational study
in Australia, using only qualitative methods, to gain major national funding.
After one term of about 13 weeks, we switched the assistants so that each
produced independently a record and an account of the two sets of four teachers
for a term. The project was essentially a methodological exploration, and
yielded several interesting and perplexing findings about the use of surro-
gate observers by researchers keen to conduct ethnographic studies (Fensham
and Ingvarson, 1979).
Immediately following this project I spent six months at the University of
120 CHAPTER 8

Illinois where Robert Stake and Jack Easley Jr. (1978) were putting together
the eleven reports of the Case Studies in Science Education (CSSE) project.
Stake introduced me to a small book, The Fortunate Man by John Berger and
Jean Mohr, which turned out to be a major influence on my own sense of
why qualitative methods were important in science education. It is a prose
and photograhic account of a doctor who goes to live and practise in a small
rural community. Slowly he gains the trust of that community, and eventu-
ally he can begin, as he describes himself, to be the amanuensis, or clerk of
the villagers’ wisdom – the knowledge they have, that they do not recognise
as important. In an ethnographic study there is a corresponding research goal
to convey to the outside world the beliefs and understandings of people on
the inside. The book was an important affirmation of what Ingvarson and I
were trying rather unsuccessfully to do in our project. It also reminded me
of how long it had taken to build up trust among the personnel in a weaving
factory when, twenty five years earlier, I was using ethnographic methods to
study their experience and response to a major technological change in their
work context.
The third of my influential encounters with ethnographic methods occurred
in 1984 when I was visiting the University of Alberta for a few weeks. Bonnie
Shapiro was a doctoral student, and her account to me of what she described
as her anthropology in the classroom was so intriguing that I invited her to
write a chapter in a book, Developments and Dilemmas in Science
Education, I was about to edit. When her chapter arrived, it was far too
long, but a quick glance at what were whole pages of transcribed dialogue
between her and 10-year-old students, suggested an obvious editorial solution.
I could just cut out most of these dialogues and replace them with the quote
or a prose sentence or two that summarised their essence. How wrong I was!
When I read the paper more carefully I saw how rich these extended exchanges
were, and that they could not be so briefly replaced. Indeed it was Shapiro’s
connecting prose that had to be cut!
The methodology she had used essentially consists of the researcher being
present in the classroom as an active participant while an extended series of
science lessons are occurring (see Shapiro, 1994). Since the researcher cannot
actively engage with every member of the class there is usually a concentra-
tion on a small number who are ‘markers’ for what is happening more
generally. The researcher unobtrusively, but persistently and regularly, ques-
tions and probes these marker students, individually or as small groups, about
their participation in the situations the teacher uses to conduct the lessons
(recording these exchanges as soon after as possible).
In Chapter 4, I referred to Leif Lybeck’s, study, Archimedes in the
Classroom, in Sweden in the late 1970s as being ahead-of-time in a number
of its substantive findings. It was also ahead methodologically since Lybeck
had used, more than five years before Shapiro, the very methodology I have
 METHODOLOGY 121

just described. In his case it was to account for the teaching and learning of
physics in the classroom in terms of the students’ conceptual development
and the lesson contexts in which this occurred.

METHODOLOGIES FROM HUMANITIES

For most science teachers moving into science education research, it is not
so easy for them to use with confidence the methodologies that are estab-
lished in the humanities for use in fields like history, linguistics, and
philosophy. A few of the early science educators did, however, become
attracted to the historical or philosophical approaches to education that had
long held foundational status in academic departments of education. An early
colleague at Monash, Denis Phillips, who had been a biology teacher, is such
a person. He did, for his PhD in Australia, a philosophical study of a topic
about some of Dewey’s ideas. Soon after he moved to Stanford University
in USA, where he has been a substantial and well known figure for twenty five
years.
David Layton, England, a chemistry teacher was attracted to historical
studies. He undertook a study of the first attempts to introduce science in
the mass public school system in England in the mid 1800s. The book of
this study, Science for the People, was published in 1973. As an example
of historical methods applied to science as a school subject, this book became
instrumental in launching a new genre of studies of the historical origins of
school subjects.
Edgar Jenkins (England), another chemistry teacher, joined the Department
of Education at Leeds University where Layton was working, and was deeply
impressed by the pioneering work Layton had achieved in this book.
It opened up for me insights into the interactions of individuals, organisations, positions of power,
and education systems in quite a profound way and made me think about what was going on
in other contexts. Jenkins, England

As a result, he embarked on a major study of science curricula in England

in the 20th century that culminated in the book, Armstrong to Nuffield, that
was itself cited by respondents in Canada and Australia as a major influ-
ence. Jenkins’ own comment on this book was methodological.
In a wider sense I think it was significant because in it I map out in a fairly detailed way the
resources that are available for looking at the history of science education. – particularly in
England and Wales and particularly in schools. I also wanted to set out some of the questions
that arose in specific historical contexts and which even as the context changes remain relevant.
So much of what has happened in science education – curriculum and research – confirms my
view that we are the poorer for not looking with an historical perspective at some of the things
we have to deal with, whether its children’s learning or how to change the curriculum.
Jenkins, England
122 CHAPTER 8

It is interesting to compare the methodology used by Rod Fawns, Australia,

for his historical studies of science curricula in Australia with Jenkins’comment
about illustrating the use of the rich store of records, available in England
for historical studies.
When there was so little in the way of written documents here, compared with Edgar Jenkins’
rich store of documents in England, my first impulse was to go to the people concerned. When
I met them in their homes, I would look for what survived from the era we were discussing. I
wanted to read what they were reading at the time. What were their sources then?
Rod Fawns, Australia

Fawns, saw these key persons as a history of ideas and that putting the two
together is a study of the way ideas have impacted on people. He recognised
that the emphasis he puts on persons, in his historical studies of curriculum
in Australia, will be an important determinant on any solution he, as researcher,
may offer about the curriculum issue of concern. Nevertheless, be believes that
for science education research to be effective in the sub-area of curriculum
history ‘it must see the person and the history together in context’.
Michael Matthews is another example of a science teacher who has suc-
cessfully made the methodologies of historical study his own scholarly
approach to science education. Very significantly for the field of science
education, his various initiatives in the 1990s have given a great boost to
historical and to philosophical study internationally. His Time for Science
Education (2000) is a testament to his commitment to these methods. He
has also involved himself in a more philosophical sense in the arguments
and debate about the role of constructivism in science teaching and learning
(see Chapter 9).

METHODOLOGIES FOR ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS

Although there had been a few studies of students’ conceptions about science
topics in Germany and by Marvin Oakes (1945) in the USA prior to the 1960s,
these had all but been forgotten when John Gilbert in England, and Denis
Driscoll, in Australia, independently began to show interest in them in the
1960s. When Gilbert and I began to correspond about research in science
education, I had drawn his attention to the work that Driscoll, an Australian
chemistry teacher, had done on students’ misconceptions. They had both begun
by trying to use multiple choice questions to infer the students’ alternative con-
ceptions from the popularly chosen distracters. The limitations in their
methodology were firstly, that students are being asked to choose between a
set of conceptual statements that have been constructed by the researcher,
not by the students; and secondly, just identifying with one of these provides
little or no information about the reasoning behind a student’s identification
with it. This reasoning is critical in the research task of inferring this or that
 METHODOLOGY 123

alternative conception, since students, who identify with the same concep-
tual statement in the multiple choice item, may do so for different reasons.

Refining Group Methods

In a paper with Pieter Licht, in IJSE in 1990, Gerard Thijs, The Netherlands,
tried to overcome this problem by carrying out item analysis on the main
distracters that students chose in a set of questions in electricity and in
mechanics. David Treagust, Australia, and Hans-Jurgen Schmidt, Germany,
went further to resolve these limitations, and in doing so, produced method-
ological developments that form a bridge from the quantitative methodology
of paper and pencil, survey testing, to the qualitative studies that use various
forms of interviewing as the methodology for data production.
Treagust and his colleagues at Curtin University developed the use of two-
tiered, multiple choice items to solve the second limitation above. Their
first-tier questions seeks to identify who holds which alternative, and the
second-tier question offers the students different reasons for their original
choice.
Schmidt, in a somewhat similar manner, but with a much more elaborate
design for the data collection and analysis, used multiple choice questions to
elucidate the patterns of student thinking that lies behind their choice of
“wrong” responses in multiple choice chemistry questions.
Although we administered our test to several thousand students, we believe our studies are
essentially qualitative, because we rely strongly on students’ written comments and on the
group discussions we hold to gain more information about the quality of students’ misconcep-
tions. Schmidt, Germany

In one of these refined forms, this methodology continues to be in use,

particularly when researchers are interested in exploring larger numbers of
students to get a sense of the proportions holding various alternative con-
ceptions. Ed van den Berg and Gerard Thijs, both The Netherlands, are
respondents who have valued this type of methodology and reported it in a
1995 paper in Science and Education, that the former chose as a signifi-
cant one.

Refining the Clinical Interview

Soon after Roger Osborne (with Peter Freyberg) had established the Learning
in Science Project (LISP) at the University in Waikato in Hamilton, New
Zealand, he went, on my suggestion, to spend some time with John Gilbert
at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.
The partnership between Gilbert and Osborne produced a research tool
for data collection (Interview about Instances), which can truly be claimed
124 CHAPTER 8

to be a methodology indigenous to science education. Researchers in many

countries, since its publication in the early 1980s, have used it to produce
literally hundred of published papers and theses on topics involving alterna-
tive conceptions of science concepts.
John Gilbert, England, gave this account of the origin of this very simple
but powerful methodology for finding out about the ideas people have, that
presumed very little about their mental states or prior knowledge.
We could just simply ask them, but what could we use as stimulus. We started using
photographs, but these were so heavily contextualised they proved useless. People just got the
story from the background. Then we tried full drawings – Roger did the drawings because I’m
no good at drawing. Even with these, the contextual clues were heavy. A female figure, for
example, would bring all the gender issues into the responses. So we came to stick figures, on
the basis that they were less contextualised (e.g. non-gendered), but also because they were within
our mutual limitations in drawing. Then we sat down and thought of a variety of situations in
which the concept of interest could or could not have application, because I remembered
Dudley Herron had used instances and non-instances of concepts in one of his chemistry
studies. Gilbert, England

The direct question about each stick figure drawing was, Is this an example
of C (the concept)? This was followed, whether the answer was Yes or No,
by Why? Gilbert went on to say they tried the instrument (about Force) with
14 year old students at school and with science undergraduates and found
similar patterns in the responses about the concept. It was then that they realised
‘how big the thing we were onto was’.
This method of data collection was so simple to replicate or develop, so
simple to administer and so rewarding in terms of results with even as few
as ten or so students, that it is little wonder it was taken up so enthusiasti-
cally by other researchers. It was also easy to modify, and soon an Interview
about Events was being used to probe students’ understandings and concep-
tions of actual scientific happenings, like a chemical reaction, a solution
process, or changes of state – melting, boiling, etc.
Mark Hackling, Australia, who studied students’ alternative conceptions
of genetic inheritance, chose Osborne and Cosgrove’s 1983 paper dealings with
the change of phase of water and kinetic molecular ideas as an absolutely
classic paper on the way the Interview about Instances methodology has
been used. As the reason for the significance of his own 1984 paper in JRST,
he pointed to the way he had modified the Interview about Instances method-
ology to explore relations between concepts.
Up to that time the research had concentrated on single concepts, and I’d always believed
that it’s the relationships between concepts that is where the real meaning lies. We used a lot
of pictures and diagrams for them to talk about. It was a semi-structured process with a core
of questions and optional follow-ups depending on their responses. Hackling, Australia
 METHODOLOGY 125

A Methodology for Group Assessment

In the late 1980s when Dr. Barry McGaw became the Director of the Australian
Council for Educational Research (ACER) – a body with a long history of
test development – he asked me what were the leading edge topics in science
education to which ACER might make a contribution. I explained that by
that time there were a number of excellent methods for exploring students’
alternative conceptions on a one-to-one basis, but we lacked an instrument that
would reveal the distribution of alternative conceptions in large groups of
students. In due course, Adams, Doig and Rosier (1990) developed a novel
set of instruments for a number of key topic in the physical and biological
sciences. Events are attractively presented via comic characters, and students
are asked to respond to a multiple choice set of options that are directly
based on the conceptions that are known from the research literature to be
commonly held by students. Scoring of each item easily leads to the distrib-
ution of these conceptions in the group being tested. The test was standardised
across age in a sample of Victorian schools, and the results for how the dis-
tribution of the conceptions change with the age of students is provided, making
these group tests very useful for both teachers and researchers.

METHODOLOGIES FOR COMBINING ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS

WITH TEACHING

Two respondents drew attention to the importance of Jack Easley’s paper in

JRST, 1982, Naturalistic research and case studies for examining the quality
of teaching. They believed that it not had the coverage it deserves. In it, Easley
laid out some really provocative ideas. While acknowledging the influence that
Piaget had on him, he argued that researchers must search for mechanisms, but
not just the old learning models and mechanisms.
He is alerting us to the fact that we must not be too overly descriptive in the case study work
in describing phenomena. Erickson, Canada

John Clement, from the closer position of being a graduate student of Easley,
similarly affirmed the importance of this paper as an excellent summary of
the methodologies that had been developed at the time for qualitative research.
Easley had also taught him the need to get at mechanisms of student thinking,
rather than just the summative data before and after some treatment. On joining
Easley in Illinois for his doctoral study, Clement had been inspired by Rosalind
Driver’s thesis, in which he found it was possible to go beyond the mapping
of the students’ cognitive structures and mechanisms – methodologies they had
learnt from Piaget – and to follow how these interacted with possible teaching
strategies that are aimed at deeper understanding of a topic. The case studies
had opened their eyes to people holding more than one idea about a situa-
126 CHAPTER 8

tion, and that these sometimes can conflict or compete with each other (cf.
Cosgrove’s findings in Chapter 3). Clement, therefore, became very cog-
nisant of the need to make the teaching strategy responsive to the students’
logic, rather than to some theoretical framework.
I had come to Illinois just after Ros Driver left, but her thesis was hot off the press. It was the
first time I had come across something that seemed to say it was possible to make representa-
tions of what kids are thinking as they were trying to learn. Also it was possible to represent
some of their knowledge structures, some of their reasoning and some of the metaphors that
changed these structures. It was mind boggling. I had never seen anything like it, and I consider
it the first example of a serious teaching experiment that I had been exposed to, that is an
experiment that went beyond the pre- and post-tests and turned it into an actual process while
it was happening. Clement, USA

Clements’ use here of the term “experiment” is interesting. Along with the
much more widespread use and acceptance of qualitative methodologies in
the research studies since the 1980s, a scientistic hope has lingered more
persistently in the USA than in some other countries. This hope is that, it
will be possible to demonstrate that some teaching strategy is likely to be
successful in a generalisable way in achieving better science learning; by
comparing a treatment group with a control group (the agricultural paradigm),
even though the qualitative methods used in the studies are underpinned by
holistic assumptions about classroom complexity that may suggest otherwise.
A more speculative contribution to using childrens’ ideas about natural
phenomena in teaching science is made by Mark Cosgrove, Australia, in a
paper with Lyn Schaverien, in the IJSE in 1996. They suggested that the
discourse of dialogue may be a fruitful way for teaching/learning science
provided the teacher maintains the normal conventions of dialogue – negoti-
ates, avoids being devious, and allows the learner to have a say.
You might think this is just mentor/mentee, but it’s more subtle than that. We’ve identified a
number of types of conversation that might be useful strategies to explore, like the ones Richard
Feynman had with his father in the woods, and the ones Galileo used. Cosgrove, Australia

It is interesting to compare this conversational possibility for teachers with

the collapse to the authority of their position that Tom Russell, Canada,
observed so commonly with the Canadian teachers in science classes he was
studying (see Chapter 6). Cosgrove, himself, was alert to this problem, because
he had been very influenced by the reports in the book by Tizard and Hughes
in 1984, in which these authors contrasted the natural conversations between
children and their mothers with the staccato discourse that takes place in
their school classrooms.
 METHODOLOGY 127

CASE STUDIES

David Layton, England, whose pioneering use of historical methods in science

education has been acknowledged above, chose as the other of his signifi-
cant contributions a small book, Inarticulate Science. This publication is based
on a series of case studies of adult citizens encounters with science. He
acknowledged that he had learnt a great deal about the methodologies of
case study research from Douglas Barnes, his colleague in Leeds, where they
had co-directed a project about innovations in technical and vocational edu-
cation.
We had found with adults, if they were free to define the problem on their own terms, if you
treated it as a naturalistic phenomenon, and if you were not imposing categories yourself from
the outside, the product of the interviews were much more illuminating and suggestive than
they would otherwise have been. Layton, England

The case studies reported in Inarticulate Science are important methodolog-

ically, because they offer a very different approach to public understanding
of science to the much more usual use of simplistic surveys of citizens’ residual
knowledge of science. Substantively the popular method is about a passive
form of residual science knowledge, whereas the methodology used by Layton
and his colleagues seeks to get at what they describe as practical knowledge
in action.

Case Studies of Problem Solving

Many of the science educators who have studied problem solving have made
use of a methodology involving case studies of human subjects talking aloud
and expressing their thoughts as they attempt to solve problems. The record
of these articulations together with the product representing their attempt at
solving the problem become protocols that form the data of the researcher.
Mark Hackling, Australia, used this methodology in one of his significant
papers to study a number of persons, ranging from junior secondary science
students to qualified scientists, who were given a problem to solve that involved
scientific investigation (Research in Science Education, 1992).
For my work on problem solving, the paper by Ericsson and Simon (1978) in The Psychological
Review where they defended the use of protocol data is a very significant paper for that paradigm.
Hackling, Australia

CHANGING METHODOLOGICAL PARADIGMS

Richard White, Australia, recalled being arrested and surprised when he heard
a conference presentation by Ian Napper (later published in RISE in 1976)
in which rich ethnographic data from students was presented.
128 CHAPTER 8

It was the first time I’d heard someone give a research paper that actually included statements
by kids the researcher had recorded in interviews with them. He had excerpts from what the
kids said some of which I still remember. It was around 1975 when all the research we did
was Campbell and Stanley stuff, elaborate designs and elaborate statistics and so on with vari-
ations between kids lumped together as error. It started me thinking about this as quite an
alternative method of research. White, Australia

Years later, the three of us at Monash University, Richard White, Dick

Gunstone and myself, tried to recall, and commit to paper the conceptual
and methodological transitions we had undergone in our research. The result
was Developments in Style and Purpose, in JRST, 1988, a paper Dick
Gunstone chose as significant because of the way it affected his thinking.
Two reasons I think. One it how it helped me see the bigger picture more clearly than before.
Second, in the talking about that and writing it together, I got a much better sense of your thinking
and of Richard’s thinking than I had from the more happenstance randomness of our everyday
interactions. Gunstone, Australia

Randy McGinnis, USA, whose personal surprise at finding interview methods

were being used in science education research was noted in Chapter 5, con-
tinued his personal methodological journey when he read and was influenced
by a paper by Sandra Abell and Wolff-Michael Roth in JRST in 1994 on
the socialisation of a young science teacher. He found it a candid and a
refreshing way to examine an induction year, an insight he used in his sig-
nificant study (with Pat Simmons) of Teachers’ perspectives of teaching
science-technology-society in local cultures (Science Education, 1999). The
extended data collection in this study made it unusual, and enabled some
very rich portrayals of teachers’ visions for STS teaching.
The qualitative first person methodology helped me to see how to portray myself in literature
as well as incorporating my participants’ voices in the narrative. McGinnis, USA

METHODOLOGICAL RISK

A number of respondents who have pioneered new methodologies have chosen

a paper as significant because its acceptance for publication was both per-
sonally a relief and a validation of what they were trying to explore, and of
the methods they had chosen or devised. This sense of risk is particularly
evident in relation to the movement among researchers, beginning in the later
1970s, towards qualitative methodologies. They were seeking to gain under-
standing of teaching and learning science, that seemed to elude the quantitative
procedures of the dominant research paradigm.
The publication in Science Education in 1979/80 of his two early papers
on Heat and Temperature were, for Gaalen Erickson, Canada, a vindication
of the research methods he used to look closely at students’ thinking. Horst
Schecker, Germany, had also taken a risk in his doctoral thesis in 1985 by
 METHODOLOGY 129

attempting a methodological combination, that included statistical methods

(that is classical testing and seeking correlations) with more detailed qualita-
tive work on what single students were doing during specific lessons in
school on the topic of Newtonian mechanics.

OTHER INNOVATIONS IN METHODOLOGY

A Student Sensitive Instrument

A methodological innovation sprang from the experience Glen Aikenhead,
Canada, had in his doctoral studies on the evaluations of Harvard Project
Physics. He felt that large group assessment needed improving and some of
his data suggested that, in its usual form, it was not as valid as people assumed.
His chance to explore student-centred testing came when the I.E.A.’s Second
Science Study was being planned in Canada. The group responsible for it in
Canada wanted to gain the cooperation of the educationally independent
provinces, and as part of establishing this, they encouraged some provinces
to initiate additions to the international tests. In Saskatchewan a group (Reg
Fleming, Alan Ryan and Glen Aikenhead) developed a page of items for the
Canadian 17 year old test. They got students to write short answers to a set
of questions, and used these wordings to build the options in multiple choice
tests with Likert-type items.
It became very apparent that the most valid form of monitoring what students believed and the
reasons for their beliefs was multiple choice, but multiple choices that came from students as
opposed to multiple choices made up by other people. Validity was not going to be dependent
on psychometrics, but on how closely we reproduced the students’ views. Students’ views, in
themselves, required extensive research, triangulating various methods of collecting these data.
Aikenhead, Canada

And so the Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS) test came into

being.
When people ask for VOSTS they don’t get a standardised instrument. They get permission not
only to use whatever selection of the items they want, but also to modify the responses in them
so it better captures the way their participants are going to look at it. This is what interpre-
tive research is all about – how to convey to the outside world the beliefs and understandings
of people on the inside, in this case students. Aikenhead, Canada

Assessing Good Learning

In his doctoral thesis, Ian Mitchell, Australia, used good learning behaviours
as one of the outcome measures of the extended teaching program he was
monitoring. This was logically consistent with the intentions of the Project
to Enhance Effective Learning (PEEL) of which this teaching program was
an example. For example, he found that the students in the classes of the
130 CHAPTER 8

program asked quality questions about ten times as frequently as have been
reported in other studies.
So the PEEL ideas work and I wanted to say that good learning behaviours are indicative of
good learning, so why not use the presence of them as a tool for a successful program.
Mitchell, Australia

The referees for the journal to which he sent a paper on his study were not
so convinced. They wanted more assurance that these good learning behav-
iours correlated with the traditional ‘test scores’ of learning achievement –
an interesting tension between the intentions of short or long term learning that
school science should have.

Self-Assessment
The assessment of practical work in school science has long been a problematic
area, but Pinchas Tamir, Israel, developed several innovative methods of
measuring this complex capability. Less well known is the work he did on
developing an instrument for student self-assessment in science learning (Tamir,
1999). He used a five point scale ranging from I don’t know anything about
it to I can teach it to somebody else, and found the results were very close
to those in a traditional test – ‘saving a lot of time and anxiety!’

Assessing Formal Reasoning

Paralleling the group assessment instrument described earlier for alternative
conceptions is one developed by John Staver, USA, for Piagetian operational
thinking was made by John Staver, USA. In 1979 he and Dorthy Gabel reported
in JRST the development and validation of Piagetian Logical Operational
Reasoning (PLOT), an instrument that consisted of a videotape of several
Piagetian tasks of formal reasoning patterns. Students watched a task and
then were asked three types of questions about it – their understanding of
the task, a cognitive decision about the task, and their reasoning behind the
decision. This paper was another of the significant ones to win a JRST
award.

Methods for New Policies

Two papers published in Science Education captured the methodology that
Douglas Roberts and Graham Orpwood, both Canada, designed for the Science
Council of Canada’s study of science education in the early 1980s. Position
Papers were commissioned, not to be balanced reviews, but to argue a
particular position (to take a curriculum emphasis as it were) so that the objects
of choice could be quite clear for the people responsible for policy in each
 METHODOLOGY 131

province. These persons were those who would have to make decisions about
what direction science education was to go, and Roberts and Orpwood were
seeking to engage them in deliberative inquiries, a blend of research with
policy deliberations.
Its real success was not the good responses from the research community, but the fact that the
policy committees and the teaching communities in every province did respond. In a policy
study if you don’t have an influence on your primary clientele, it’s been a waste of time.
Orpwood, Canada

In Chapter 2 I drew attention to the division within NARST in 1963 that led
to two Dreams about methodology – one based on the methods of the sciences
and one based on those of the social sciences. Readers are now in a position
to judge on which side the evidence here is falling. To what extent the
conceptual developments discussed in the last chapter and the methodolog-
ical ones of this chapter add together to progress the research field is the
issue I consider in Chapter 9.

REFERENCES

Adams, R.J., Doig, B.A. and Rosier, M. (1990) Science Learning in Victorian Schools. ACER
Research Monograph No. 41. Hawthorn, Victoria: ACER.
Fensham, P.J. and Ingvarson, L.C. (1981) Two pairs of eyes are better than one. Curriculum
Perspectives 2(1): 1–8.
Gardner, P.L. (1975) Attitude measurement – A critique of some recent research. Educational
Research 17(2): 101–109.
Matthews, M.R. (2000) Time for Science Education. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers.
Novak, J. and Nussbaum, J. (1978) Junior high school pupils’ understanding of the particulate
nature of matter: An interview study. Science Education 62(3): 273–281.
Oakes, M. (1945) Children’s Explanations of Natural Phenomena. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Pepper, S.C. (1942) World Hypotheses: A study in evidence. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Shapiro, B. (1994) What children bring to light: A constructivist perspective on children’s learning
in science. New York: Teachers College Press.
Tamir, P. (1999) Self-assessment: The use of self-report knowledge and opportunity to learn.
International Journal of Science Education 21(4): 401–412.
Tobin, K., Kahle, J. and Fraser, B. (Eds.) (1990) Windows into Science Classrooms: Problems
associated with higher-level cognitive learning. London: Falmer Press.
White, R.T. (2001) The revolution in research on science teaching, In: V. Richardson (Ed.),
Handbook of Research on Teaching, 4th Edition, pp. 457–472. Washington: AERA.
 CHAPTER 9

EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION

Hopefully it’s progressing towards something that is improving

our understanding of how we learn and teach. We have a lot
of twists and turns as we move down the road.
Vince Lunetta, USA

Yes, I was happy with it because for me – you know how

research builds and builds and builds.
Ken Tobin, USA

The young reformers of NARST in 1963 criticised the previous research in

science education as lacking the sense of progression that should charac-
terise a lively research field. This lack was confirmed by John Nisbet (1974)
in his review of these studies that has been mentioned in Chapter 2. The
extent to which this aspect of the research has changed is the subject of this
chapter, that is, it is concerned with intra-research criterion, R5. Progression.
Almost half of the respondents made reference to some sense of progression
in describing the significance of their work. There are, thus, many signs that
researchers do have a sense of the importance of progression, but there was
considerable variation in what they meant by it. Once again, for some the sense
of progression was expressed in personal terms, while for others it was in terms
of the issues of the field itself.

PERSONAL PROGRESSION

A number of the researchers described their research contribution in stages,

each of which is concerned with a different topic or sub-area of science
education. This shifting stage seemed to provide them with the challenge of
keeping pace with a field that they see as on the move. ‘Move into’ was
commonly used to describe their own shifts of research focus. They found
something personally challenging and satisfying, in considering a new set of
literature, finding a niche for a research study within the new sub-area, and
encountering a new set of colleagues.
For some of these, a period away from an earlier research interest, led to
an enlivened return to the original interest in a way that was an advance on
what, and how the researcher had worked previously.
Ken Tobin, USA, saw his research career in such stages. Indeed, his response
about the influence of others’ work was couched in stage by stage terms (see
Chapter 5). In his first stage he was doing process/product research, and to

132
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 133

represent it he chose as significant a paper in the Journal of Educational

Psychology and an RER review of studies on wait time.
I was starting to understand there were different levels of measurement – teachers’ beliefs,
teachers’ attributes, how these influenced the teacher in interactions with the students, the
students’ attributes and their achievements. In those days I was trying to untangle all of that
quantitatively, and the paper was the first serious attempt to move across the model.
Tobin, USA

This was followed by a stage, in which Tobin was using qualitative methods,
including ethnography. A paper (with Gallagher) in JRST in 1984 was
significant because it was his first publication with these qualitative method-
ologies. A third stage is typified by the paper, with Campbell McRobbie, in
Science and Education. This was significant because it provided Tobin with
a conceptual breakthrough to start to understand what action meant.
Then I moved from action to interaction, and it brought together the individualistic and the social
bits of the work I was doing. We’ve really taken off with that. Tobin, USA

Then, after years of thinking about action, there was a paper with Sarah Ulerick
in 1992 the was about the extent of fit between the beliefs of the teacher
and the students, and how a very close fit can be an impediment to reform.
Finally, I got to the point where I could write about it (action) and in a succinct way that
didn’t belittle the whole idea. Tobin, USA

I have spelt out Tobin’s stages in some detail, because they embody so clearly
the sense of personal progression, but also because there is a sense in his
description of his research that, overall, it has been progressive in the sense
of understanding science classrooms.
James Wandersee, USA, is another stage researcher and his personal and
substantive progressions, moving through the stages of alternative conceptions,
history of science, and the growth of biological knowledge, have already
been touched on in Chapters 5 and Chapter 6.
For a few, and I am one of them, this personal sense of being part of the
movement of a research area is derived from engaging simultaneously with
several different sub-areas. A colleague once described me as like a juggler,
who keeps enough balls in the air so that it doesn’t matter if you drop one!
Sometimes such persons are able to make a conceptual link from one research
area to another one that provides an advance, that would not have been obvious
to more single minded researchers.
Randy McGinnis, USA is one of these multi-front researchers. His three
significant papers were all published in less than twelve months in JRST,
Science Education and Science and Education, and each is concerned with
a distinctly different sub-area of science education.
It is very difficult to delimit my published research papers down to three. In fact, each one is
a tangible record of my personal intellectual quest in science education. McGinnis, USA
134 CHAPTER 9

Another form of personal progression was described by respondents who

had had strong careers as teachers. For them, the progression from thoughtful
classroom practitioner to researcher was a very significant personal reshaping.
Reference has already been made to this in Chapter 3 in the way Rod Fawns,
Australia, described his series of studies on the social context of science
curricula as ‘a journey of self discovery’. A few others like John Staver,
USA, associated the professional shifts into and out of research with a similar
sense of personal reshaping. He used the terms of the terms of the BSCS
5-Es learning cycle to describe this pilgrimage. Seven years of teaching
chemistry in high school was the Engage stage, and it had left him with
one burning question for his years of research. Why didn’t my students learn
chemistry as well as I thought they should, given how hard all of us had
worked?
After wonderful mentoring during his doctorate (see Chapter 5), he began
an Exploration stage that produced the Piagetian Logical Operations Test
(PLOT), for use with large groups, shortening the individual clinical proce-
dures (see Chapter 8). His Explain stage began in the mid-1980s when he
directed his work towards the constructivist foundations of Piaget’s theory.
I began this work as a realist. I think we all in the western world grow up as realists. It’s
intuitive to think what we know describes a world that is external to, independent of, and separate
from us. So I looked for the weaknesses in constructivist epistemology that I thought must be
wrong with it. We should not use a flawed theory to explain innovative practices. But the more
work I did the more I changed my mind and became a strong advocate for constructivist theory
and its applications to science and science education. Staver, USA

The Elaborate stage began when he assumed more administrative and policy
responsiblities for science curriculum.
Some, who had had the opportunity to be part, albeit temporarily, of a
research group whose work they saw as being in progression, found that
experience to be a source of great personal satisfaction. Others expressed
their personal admiration for researchers who had had the persistence to
continue over a longish period of time to explore one theoretical perspec-
tive. They were, by the very persistence of their research program, seen to
be contributing to the development of that sub-area of the whole, and to be
fostering in others an appreciation of the development of a line of research.

MOVEMENT OR PROGRESS

In the Introduction I referred to some other attempts to see whether and how
research in science education is moving. Movement should not, however, be
confused with progress. Fashion is about movement in the style of clothing
that people are attracted to buy from year to year, but it is not about progress
in the basic purposes that clothing has for human beings. If one is interested
in clothing that provides water proof protection, then the innovative use of a
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 135

new material like Gortex is an example of progress, but that material will,
no doubt, be overtaken by even better materials. A butterfly moves from flower
to flower, but what it is doing for itself and the flower is essentially the same
– a replication.
There are undoubtedly fashions in research in science education. Some of
the surge, for example, in studies of alternative conceptions in the 1980s,
and in language and the science classroom in the 1990s, is due to a wish to
be part of where the research action is, rather than having any idea about
advancing that research frontier.
For the 25th issue of Studies in Science Education I suggested that my
colleague, Jeff Northfield (1995), be invited to overview the previous twenty
four issues, because I knew he would do it well and with impartiality. He
concluded that this journal has been successful in extending what counts as
science education research, and that it had encouraged the use of a wider range
of research methods. The journal had contributed very positively to establishing
the gender issue in science education and the issue of the relationship between
science and technology in education, but the interest in both these issues
seemed to have waned. Gaps he noted as possible future directions were
pre-school education, tertiary and adult education, and non-formal settings.
Since 1995 reviews have appeared on the last topic, as has one on science
and vocational education, a new sector Northfield did not mention. He sug-
gested a review assessing what has been achieved through the great interest
in constructivism, and this has been taken up by several authors. Finally, he
put in a plea for more comparative studies, particularly of policy making re
the curriculum and of assessment of science education.

Persistence with a Theory

Some researchers come across a theoretical position which impresses them
greatly because of the application it seems likely to have in science educa-
tion. They use it to design a study, the results of which confirm their sense
of its applicability. This then encourages them to explore other details and
consequences of the theory, so that its implications for teaching/learning
science become more and more supported by the empirical results from the
studies. Thus a long series of studies is undertaken that do not particularly
extend or modify the original theory, but they do enlarge and develop the
researcher’s claim that it should be heeded by science educators. Joseph Novak,
USA, Heinrich Stork, Germany, and Theo Wubbels, The Netherlands, are three
such respondents, whose persistent work within one theoretical frame has been
referred to in Chapter 7.
The commitment of these researchers to their chosen frame is well illus-
trated by a comment from the last of this trio. He told me how, after many
years of studies within the frame provided by Timothy Leary’s book on
136 CHAPTER 9

inter-personal diagnosis of personality, he had gained fresh insight when he

reviewed a paper by another researcher who had also read Leary.
I was reminded of ideas that we have not yet used, about the kinds of behaviour that are provoked
by the teacher’s behaviour. “I think we’ll all have to work for five more years on that.”
Wubbels, The Netherlands

Both Wubbels and Barry Fraser, Australia, the other leading figure among
the respondents in this area of science education (see Chapter 8), undoubt-
edly see their studies as programmatic in order to achieve progression of the
ideas in them and the methodologies being used. A number of other studies
of science classroom interactions and of the science classroom environment
seem to have a less clear sense of progression or of a connection to theory.

OTHER PROGRESSIONS

Laboratory Studies
Not easy to classify as an example of the development of theory, but cer-
tainly a progression of understanding is the extended series of studies by
Pinchas Tamir, Israel, of the place and possible roles of the laboratory in
science education. These studies were seen as highly significant by himself
and commended very highly by others. The review he wrote, with Lazarowitz,
for the NSTA-sponsored Handbook of Research on Science Teaching enabled
him to present many powerful ideas and possibilities for the laboratory in
science education. Much of these stemmed from the studies he was able to
conduct over many years, from the advantageous positions he held in relation
to the curriculum and assessment of school biology in Israel.
The work we have done to develop alternative possibilities for practical work and particularly
the assessment of practical work, including the use of external examinations has been more
comprehensive. That is what makes it important and influential. Tamir, Israel

Teacher Education
Tom Russell, Canada, is an example of a respondent with a clear sense of
progression in the sub-area of teacher education. In 1983 he published in JRST
a paper in which he analysed teachers’ discourse to see whether they support
or distort the authority of science. He used Toulmin’s criteria for arguments
moving from data to a conclusion on the basis of a warrant which has certain
backing. He found that some teachers conduct their lessons in ways that are
pedagogically creditable, but inadvertently these leave the argument for the
scientific point of the lesson incomplete. In default for the authority of reason,
the only authority for the science becomes the authority of the teacher’s
position. This study led on to other studies, more focussed on initial teacher
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 137

education, one of which resulted in another of his publications of signifi-

cance (with Hugh Munby), in the Journal of Teacher Education. In this paper,
the authors move from the default for the authority of reason in science being
the authority of teacher’s position, to the relation between the latter and the
‘authority of personal experience’. By this phrase, the authors mean that
student teachers desperately want to be told how to teach science by someone
whom they see as having authority of position, whereas what this person
actually has is the authority of personal experience. Student teachers need to
be helped to realise that they have got an inner set of values that are probably
closely related to their decision to become teachers, and that these can be
related to their own personal experiences of teaching, including what, in due
course, their own students can tell them about their teaching,
This idea is probably going to see me through the next five years. The wonderful thing is that
it all appeared magically in Hugh’s kitchen after coffee when we were putting the presenta-
tion for AERA together. All of a sudden we found ourselves talking about not the authority of
reason or the authority of position but the authority of experience. Russell, Canada

Alternative Conceptions and Conceptual Change

One sub-area of research in science education stands out as an example of
development that substantially took place from within the area, rather than
as development with the help of borrowed ideas, theories and methodologies
from outside the area. This sub-area began with the re-discovery by Driver and
Easley (1978) of the importance of children’s views about scientific phenomena
and their use of modifications of Piaget’s clinical interviewing as methodology.
It was a re-discovery, because German scholars had been interested in these
views many years earlier (see Duit, 1992), and Marven Oakes (1947) at
Teachers College, Columbia University in New York had published several
such studies in the 1940s.
The research on these children’s views was facilitated by the invention
by several science education researchers of several methods of data collec-
tion that were very simple to administer (see Chapter 8). In just over a decade
several thousand of these studies of what became generally known as alter-
native conceptions had been reported from researchers in a an unusually wide
spread of countries. Helga Pfundt and Reinders Duit of the I.P.N. in Kiel,
Germany, have greatly helped to make these studies accessible through their
four editions of Bibliography: Students’ Alternative Frameworks and
Science Education. Beginning modestly in the 1970s, the 4th Edition in
1994 contained reference to more than 4000 studies. Many researchers are
indebted to these two scholars for their vision and persistence in providing
others with this amazing service in an exploding sub-area of research.
This new domain for science education research has turned out, for some
researchers, to be a place to mark step, producing studies of the conceptions
138 CHAPTER 9

of a number of different science phenomena, or producing replications of

the same phenomena with another group of students. It has, however, thanks
to others been progressively moving.
In Table 9.1 I set out a progression for this new domain of research, that
was evident from the interviews with respondents who have been active
contributors to it. The dates are not intended to be exact, but rather to provide
a temporal sense of when the research studies began to move from one phase
to the next.

Table 9.1. The progression of research into alternative conceptions and conceptual change.

1973 on Rediscovery of Students’ Views

(announcement of first results and reactions)
1979 on Studies of Alternative Conceptions
(methods are developed, and characteristics recognised)
1982 on Studies of Conceptual Change
(empirical studies and the theorising begins)
1988 on Studies of Concepts and Contexts
(recognition of context, conceptual addition and the role of metacognition)
1990 on Studies of Social Dimensions of Conceptual Change
(social and cultural aspects of construction of science knowledge)
Studies of the Origins of Alternative Conceptions
(cognitive and affective origins, and the history of science)

To avoid complicating this outline of progression, I have omitted the research

sub-areas of analogies and models, although Duit, Germany, and Gilbert,
England both explained the significance of publications in these sub-areas
in terms of their linkage to earlier work they had done on alternative con-
ceptions.
This progression is a good example in science education research of the
hope expressed in the Dream D1–D3 of NARST (Chapter 3) that research
will become theory based in a way that advances conceptual development, and
that good research studies will become the foundation for more searching
enquiries.
Phase one began with the doctoral thesis of Rosalind Driver, England, in
1973 at the University of Illinois, but for a wider audience her review with
(with Jack Easley), Pupils and Paradigms in 1978 announced it. In this review
the authors acknowledged their debt to Piaget, but portrayed a quite new
perspective on children’s ideas for the first time in the public domain – the
importance of children’s ideas about science from their point of view. In
another review in Studies in Science Education in 1983, Driver and Gaalen
Erickson, Canada, set out the conceptual and methodological issues that were
emerging. In the same issue, John Gilbert, England, and Michael Watts had
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 139

a review entitled Conceptions, Misconceptions and Alternative Conceptions,

in which these authors considered definitions of a conception – a new idea
for many in science education research – and then used these definitions to
review the existing literature on misconceptions.
The second phase and the beginning of the third phase were almost entirely
conducted by researchers within science education itself. As the third phase
progressed and questions like How and Why do these conceptions develop?
and How can they be changed? were asked more seriously, theories from
outside, such as the radical constructivism of von Glaserfeld and its less radical
versions, became attractive ways of answering the first question and describing
what was found among students. The suggestions for pedagogies to answer the
second question were largely generated within science classrooms, where
conceptual change began to be given an explicit place in the teaching of
science.
In the fourth phase there was a further borrowing of the theoretical ideas
of situated cognition that had burst on the educational research scene a year
or so earlier. The work of Solomon referred to in Chapter 6 on different
conceptions for different contexts foreshadowed this phase. Alastair Jones,
New Zealand, a member of Roger Osborne’s group at Waikato University in
the 1980s, in describing his paper with C.M. Kirk in the IJSE in 1990 reminded
me that Roger Osborne had had two strands of interest to follow in uncov-
ering the role of students’ alternative conceptions in science education –
conceptual change and the role of context. Jones’ own early research was an
example of the latter strand.
Finally, in the fifth phase, the recognition of the social nature of class-
rooms opened science education to the more social theories of learning, such
as those of Vygotsky, Edwards and Mercer, and Wertsch, and cultural ones
from Geertz and Greene. Publications from each of these outside authors
feature in Appendix B among the major influences from others on the respon-
dents. There has been some indigenising of these borrowed theories into science
education but, in general, the main use of the outside theories seems as yet
to have been descriptive.
A number of the respondents are the very persons who shaped and devel-
oped these phases of research, and they have chosen publications as significant
that belong to each of these phases. Publication by Rosalind Driver, Gaalen
Erickson and Björn Andersson, have been mentioned already, but Richard
Gunstone, Australia, and Audrey Champagne, USA, were also prominent.
Collecting the data for the paper on Understanding of Gravity (in Science Education) and
then trying to make sense of it, just led me into this huge shift to thinking in ways that seemed
valuable about learning in real classrooms. Gunstone, Australia
The article in the American Journal of Physics helped to bring our work to the attention of
both the physics and the physics education communities. That single article generated more
response than any other article I have been involved in writing. Champagne, USA
140 CHAPTER 9

Replicative studies began to appear in this, and each succeeding phase. A

degree of replication is necessary, but such studies can be overdone. Studies
that extend the ideas, and methods, and hence, the findings within in each phase
are also important. Mark Hackling’s, Australia, paper, with David Treagust,
in JRST in 1984 is a good example of a substantive extension in the first phase.
It moved the focus from the way students conceived of a single concept to
the relationships between concepts (see Chapter 8).
In the third phase, Rosalind Driver, England, Phillip Scott, England, Peter
Hewson, USA, James Wandersee, USA, and Ik Jung Kim, S. Korea, among
many others others, have been contributors, and the significant studies of some
of them have already been discussed. For his doctoral dissertation, Kim studied
the use in the classroom of critical discussion of rival concepts, including
the scientific one, as one way to bring about conceptual change. He found that,
for a number of students, their positive changes to a Newtonian way of thinking
about mechanics did persist, when they were subsequently confronted with a
wide range of different contexts involving force and motion.
Scientists change their concepts with ease compared to students. Scientist know the concepts they
have and can understand competing ones. Many students are not aware of their own concepts
and do not understand other concepts like the formal scientific ones. Kim, S. Korea

At the second Cornell Conference in 1987 Phillip Scott, England, presented

a paper (published in the Proceedings) that followed the path of a particular
student through the teaching scheme for the topic, particles, that he and others
in Rosalind Driver’s group at Leeds had developed to facilitate conceptual
change.
It was written up as a case study of one kid’s ideas as the teaching went on. I felt and still do
to an extent proud of that teaching scheme. So the paper is not just about the kid, but it offered
a window for others to get into the CLIS teaching scheme and what lies behind it.
Scott, England

Further Developments
I have already referred to the studies by Jinwoong Song, S. Korea, Leif Lybeck,
Sweden, and Ian Mitchell, Australia, of the importance of three different
aspects of context, and to the prescient work by Joan Solomon, England on
different domains. Maria Pilar Jimenez-Aleixandre, Spain, chose a paper in the
IJSE in 1992 as significant because it extends and refines the manner in which
certain terms in the emerging theoretical frame are being used in science
education research. In her study she explored the effect of teaching the
biological topic of selection with a conceptual change strategy in two classes,
but in one metacognitive strategies were added. The students in the metacog-
nitive class did achieve significantly greater learning. These studies all
contributed to the fourth phase.
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 141

Driver and Scott appear again, with three other colleagues, as contribu-
tors to the first strand of the fifth phase in their much discussed paper in the
Educational Researcher in 1994. In the context of teacher education the
contribution of Beverley Bell, New Zealand, has been mentioned before in
Chapter 7. A significant paper of Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada, involved social
construction in the classroom, and it has also been mentioned in Chapter 4.
In his other significant paper, published in Cognition and Instruction, the
study involved a class of students working in small groups to conduct an
open inquiry of a small area of land. When the inquiry was completed the small
groups were mixed together in the classroom to defend what they had done
in their respective inquiries. Roth and his colleague, Bowen, this time extended
their observation beyond the small groups to monitor the interactions in the
classroom community, and then how individual students were integrated in
the small groups and in the classroom community.
We shifted units of analysis several times to pursue knowing and learning in the classroom.
We went back to the individuals and showed how interactions with other individuals in the
classroom community – teacher and peers – how individuals changed their ideas.
Roth, Canada

The movement of the research in this sub-area has also been evident in the
contributions to the second strand of phase 4 by Ruth Stavy, Israel, con-
cerning underlying intuitions, and of James Wandersee, USA and Randy
McGinnis, USA, concerning history of science, which have been mentioned
briefly in Chapters and respectively.
In Chapter 5 I referred briefly to the studies over many years by John
Clement, USA, which stand alongside Joseph Novak’s twelve year study (see
Chapter 7), as the most sustained and progressive piece of research among
my respondents. In my interview with Clement, there is a nice segment that
highlights not only the need for ongoing studies, but also how his work at each
stage built very deliberately on the earlier studies.
John Well the word significant is a nasty word, but let me start with the paper
in JRST about bridging analogies and intuitions to deal with students’
preconceptions of physics. The reason I thought of that one is that it
describes a long chain of work which started with work on preconcep-
tions of mechanics fifteen years ago, just exposing them. But this paper
goes into applying some of that to classroom teaching. It describes
several lessons that came out of the previous tentative research, and
we were, after several years of struggle when we got no gains over
control which was quite frustrating; we finally were able to get one
standard deviation difference over the control groups. So that was
satisfying, having spent the previous ten years on just researching what
the difficulties were. And I guess my hope out of that project is that it
may give others some hope that it is possible to get an effect.
142 CHAPTER 9

Peter You said after some attempts with no gains you were evolving the
teaching treatment.
John Yes. We did a series of at least three years of trials on each lesson.
Classroom trials – observing them critically and revising them. Only
then in many areas were we able to see. So that’s an interesting point.
The laboratory research was not sufficient – the research on precon-
ceptions was necessary, but alone was not sufficient to do this. We had
to go right into the classroom and fail a number of times.
John Clement’s long and painstaking studies of students’ conceptions in
mechanics have become a classic exemplar of how the ideas of alternative
conceptions and conceptual change have been indigenised and incorporated
in to science education research. In his famous 1993 paper in JRST (see
Chapter 5 for its seminal status) he describes how he and his colleagues used
bridging analogies and anchoring intuitions to deal with students’ precon-
ceptions in mechanics. The long chain of work is outlined, and how progress
was made, albeit haltingly at times, towards a classroom teaching strategy
that gave a standard deviation improvement in the students’ learning measure,
compared with the control classes. The final teaching strategy ‘emphasises
rational (a lot of thought experiments in class discussions) as well as empir-
ical components of instruction. The laboratory is involved, but its use is to
try to go beyond induction from little empirical experiences, towards the
idea, that construction of images in the mind, is necessary to get a handle
on mechanics. It isn’t just experience.’
The schematic diagrams of the lesson plans in the strategy all have similar
form which encouraged Clement and his colleagues to think that a start has
been made towards a general teaching strategy for this type of science content.
Clement’s work in this series of studies is the epitome of the NARST Dream
3 and of what is implied by the four intra-research criteria, R2–R5. Important
questions have been asked, innovative methodologies have been used, and
theoretical concepts have been defined and redefined so that the ideas they
represent are more capable of modeling the realities of science classrooms. His
group recognises it has been fortunate to have sustained funding support for
so long, but they believe tough problems in science education, like persis-
tent alternative conceptions, require research that is programmatic and extended
over time, if they are to be solved.

Critique
The maturity and the robustness of what has evolved in science education
research, as a result of the combination of alternative conceptions work with
constructivist views of learning are attested to by the efforts to which some
other researchers have gone to oppose its relevance for science teaching and
 EVIDENCE OF PROGRESSION 143

learning. Most prominent among these critics is Michael Matthews who, during
a short stint in New Zealand, set out professionally and in the public arena
to negate the influence he saw the Waikato group was exercising on New
Zealand’s practice of science education. Since then Matthews (1998) has
continued to write and campaign against constructivist influences more
generally.
One respondent, Jonathan Osborne, England, chose as one of his significant
publications a 1996 paper entitled Beyond Constructivism. He is much more
measured than Matthews in his critique, and his main concern is that there
are now some people in the area who, over zealously promote the universal
adoption of constructivism as a mantra to solve everything in science educa-
tion. As a caution against this, he sets out a case for realism in science
education.
My paper is probably one of the more balanced considerations of the strengths and weak-
nesses of constructivism and I know it has been widely used in various courses.
Osborne, England

Edgar Jenkins, England, as an editor has published some of Matthews’ critique,

and with his historian’s hat on, he has pointed out there have been learning
theories put forward at various points of time, from which people have moved
very quickly to pedagogies, that have then not provided the answers. Lest
people make the same mistake again, he joins Osborne, in the note of caution,
by asking the question.
What confidence have we got that as a learning theory, constructivism, is necessarily any better
than another kind of learning model you may want to invent or draw from educational history?
Jenkins, England

In a subsequent paper Jenkins (2000) extends caution to a more antagonistic

stance against constructivism, seeing it as narrowing the agenda of the pro-
fessional and research agenda relating to the teaching of science.
The way alternative conceptions research has evolved over twenty plus
years, and the robust debates within it, and about it in the science education
community, provide the strongest evidence that science education research
in this sub-area has met the substantive aspect of intra-research criterion R5.
Progression for a field of research.
Earlier in this chapter evidence was provided, albeit not as spectacular, from
some other sub-areas of science education that our understanding in them
has been developing, so it can be claimed that meeting this criterion extends
also to these other sub-areas.
There is a sense among the respondents that the progression of thinking
among the body of the field’s researchers is quite a slow process. Thus, the
phrase ahead-of-its-time, was used, occasionally by a respondent about their
own work, more often about work by others that was seen as very signifi-
cant. In due course, it was implied these ideas would become part of corporate
144 CHAPTER 9

scene and start to appear in reference lists. It is still quite common, however,
in science education to find authors submitting papers to the research journals
(and referees recommending them) that make no reference to earlier studies
of the same research issue in other readily accessible journals. In Chapter 7
I discussed another example of this reluctance to keep pace with where the
field has reached. Theoretical positions were being presented and used in a
form that suited the authors’ studies, although this theoretical position had been
revised as a result of studies and work these authors had not read or wished
to ignore. My research experiences in chemical research and in science edu-
cation suggests that such past-the-used-by-date publishing is much more
common in science education than it was in chemistry. Hence the appropri-
ateness of the comment about twists and turns by Lunetta that heads this
chapter.
In the next chapter the respondents’ significant publications are discussed
in relation to the one remaining intra-research criterion R1. Scientific knowl-
edge.

REFERENCES

Duit, R. (1992) Forschungen zur Bedeutung vorinterrichtlicher Vorstellungen für das Erlernen
der Naturwissenschaften (Research on the role of students’ preconceptions in learning science).
In: K. Riquarts, W. Dierks, R. Duit, G. Eulefeld, H. Haft and H. Stork (Eds.), Naturwissen-
schaftliche Bildung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Volume IV: Aktuelle Entwicklungen
und fachdidaktische Fragestellungen in der naturwissenschaftlichen Bildung, pp. 47–84. Kiel,
Germany: IPN.
Jenkins, E. (2000) Constructivism in school science education: Powerful model or the most
dangerous intellectual tendency. Science and Education 9(6): 599–610.
Matthews, M.R. (Ed.) (1998) Constructivism in Science Education: A philosophical examination.
Dordrecht. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Northfield, J.R. (1995) Reviewing a Journal’s Contribution to Science Education. International
Journal of Science Education 25: 199–210.
Oakes, M.E. (1947) Children’s Explanations of Natural Phenomena. New York: Teachers College
Press.
 CHAPTER 10

FOCUS ON CONTENT

The Driver and Osborne books stimulated me to do more

research evaluating the physics content to be taught, rather
than more psychological or more general educational research
or just more research in physics.
Sung Jae Pak, S. Korea

In Chapter 1 the first criterion I suggested for science education as a distinctive

field of research is that the researcher had a knowledge of science. This chapter
is essentially about research that does meet that criterion. More particularly,
much of what is discussed not only requires a knowledge of the science in
the research, but also the capacity to critically evaluate that scientific knowl-
edge from an educational perspective.
Over the last 30 years, as research in science education has developed
internationally I have been repeatedly aware of a conceptual block or com-
munication failure among certain of its proponents. This occurs most often
when researchers from the Anglo-American orbit, with its educational tradi-
tion of what has been called Curriculum (English speaking countries), meet
with their counterparts from continental Europe and countries in Latin America
and Asia, that share the continental European heritages about the teaching
of disciplinary science subjects, that are implied in the word, Didaktik (and
its various linguistic forms in Europe).
The word Didaktik is the semiotic indicator of this discontinuity of con-
versation and, accordingly, of unshared appreciation of each group’s work.
What is clearly valued as a noun by one group has a derogatory meaning
for the other as the adjective, didactic, with its association in English with
transmissive, instructional teaching.
As one who has been educated and strongly socialised in the Curriculum
tradition, I remember my surprise, in the early years of my appointment in
Australia to initiate research in science education in Australia, when I talked
to German colleagues at a conference at IPN in Kiel. It was not that the
ideas and papers of educators like Weninger (1979) and Dierks (1981) were
not highly thoughtful and original. Their analysis of issues in chemical edu-
cation, and their suggested solutions to them attracted me. The solutions
seemed worthwhile contributions to overcome student problems that I had
encountered as a teacher of chemistry. It was rather that these apparently
armchair reflections on topics in chemistry did not fit my conception then of
what research in science education should involve. Nor were they studies in

145
146 CHAPTER 10

the history of chemistry, although they did draw on the historical shifts in
how the international community of chemistry has formally conceptualised and
presented the topics under discussion. There was no empirical data and no
explicit analysis of the teachers, students, and classroom contexts for which
their teaching suggestions were made.
On numerous occasions since then, I have been reminded that important
educational traditions express, organise, and do things in education, quite
differently from my own tradition. Very unsystematically, I began to acquire
a respect for, and some fragmentary knowledge of what is involved in the
tradition of Didaktik in relation to science education. At the same time I was
aware that these alternative ways of thinking about, and carrying out research
in science education were unknown to my colleagues in the Australasian scene,
and to most of those who attend the major fora in North America and else-
where, to which our shared English language draws us.
In the 1990s a cooperative project took place entitled Curriculum v. Didaktik
or Didaktik v. Curriculum, depending on the tradition with which one
identifies. Groups of scholars, familiar with, or interested in, these two edu-
cational traditions have met on several occasions, and the fruits of their
discussions have become available in a number of publications. Because
these traditions are still not mutually well known, I attempt in the first sections
of this chapter to distill some of the basic assumptions and emphases in the
two traditions. Then in the later sections I try to relate them to how they
have influenced the main directions research in science education has taken.
Among these publications are Didaktik and/or Curriculum, edited by
Stephan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts, (1995), the first number of volume 27
of the Journal of Curriculum Studies (1995), Didaktik and/or Curriculum:
An international dialogue, edited by Björg B. Gundem and Stephan Hopmann
(1998), Teaching as Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik tradition,
edited by Ian Westbury, Stephan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts (2000) and
Looking into Classrooms: Papers on Didactics by Peter Menck (2000).
The impetus for the meetings can be traced to the appearance of the words,
“subject content”, in Lee Shulman’s (1987) account of what the new Stanford
project of teachers and teaching was studying. He combined subject content
and pedagogy to coin the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)
as the central focus of this major research study. This recognition of PCK in
North America attracted the interest of those in the Didaktik tradition for whom
subject content had always been a central issue and integral to their approach
to research. Shulman (1995) later complemented PCK with the phrase
“pedagogy of substance”.
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 147

DIDAKTIK

To begin to understand the Didaktik tradition in Germany it was quickly evident

that an appreciation of the German word Bildung in relation to education
was important, but it is not simple to translate into English. Bildung und
Erziehen makes sense in German, and carries discriminatory meanings, that
my simple dictionary translation into Education and Education failed to
convey. I found the metaphors associated with Bildung more helpful. They
include the formation of a learner as an individual character or whole per-
sonality, and the cultivation or nurturing of a plant from seedling to mature
plant, bearing flower or fruit.
The knowledge of biology or chemistry or physics has been developed in
the contexts of inquiry and investigation in these sciences. These contexts
are quite different from the contexts of schooling, particularly schooling which
has a more liberal or general purpose. In other words, the knowledge in these
sciences is not automatically in a form that makes it meaningful or worthy
of a place in schooling committed to education as Bildung.
Didaktik analysis, in the case of a specific school subject like one of these
sciences, is the process that needs to go on to turn the primary knowledge
in the source discipline into knowledge for schooling that has the potential
to contribute to Bildung in the learners.
Gundem (2000) and Tiberghien (2000) both describe Chevallard’s (1985)
concept of transposition – within the French sense of la didactique – as serving
a rather similar role, namely, the development of knowledge to be taught
from scientific knowledge.
Wolfgang Klafki (1958) in a textbook on Didaktik, which was very influ-
ential on generations of secondary school teachers in Germany, challenges
teachers with a succession of five sets of questions that illustrates, in the
Bildung sense, the process of Didaktik analysis in a subject area (see Uljens,
1995). His first three sets of questions are thus concerned with establishing the
significance a potential science topic has for school science, and with its
significance for the learner’s past, present, and future.
The first set is:
I. What wider or general sense or reality does this content exemplify and open
up to the learner?
What basic phenomenon or fundamental principle, what law, criterion,
problem, method, technique or attitude can be grasped by dealing with
this content as an “example”?
The stress on the exemplary in these questions points to the opposite of the
very specialised learning that science education too often seems to involve.
The exemplar reflects a whole, beyond the particular case, and perhaps, too,
beyond a single science discipline. It is instructive to insert various familiar
148 CHAPTER 10

school science topics into this question. What are chemical equations an
example of in science? What wider sense does series and parallel circuits or
the laws of reflection open up to students? Of what fundamental principle
or problem is the flow of energy through food chains an example?
These are not familiar questions to teachers or student teachers in the
Curriculum tradition. Indeed, they find them difficult to answer, as a colleague
and I found when we explored with such persons the question, What makes
a chemical equation and equation? (Fensham and Lui, 2001). Secondary
teachers in the Curriculum tradition, like their Continental counterparts, do
very commonly have their education in science quite separately from their
studies in education. There is an important difference, however, and it lies more
in the education studies of these future teachers than in their science studies.
In their education studies, student teachers in the Curriculum tradition are
not usually encouraged to continue to reflect on the knowledge content of
science, because it is essentially taken as a given. The education studies in
this tradition deal, as far as the science content is concerned, only with Klafki’s
fourth and fifth sets of questions about the pedagogical processes for teaching
a given topic. Senn-Fennell (1995) has described, on the other hand, how
Didaktik analysis of subject matter content does have a central place in the
education studies of German teachers.
In hindsight, I now recognise that the questions my German friends were
addressing in the papers referred to earlier were like the ones in the Klafki’s
first set. They are questions that need to be asked in the process of exploring
whether a topic, like chemical equations, does meet the criterion of being an
example of a wider or general sense or reality for learners.
Dorothy Vásquez-Levy (2001) has recently provided a much fuller descrip-
tion of the meaning of Bildung in relation to education. In this essay review
of the last two books mentioned above from the Curriculum v. Didaktik
meetings, she also enlarges on Klafki’s five sets of questions as a result of
his restatement of them in chapter 8 of the book by Westbury et al. (2000).
Hensen and Olson (1996) discussed the tension that teaching an STS-
curriculum raises for science teachers who have been socialised into a
particular scientific discipline. They make use of Klafki’s (1991) reconcep-
tualisation of Bildung along a political dimension to counter the critique that
its earlier notion was idealist and elitist. In this new sense of Bildung, these
authors argue that education should contribute to a person’s awareness of
key socio-scientific problems, problems that have stemmed, in part, from the
positivist separation of knowledge and values that exists in the disciplinary
sciences. An STS science curriculum is thus seen to be a move towards a
morally-based science education that is consistent with this reinterpreted sense
of Bildung.
In a somewhat related way, I have argued that the idea that content
knowledge should meet the standard implied in Bildung, i.e. committed to
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 149

the character formation of learners, provides a powerful criterion for deter-

mining what the content and the emphases should be in school science
curriculum that aims to be a science for all students (Fensham, 2000). Without
very clear criteria such as this one provides, the curriculum task of priori-
tising the science knowledge to prepare all students for responsible citizenship
in the real world becomes impossible (see Fensham, 2002).

RESPONSIBILITY FOR DIDAKTIK ANALYSIS

In 1978 I visited a number of countries for discussions with science educa-

tors, who had been directly involved in the science projects of the curriculum
reforms in the 1960–70s. I asked them about their experiences including their
memory of interesting ideas about content that were subsequently rejected.
This led to a paper entitled Books, Teachers and Committees: A comparative
essay on authority in science education (Fensham, 1980). In this small project,
I now realise, I had just opened the door a fraction to central differences
between the two traditions.
The issue behind these differences is: Where does the responsibility for
the stages in determining and implementing a curriculum lie? In Figures
10.1a and 10.1b I have tried to represent the differences as I now discern them.
In the Curriculum tradition (Figure 10.1a) the Educational System is the
responsible authority. It provides, through its curriculum agency, to the schools
in the system the particular content for learning. This content is to be taught
by subject teachers, as agents of the System, to the learners by means of

EDUCATION SYSTEM EDUCATION SYSTEM

Curriculum Board Purposes of Knowledge

of Schooling Sources
Detailed Science Content Disciplinary Sciences
to be taught
Teacher
Teacher
Didaktik analysis
Appropriate Pedagogy
Knowledge for School Science
Learners
Appropriate Pedagogy

Learners

(a) (b)

Figure 10.1. Responsibilities for curricular content and teaching in education systems with
(a) the Curriculum tradition and (b) the Didaktik tradition.
150 CHAPTER 10

suitable pedagogical strategies (Klafki’s fourth and fifth sets of questions). The
teachers’ effectiveness will be checked by other agents of the System called
inspectors, examination boards, etc.
In the Didaktik tradition (Figure 10.1b) responsibility for two stages of
this sequence lies with the teacher. The purposes of schooling and the source
areas of knowledge (e.g. the disciplinary sciences) are determined by the
System. These purposes and the deep pools of scientific knowledge then pass
to the schools where the science subject teachers are expected to engage in
Didaktik analysis (Klafki’s first, second and third sets of questions) to deter-
mine the science knowledge to be taught. The teacher is then responsible for
teaching it, with suitable pedagogical strategies (Klafki’s fourth and fifth sets
of questions), so that it may, in Tibergien’s term, become effectively learnt
science knowledge.
I am not suggesting that these two different conceptions of educational
responsibility, and the processes associated with them, occur consistently or
exclusively in the schools that are part of educational systems that have these
two traditions. There are, of course, examples of school-based curriculum
development and of science teaching in Australia, North America and Britain
that have the characteristics of Didaktik, just as I feel sure there will be
examples in Europe that are better represented by Figure 10.1a than by 10.1b.
Again, feminist science educators in countries with the Curriculum tradition
have from time to time questioned the content of official curricula, as more
recently have those interested in the issues of culture and school science.
Nevertheless, this way of expressing the different loci of responsibility makes
sense of a number of differences in organisational aspects of schooling and
of science education in the countries of the two traditions.

MANIFESTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE IN THE TRADITIONS

In 1994, Norway and a number of Australian states published new docu-

ments for their respective system-wide curriculum. The stark and striking
difference in Table 10.1 between the chapter headings in these two docu-
ments about the curriculum of schooling make very clear the effect the idea
of education as Bildung can have at this systemic level.
In the one, the maturing young person is the purpose of the curriculum.
In the other, the teaching of subjects is the purpose. In the one, disciplines
of knowledge are to be mined to achieve its purpose; in the other, disciplines
of knowledge are the purposes.
In Scandinavian schools, a teacher takes a class of learners through their
first several years of education, whereas in Australia these young learners
normally have a different teacher every year. The former arrangement relates
to the Bildung metaphors above, and the latter to a system that historically
needed to encourage teacher mobility as part of its solution to the equity
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 151

Table 10.1. The chapter headings in the 1994 statements of the curriculum of schooling in Norway
and Victoria, Australia.

THE CORE CURRICULUM THE CURRICULUM

(Norway, 1994) (Victoria, Australia, 1994)
The Spiritual Human English
The Cultural Human Mathematics
The Working Human Science
The Socially Conscious Human Studies of Society and Environment
The Creative Human Languages Other than English
The Environmentally Aware Human Technology
The Integrated Human The Arts
Health

goal of optimising the chance of all students, wherever they are living, to
get their share of quality teaching.
The common use of external tests and examinations in countries like
Australia, USA, Hong Kong, New Zealand and England with the Anglo-
American tradition is consistent with the System being responsible. They quite
naturally participate in comparative international assessments of school science
achievement, like the Third International Mathematics and Science Study
(TIMSS), to get still more evidence of the System’s effectiveness. In contrast,
some European countries, like Norway and Germany, participated in TIMSS,
and now are in the OECD/PISA project, in order to gain some national data,
since national testing of subject teaching/learning by the education system itself
would be quite inconsistent with where the responsibility for it lies.
The new 1990s curricula in a number of American and Australian states and
Canadian provinces, and the national curricula in England and Wales and
New Zealand, specify long lists (even for the primary years) of conceptual
science content, exemplifying those education systems’ senses of responsi-
bility. The absence of conceptual content in the short statement in Denmark
of its 1990s primary school curriculum for Science – Natur/Teknik is con-
sistent with that country’s expectations of teachers and their responsibilities.
As the teachers carry out investigations with their students of the natural and
human-made environments, so it is expected that worthwhile content learning
of science will occur (Andersen, Schnack and Sørensen, 1995).
Appreciation of the emphases in the Didaktik tradition is also a partial
explanation of why the main activity of science education researchers in China
has been, and still is the production of science textbooks for the different levels
of school science. This research activity involves deep consideration of the
152 CHAPTER 10

first stage in Figure 10.1b, the didactical analysis or transposition of the sci-
entific knowledge to scientific knowledge to be taught.
Physical location is another obvious difference that affects the research
perspective of the researchers in the two traditions. The university location
of most of those in the Curriculum tradition is in Faculties or Schools of
Education, and the location of their counterparts in Europe, South America and
parts of Asia in disciplinary Science Departments.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH

The way these two traditions conceive of, and organise school science edu-
cation, does influence what becomes the focus of research, that is, what is seen
as problematic. In the Curriculum tradition the teaching/learning stage is
most obviously problematic, whereas in the Didaktik tradition, the transpo-
sition stage and the teaching/learning stage are both problematic. In the former
tradition, the science content itself is essentially a given. In the latter tradi-
tion the science content is initially the site of the problem, because of the
decisions teachers should make about it, and then this content is intimately
involved in the problems of its teaching and learning.
Shulman’s (1986) announcement at the AERA annual conference that
subject matter is the missing paradigm in American educational research was
a confirmation in that country that the usual definition of where the research
problem lies is one-sided or too simplistic. Too often in the Anglo-American
tradition it has been assumed that research in science education is merely about
its education aspect, and too rarely has its science aspect been regarded as what
is problematic. This was borne out among the respondents, the majority of
whom were from the Curriculum tradition. Of those who identified science
content in explaining the significance of their chosen publications the majority
were from the Didaktik tradition.
Shulman argued that it is the PCK of a teacher that distinguishes good
teachers from less effective ones. He did not, however, spell out the interac-
tion between content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. This interaction
could have become the focus of PCK research. However, under a press from
a wider interest in creating standards for subject teaching in USA, the research
tended to focus on how exemplary science teachers with strong science back-
grounds taught various science topics, on the assumption that such teachers
must possess a high degree of pedagogical science content knowledge.
Researchers in many other places within the Curriculum tradition have taken
up exemplary science teacher research. Because of the unfamiliarity of the
process of Didaktik analysis to a number of these researchers, and because
their research methodology only records the classroom practice, many of these
studies still only see the pedagogy of the content topic as the problematic focus.
Although specific content is involved in the situations the researchers are
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 153

recording and analysing, they ignore the problematic nature of the content
that the Didaktik analysis in a stage of Figure 10.1b is recognising.
Gudmundsdottir (1991), an Icelander worked with the Shulman group. She
commented that an important point is misunderstood when exemplary teachers
are chosen for study by the grades their students achieve, and not by an
‘evaluation of their didactical interpretation and implementation of the study
plan’s intentions’. These are the teacher responsibilities in Figure 10.1b.

LINK WITH ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS

Among the respondents with interest in alternative conceptions the same

difference in emphasis can be found between those who have been nurtured
in the Curriculum tradition and those with a Didaktik background. In Chapter
6 reference was made to way James Wandersee, USA, and Randy McGinnis,
USA, have both drawn attention in their significant publications to the
importance the history and philosophy of a science topic can have for its
teaching. These studies contrast with the one described later in this current
chapter by Hans Niedderer, Germany, in which he engaged teachers in didac-
tical analysis of the topic, mechanics, including its history in science. Although
Wandersee and McGinnis do not engage in transposition of their curriculum
topics in the Didaktik sense, they are taking note in their suggestions for its
teaching of the historical transpositions the topics have undergone in science
itself.
Klafki’s second set of questions recognises the importance for learners
that their prior ideas can have.
II. What significance does the content in question or the experience, knowl-
edge, ability, or skill to be acquired through this topic already possess
in the minds of the children in my class? What significance should it
have from a pedagogical point of view?
It is thus perhaps unfortunate that none of the science education researchers
who participated directly in the Didaktik v. Curriculum meetings was repre-
sentative of alternative conceptions research. This is one sub-area of science
education research that has attracted many scholars in both traditions and,
by their focus on specific science topics or phenomenon, are treating science
content as problematic (for learners). The continued use by some researchers,
particularly in the USA, of the term misconceptions for the findings of alter-
native conceptions research in science education encourages a response to them
that merely looks for cognitive change pedagogies. They explore the use of
teaching strategies like peer-peer sharing of prior knowledge, discrepant events,
or POEs, that may lead, or embarrass learners into accepting the unques-
tioned science content as prescribed in the curriculum, or its companion, the
textbook. When it is accepted that that the science content itself can be
154 CHAPTER 10

problematic, the research approach to alternative conceptions can, however,

take several other forms.
Driver et al. (1994) have explored the possibility of individuals having plural
conceptual schemes, each appropriate to specific social settings, an echo of the
outcome of the significant papers Solomon, England, published in 1983 and
1984. Again, Eduardo Mortimer’s (1995) work in Brazil led him to the notion
of a learner having a conceptual profile. A very small number of the many
researchers in this sub-area have engaged in transposition of the subject topic
for schooling, as a result of the alternative conceptions they found students
to hold. An example of these few is Strömdahl (1996) in Sweden as a result
of his extensive studies (with Tullberg and Lybeck) of the conceptions that
chemists, teachers and students have in relation to chemistry’s amount of
substance and its SI unit, the mole.

REDEFINING CONTENT

Several studies from European respondents led to publications that were chosen
as significant because they changed, or attempted to change, the way science
content for schooling had been understood.

Nature of Science
There has been considerable interest in the last decade in the wider meanings
of the Nature of Science being part of the knowledge content of the science
curriculum for all. Hitherto, it has been neglected in all but some of its
process senses. Several of the respondents identified publications as signifi-
cant research because their research was addressing this issue.
An example is the paper Peter Reinhold, Germany, published in 1994 on
Open experimenting: A new approach to teaching and learning. In using this
approach in his teacher education class he was attempting to enable these
student teachers to gain a better understanding of how science proceeds.
Phenomena are presented to the students that disturb their knowledge of the relevant content.
As they begin to explore them, problems in their methodological backgrounds are also exposed.
These two problems (associated as they are with a particular phenomenon) become the starting
point for personal reflection on their understanding of the content knowledge and of method-
ologies. Subsequently, we reflect together on a teaching and learning process that would enable
them to use this approach in schools. Reinhold, Germany

An expanded version of this paper in English has been included as an example

of Didaktik as Praxis in the book mentioned above, edited by Westbury,
Hopmann and Riquarts (2000).
Jürgen Mayer, Germany, studied for his thesis the teaching and learning
of biological diversity. When it was published, two symposia were organ-
ised around this work that resulted in him becoming well known in Germany
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 155

among the biology teaching community – a rather unusual outcome for a

new doctorate and his thesis.
I set out to change the German view of biological diversity that saw diversity of species as the
focus. Biological diversity, for me, is on three levels-genetic diversity, species diversity and
ecological diversity. In this way, I was trying to make a link with American discussions of
biodiversity. Jürgen Mayer, Germany

Mayer went on to explain the personal importance of the shift in the way
this biological issue was now conceived. It provided him with a framework
for his next project in which he explored the widely held assumption in German
biological education that direct primary experience of nature does influence
environmental behaviour. He believed, at the time, that there was little data
to support or negate this assumption, and so proposed to test it empirically.
Harrie Eijkelhof, The Netherlands, described his thesis, Radiation and Risk
in Physics Education, as significant because it looked in depth at some of
the PLON materials – how they work and do not work. He also explored
how to make a link between the PLON work and conceptual change research.
In his didactical analysis he contrasted the contradictory views that scien-
tific experts in the radiation field held about risk of radiation, and hence,
suggested how the idea of radiation risk could be transposed to be dealt with
in the school curriculum.
There were very contradictory views about risk, while they seemed to agree about the physics
content for a curriculum. Some said, “Play it down”. Others said, “You should focus people
on the risks to show the extremes”. Eijkelhof, The Netherlands

PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

Pinchas Tamir, Israel was another of the few non-European respondents to refer
to the importance of science content. He acknowledged the influence on his
own work that Lee Shulman had exercised personally and professionally, and
drew attention to the interest he shared with Shulman in the interaction between
subject matter and various educational processes.
This interaction between content and educational process – a central aspect
of PCK – is certainly an issue in Didaktik, but the first stage of the Didaktik
analysis, transposing the disciplinary science knowledge itself to the purposes
of school science, is often not recognised by those in the Curriculum tradi-
tion. Thus the significant paper by Phillip Scott, England, in 1987 on teaching
for conceptual change about the topic of matter is a fine example of PCK,
but there is no critique of the worth of this science knowledge and no
transposition to improve its worth for the students involved. Similarly, but
on a grander scale of content, Ian Mitchell, Australia, in his 1986 paper with
John Baird, reported the interesting notion that different science content
requires different pedagogical strategies. For example, Chemistry is gener-
156 CHAPTER 10

ally weak in what he calls ‘compelling topics’, whereas physics is rich in them.
‘Compelling topics’ are ones in which students’ ideas can lead to different
outcomes that students can observe. These authors, however, leave the topics
themselves quite unappraised. This research contrasts with the studies in the
Didaktik tradition of Wobbe de Vos, The Netherlands, Leif Östman, Sweden,
and Hans-Jurgen Schmidt, Germany.
De Vos shared Mitchell’s passion for more effective learning, but his sig-
nificant paper contains an historical analysis of the content of the chemistry
curriculum in The Netherlands, and uncovers how it has become so inco-
herent and isolated as content and so difficult for students.
You get a picture of the latest structure as innovatory, but it is just the old curriculum with
additions. You get a quite incoherent curriculum For the one topic of acid/base I could trace
six or seven layers and 6 or 7 contexts in which the teaching of acid/base is set, each giving some
new meaning, but with the old retained in various ways. De Vos, The Netherlands

Östman analysed Swedish science textbooks to unearth the companion ideo-

logical meanings they are conveying in the way science topics are presented.
That texts embody such companion meanings is to be expected in the Didaktik
tradition. Periodically, however, as Östman reminds us, it is important to review
the appropriateness of these for students in contemporary society.
Schmidt, in an extended series of studies, has searched for the patterns of
chemical reasoning that lie behind the common errors students make in
answering questions about basic topics in chemistry. For example, in his
significant paper, he found that a common pattern for the failure of students
in stoichiometric problems was that they use only two of three variables when,
in fact, all three are needed for a correct solution. He confirmed the pattern
by devising problems that are based on it, and finding that these students solved
them in the predictable way.
The students’ problems largely have their roots in the chemistry itself. So they can only be
analysed and comprehended by chemists. Schmidt, Germany

ANOTHER VIEW OF PCK

An alternative meaning for PCK is to regard it as the way a teacher’s

knowledge of science content is modified by the experience of teaching it. This
meaning picks up some of the French sense of “transposition” that is involved
in teaching subject matter knowledge. This sense of PCK points towards
longitudinal studies of teachers of the type carried out by Hanna Arzi, when
she followed a number of science graduates from their entry into teacher
education and on into their first few years of teaching. She used as her indi-
cators of change several common content knowledge topics like energy that
recur in various contexts in the school science curriculum. Energy is also
used in rather different ways in the chemical, physical and biological science
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 157

departments of the university, in which her teachers had been scientifically

prepared for teaching in the university (see Arzi, White and Fensham, 1987).
A research area that is attentive to the subtleties of the teacher’s content
knowledge is the use of analogies in science teaching. It is also an area that
has attracted the attention of researchers across the Curriculum and Didaktik
traditions. Reinders Duit, Germany, and David Treagust, Australia, both chose
papers on teachers’ use of analogies as significant, and indeed they have
collaborated together and with a number of other Anglo-American and German
researchers. Analogies highlight features of a science topic by comparing
their likeness and dissimilarity with those of something that is very familiar
to the students. To be used well analogies require a thorough didactical analysis
of the particular science content.

INFLUENCES FROM CONTENT

Respondents in the Didaktik tradition were also more likely to be influenced

by publications by others that referred specifically to science content. Thus,
Louisa Viglietta, Italy, while grappling with the complexities of the way energy
is treated in physics, read a paper by Paul Black and Joan Solomon.
It was a big influence. Its title was Life world and science world: Pupils’ ideas about energy.
It raised the question: Does the Second Law come first? Just a short, three page paper; but
soon I knew it by heart. I was grappling with the problem of the Second Law’s concept of effi-
ciency. There were, of course, lots of books on thermodynamics, but they were all too difficult.
It was on the basis of this short paper, that in the end I built up the material for the students.
Viglietta, Italy

In teacher education courses within the Curriculum tradition it is not

uncommon to find courses in General Pedagogy, as if pedagogy is indepen-
dent of the subject matter to be taught. Even where there are specific subject
Methods courses, it is unusual to find much differentiated discussion about
the interaction of particular subject content with pedagogy. Reinders Duit,
Germany, reported a different experience.
To prepare for my exam in Pedagogy as a student teacher, I read a book by Martin Wagenschein,
The Pedagogical Dimension of Physics, in which the idea was that physics offers only one
facet of the world outside. To learn physics is to reduce the worldview. Physics is a reduced
aspect of the world. Duit, Germany

Also relating to teacher education, Hans Niedderer, Germany, chose What

research can contribute to the improvement of classroom teaching, a paper
he gave at a teacher education conference in Germany in 1992 as one of his
significant publications. He sees it as a contribution then to the coherence of
science education research – a young discipline dealing with an already
established body of knowledge. In it he describes an exercise in theory
development he has used with preservice teachers. For an experiment in
158 CHAPTER 10

mechanics he gathers the student teachers’ ideas about force. Then they look
at (i) the findings from alternative conception studies involving force, (ii)
history of thinking about force and (iii) textbook presentations of force. Such
Didaktik analysis is rewarded, he says, when so many of the student teachers
say that ‘only now do they know what they learnt in physics!’.
It is also in this tradition that students in the new doctoral program in science
education research at Seoul National University in the mid 1990s were expected
to undertake a parallel study in the history in science of whatever science
concept their educational study involved.

BILDUNG AND SCIENCE FOR ALL

Despite recognition in the Didaktik tradition of the need for didactical analysis
or transposition, both traditions have, I believe, hitherto held strongly to the
idea that the content for school science subjects should be determined by
what is accepted as lying within the content of the corresponding discipli-
nary science. Earlier (p. 149) I referred to the good ideas that curriculum
developers told me they had not been allowed to incorporate in the mate-
rials they were developing. In 1978 most of these were exclusions on the
grounds of a strictly defined, disciplinary subject boundary. Thus, the idea
of introducing compounds in chemistry as combinations of the two types of
elements – metals and non metals – was disallowed because it would have
introduced in school chemistry the topic of alloys, which lay outside chem-
istry because they do not meet the criterion of constant proportions. This
may seem to be a rather trivial example (and an ironic one for me, as a chemist
whose research field was non-stoichiometry!), but even today, few school
chemistry courses take seriously the properties of important mixtures, such
as alloys, emulsions and ceramics.
The expectation of a containing correspondence between a disciplinary
science and its counterpart school subject may have been reasonable, as long
as the sole or primary purpose of school science was to select and prepare
the next generation of university science students. It should have become much
less tenable when school science was acknowledged in the 1980s to be at
least equally concerned with equipping all students to be future citizens.
Nevertheless, anyone who has been involved in STS-type science curriculum
projects will testify that the old expectation is still regularly wielded by
powerful academic scientists to contain science in school to be the separate
disciplinary sciences. (Fensham, 1998; Blades, 1997; and Hart, 2001).
Now that there is a heightened interest in scientific literacy as the major
outcome of school science, the curriculum needs a broader knowledge base
from which to draw its knowledge of worth than single disciplinary sciences
can provide.
Paul Black, England, in one of his significant publications, voiced his
 FOCUS ON CONTENT 159

concern, however, in 1986 about the notions of Integrated or Coordinated

Science, that a number of countries were considering as the first curriculum
responses to the challenge at that time of Science for All.
This paper was important to me intellectually. I’m puzzled about it because I think I got it
right, but I’m not positive about the pay-off. As a physicist I had been concerned for some
time about the rhetoric of Integrated Science. I tried to say that the notion that all the sciences
are the same, that they have the same methods, didn’t stand up to examination. There seemed
to me to be deep differences between the purposes of physics, of biology, and of the social
sciences. To suggest they were all the same on some superficial view of processes was profoundly
misleading. Secondly, the way integration had been given meaning was false. The sense in
which electrons are “particles” in physics is so different from the sense of a cell as a “particle”
in biology, that there was little point in putting them under such same headings. . . . So I came
to a curriculum philosophy of very strong coordination in which students do cover all the main
sciences, but with a more profound sense of how they form a unified whole.
Black, England

The fact remains, nevertheless, that the socio-scientific situations and issues
now confronting citizens are not confined within disciplinary boundaries.
Citizens need to appreciate the relationships between knowledge in the sciences
and other knowledge, as well as how the sciences coordinate their knowl-
edge in application to these situations. These two sets of relationships between
knowledge content open up questions researchers in both the Curriculum and
Didaktik traditions must urgently tackle, if the intentions of their current
national curricula for school science are to be achieved to any substantial
degree at all.

CONTENT AS A CRITERION

The reference source I chose in Chapter 1 for developing the intra-research

criteria for a field of research led naturally to R1. Scientific knowledge as a
first of these. For reasons that I hope are now clear, I have discussed the
evidence or case for it last. In a sense that stems from the given nature of
the content to be taught in the Curriculum tradition – science knowledge is not
problematic. It is not surprising therefore that whole issues of research journals
can still have no paper that includes the science knowledge itself as an issue
for the researchers or for the teachers and students they are studying. I hope,
that the published products of research in science education that have been dis-
cussed here will act as stimuli for more researchers in the field to focus on
the content knowledge of science education as problematic.
It is now the turn of the oldest criterion for research in science education,
O1. Implications for practice (see Chapter 2 for the primacy of its origins),
to be considered.
160 CHAPTER 10

REFERENCES

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learning. Didaktiske Studier Volume 22, Copenhagen: Royal Danish School of Educational
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Arzi, H., White, R.T. and Fensham, P.J. (1987) Teachers’ knowledge of science: An account
of a study in progress. Paper presented at annual meeting of AERA, Washington, DC.
Blades, D.W. (1997) Procedures of Power and Curriculum Change. New York: Peter Lang
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Chevallard, Y. (1991) La Transposition Didactique. Grenoble, France: La Pensée Sauvage.
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Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E. and Scott, P. (1994) Constructing scientific
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Curriculum, pp. 178–192, New York: Teachers College Press.
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pp. 147–164. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Fensham, P.J. (2001) Science content as problematic – Issues for research. In: Helge Behrendt
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 CHAPTER 11

R E S E A R C H TO P R A C T I C E

We have a platform of research on children’s ideas in science.

What are the consequences now for teaching and curriculum
development?
Rosalind Driver, England

To a large extent attention in Chapters 6–10 has centred on the contributions

individual researchers see their studies and personal publications making to
the research area as a whole. In this chapter, the focus moves to the contri-
bution of these research studies to the practices of science education.

RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE

The oldest of the research associations, NARST, is the Association for Research
in Science Teaching. As was noted in Chapter 2, it uses the term, ‘Science
Teaching’, not the wider and more general term, ‘Science Education’, which
is the way several of the later research associations, such as ASERA (Australia
and New Zealand) or ESERA (Europe), describe their broader domains of
interest.
The founders of NARST were quite explicit that its primary purpose was
the improvement of science teaching. At that time it was most likely that
learning was not mentioned because there was a general belief that if teaching
was good, then learning naturally followed. Since then, of course, much
evidence has accumulated that the general quality of learning is not so simply
related to teaching. For example, teaching that may be regarded as good on
a set of transmissive criteria, such as those that are usually used to judge
lecturing at the university level, is a very dubious guarantee of long term
learning in the students present.
In considering the evidence for the Outcome criterion O1. Implications
for practice, a much broader meaning of practice will be used. It is more in
line with the role Bassey (1995) gives research as critically informing judge-
ments and decisions in order to improve action. Jenkins (2001) quotes with
approval this role for research, because it accommodates strands of research
in science education that can be overlooked when the only foci are teaching
and learning. Furthermore, this view of the research/practice relationship holds
even more positive possibilities than the one, ‘increasing the problem solving
capacity of those within the education system’, by which Nisbet (1974)
justified research studies in his review of the Curtis Digests (see Chapter 2).

162
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 163

Jenkins, however, added one other role for research in science education,
namely, that research is about ‘understanding for its own sake’. This steps back
even further from practical action than Nisbet, and it is, to a considerable
extent, the appraisal of research that has been central to the discussions on
the person of the researcher in Chapters 3–5 and in Chapters 6–10 dealing with
the intra-research criteria.
Before looking at this broad sense of how research may have implications
for practice, I will consider how prevalent and how persistent the improvement
of practice has been as a purpose for research among my large set of respon-
dent researchers. My criterion for seeing the purpose as persistent is that the
link between research and practice is mentioned explicitly when these
researchers were talking about the significance of their own work and the
influence of the publications of others. Just over half the respondents met
this criterion. Within this group there were some who chose their own pub-
lications of significance, because they had improved or had the potential to
improve practice. Others identified publications about practice as the major
influences on their work in the research area. A few like Paul Black, England,
both chose publications about practice for their work of significance and
identified ones about practice as their major influences. The way the researchers
did associate themselves with the improvement of practice will form a central
section of this chapter.
Failure to meet my criterion does not, of course, mean that the all the
other thirty five or so respondents have no interest as researchers in the
improvement of practice. The direction our conversation took may simply mean
that I overlooked their interest. On the other hand, reading and rereading the
transcripts of some of the respondents gave me a clear impression that the
research process itself bound the purposes they saw as important for their
research. I suppose this is an inevitable consequence of the growth of the
research area and of science education becoming an academic research area
within a university culture, that rewards scholarly research much more highly
than teaching or professional practice.
If a research area is dynamic, it will be raising issues that challenge its
participants to respond in research terms. Moreover, there is now a very rich
corpus of publications from within the area itself that may inspire and
influence newer members. As discussed in Chapter 5, for members who entered
the area in its earlier days, quality publications from within were quite rare,
and so publications from outside the field were more likely to exercise
important influence. The fact, that these original influences have not been
supplanted in some respondents by more recent intra-field, quality publica-
tions, may be indicative of very real abiding influence. Or it may just be the
natural tendency for older persons to reflect on changes in life’s direction,
rather than on the journey in between.
164 CHAPTER 11

In the culture of academe, where almost all my respondents have been

located for all their research lives, persons who are striving for more senior
positions are under great pressure to concentrate on their research output, which
means that they must also keep abreast of the research of others. Nor do
they often have the same opportunities that some senior academic persons have
to exercise an effect on practice in the policy arena. Many of them are,
however, engaged in teacher education and so this is an arena of practice
that is open to them as an immediate possibility. A number of the respon-
dents, as was noted in Chapter 2 have been engaged in curriculum development,
and saw this as an arena for potential action in which their research, or that
of others could improve practice.
Most researchers in science education have been teachers in schools, usually
secondary ones, before their academic appointments, and the practice arena
of science teaching and learning including assessment, is a familiar one to
them. It is noteworthy that some of the respondents chose, as a publication
of influence, an account by a teacher or a textbook that described what they
found to be a particularly interesting approach to teaching science. It is also
not surprising that some of these researchers relate their own significant
research very directly to classroom practices, with some conducting their
research in a collaborative way as action research with teachers.
Four arenas of practice in science education emerge from the reports of
the respondents – (i) teaching and learning including assessment, (ii) cur-
riculum development, (iii) teacher education, and (iv) policy. Each of these
arenas of practice has to some extent been recognised in the discussions in
the earlier chapters about the research itself. In what follows, evidence from
the publications that relate directly to each of these arenas is presented and
discussed.

TEACHING AND LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT

A number of the respondents, whose research centred on the science class-

room, related their significant publications to the improvement of practices
in that arena. They may not have had evidence that these improving strate-
gies are being used by teachers beyond the research situation, but their interest
in that happening was quite clear. A number of these potential improvements
have already been discussed, especially in Chapter 9 under the heading of
Alternative conceptions and Conceptual change. Thus, the research done by
David Treagust, Australia, and Hans-Jürgen Schmidt, Germany, to develop
simple diagnostic tools to identify the alternative conceptions their students
hold, was explicitly intended for the use of classroom teachers, who cannot
be expected to carry out the clinical interview procedures used in research.
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 165

It is significant because the studies can be useful to teachers and students, helping them find
chemistry lessons more enjoyable, and revealing some logical reasons students have for their
mistakes thus giving their teachers a more positive image of them, and a means of discussing
these topics with their students. Schmidt, Germany

In Chapter 6, James Wandersee, and Randy McGinnis, both of USA, explored

a relationship between students’ alternative conceptions and the history of
specific topics in science. They both saw the significance of their studies in
the potential they had for use in teaching strategies that would assist teachers
to identify and obviate some of the blocks a number of students have to learning
such topics in science. Phillip Scott, England, Richard Gunstone and Ian
Mitchell, both Australia, and Ik Jung Kim, S. Korea, are four other respon-
dents with research on alternative conceptions and conceptual change that
has already been mentioned in the earlier chapters. Each of these authors, in
their research studies, has modeled for other teachers the use in regular class-
rooms of tools, like concept maps, POEs, Venn diagrams, and discussion of
rival concepts, that were originally developed for the purpose of research.
Kim’s strategy of ensuring the relative merits of alternative concepts are
discussed and tested in the teaching of mechanics is an example of Mitchell’s
compelling topics in physics, where alternative concepts or explanations are
readily available and lead to observably different physical outcomes.
The two significant publications, Probing Understanding, by Gunstone and
White, both Australia, and Assessing Science Understanding by Wandersee,
Mintzes and Novak, all USA, are about the tools of research methodologies.
In many cases these are also pedagogical tools that can and have been used
in classrooms on a regular basis. Another research sub-area that is directly
relatable to classroom practices is the work by Duit, Germany, Treagust,
Australia, Gilbert, England, and others on the use of analogies and models
in the teaching of science. Their studies have certainly reached the point where
guidelines for the positive use of these as pedagogical strategies are avail-
able for teachers.
Ian Mitchell, Australia, in the more than a decade in which he was 50% a
science teacher in secondary schools and 50% in the Faculty of Education at
Monash, epitomised research into practice. This dual position was extremely
fruitful for Mitchell’s research and teaching, and it made possible the Project
to Enhance Effective Learning (PEEL) of which he was a cofounder. This
project of collaborative action research helped to define new ways teachers
and academic researchers could fruitfully work together (White, 1988).
Respondents in two other countries identified the publications this project
has produced as major influences. Both Mitchell and John Baird, another of
the cofounders, have been involved in assisting groups of teachers in Canada,
Denmark, and Sweden to establish their own versions of PEEL’s patterns of
sharing teachers’ knowledge, practices and creative expertise. It would have
been surprising indeed, if Mitchell had not identified the remarkable first
166 CHAPTER 11

volume from the pioneering group of PEEL teachers as one of his signifi-
cant publications.
My interests in teaching and learning will always remain a high priority, but now my interests
are in teacher change, and facilitating teachers’ work, and teachers’ career pathways and
teachers’ jobs in school. It led to all that, of which I had no realisation at all in 1985.
Mitchell, Australia

An advantage of coming later into a research area is that there is scope to learn
from the experience of others, although education systems turn out to be so
situationally constrained that comparative learning is much less than might
be expected. There are however exceptions, as Thailand’s pioneering success
with girls and the physical sciences, chemistry and physics, bears testimony
(see Chapter 12). Spain’s active interest in the research field of science
education began only in the 1980s, and Maria Jimenez-Aleixandre’s doctoral
study was only the second one with a focus on biology education. She
compared two biology classes in which the teaching strategy was based on
cognitive change research, but in one the students were encouraged to think
with theories they held, and to reflect on any wrong ideas that resulted. The
appearance of her thesis in 1990 with this meta-cognitive element coincided
with a surge of interest in Spain in new teaching strategies and hence the
strategies from her thesis became widely known and used by teachers.
In Chapter 14, the work of four respondents on the use of IT in the science
classroom will be discussed. These are further examples of the interest in
orientating research to classroom practice. Vince Lunetta, USA, was the pioneer
of this group, back in the days of main frame computers, when he attempted
to develop an instructional technique that would be more effective than some
he observed being used in physics classrooms. His paper in The Physics
Teacher in 1974 describes his attempts to capture what students were doing
when they were using these simulation techniques in physics.
My purpose was to develop software resources for teaching and learning beyond what was avail-
able. It was to present a scientist’s model of electric current, because I had observed students
could become good at predicting the macro effects in circuits, but the nature of their model of
electric current was not necessarily influenced. Lunetta, USA

An unusual example of research to pedagogical practice is the project reported

by Sudharkar Agarkar, India, who is based at the Homi Baba Centre for Science
Education (named after the nuclear physicist who directed, and so largely
designed the famous Tata Institute for Fundamental Research near Bombay,
India). Agarkar was inspired by the Coleman Report in the USA to believe
education could make a difference, and then was intellectually challenged
by Arthur Jensen’s writings about the dominant influence of Nature (genetics)
compared with Nurture – a view that corresponded with a strong orthodoxy
in Indian society. In 1980 he embarked on a science education program with
Salunkar adolescents (Untouchables), a minority group who, according to
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 167

prevailing orthodoxy were born to fail. He began by thoroughly assessing their

educational needs, compared with corresponding members of other mainstream
groups. He then tailored an instructional program accordingly. The success
of the program went beyond the immediate students; when a report on it,
published in 1985, became the basis for several school systems and many
individual teachers, who sought to replicate it on a wider and wider scale.
When one realises that the minority group Agarkar was working with totals
about 70 million, this is impact on practice on a scale few researchers can
aspire to. Agarkar and his group next moved on to develop a program, again
based on a systematic assessment of the students’ needs, with other dis-
advantaged populations in the tribal areas of India (Agarkar, 1995).
Both the significant publications of Elizabeth Whitelegg, England (see
Chapter 12). were science teaching materials she developed for use in her
courses at the Open University in Britain, where the student groups have
quite mixed backgrounds, mostly without science.
My part of the course was readable and understandable compared with the earlier sociologically
based parts they found very difficult. The science had not put them off although most of them
had not become scientists through the difficulties they had had with science at school.
Whitelegg, England

Although a number of other respondents did not explicitly use the words
“theory” or “theoretical”, I found myself noting that their responses about
the significance of a publication could be described as Theory into Practice,
a subset of Research into Practice. For example, James Wandersee, USA,
was interested in theory because of what he believed it could contribute to
improving practice in the classroom. He sees his own studies, such as
Children’s biology studies on conceptual development in the life sciences, in
the book, The Psychology of the Learning Sciences, as ‘vehicles to elabo-
rate learning theories and hence to improve biology learning in the classroom’.
Wandersee also directly linked the influence of books by E.R. Tufte on the
visual display of information with what he sees as a major source of students’
misunderstandings in science, but also as an essential component of science
pedagogy.
We found textbooks tend to marginalise the captions of diagrams, so that the students skip
their explanations. I think the diagrams in texts can be much improved once we understand
how students think about them and extract meaning from them. Wandersee, USA

In both Chapters 4 and 13, I refer to Paul Black, England, being involved in
research into assessment and its application in educational systems at the
highest educational and political levels. Likewise, the work of Pinchas Tamir,
Israel, in developing method of assessment for student practical work and
for student self-assessment of learning have been discussed in Chapter 8.
Richard White, Australia, believed his paper in the Journal of Curriculum
Studies in 1992 said some significant things on which teachers might well
168 CHAPTER 11

reflect. In a figure in that paper, he shows two alternative views of teaching

and learning. In one, the teacher’s knowledge encompasses the student’s, and
the teacher’s job is to expand the student’s knowledge to be a bigger subset
of what the teacher knows. In the other one, the student’s knowledge is partly
encompassed by the teacher’s knowledge, but there are things the student
knows the teacher does not. The student’s and the teacher’s job here is to make
the student’s knowledge grow, but not just the encompassed part. The student’s
other knowledge should also grow and so should the teacher’s. Teaching and
assessment are so often constrained by the first view. The other view would
encourage assessments that enabled the students to display those aspects they
felt they knew, but were not usually asked.

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

I found Denmark to be an unusual country in which to discuss the curriculum.

When I have met colleagues there, it does not take long for the word,
democracy, to occur in the discourse, a concept that is only rarely brought
up elsewhere in such discussions. Annemarie Møller Andersen, Denmark,
was a major contributor to the development of the curriculum for biology
during the 1980s. The research behind these was a comparative review of
two American and one Norwegian curricula that include considerable biology
(her own science field) at the level at which this subject was introduced to
pupils in Denmark. The purpose of her review was to elucidate relations
between theory and teaching practice that could provide a sounder basis for
what she called the ‘structuring’ of biology teaching. The four factors on which
she focussed were pupils, subject matter, teaching materials and teachers
and their interactions together. Her first significant publication in 1984 is
thus a didactical analysis of biological knowledge content. A second publi-
cation reports the outcomes of her major review and its implications for the
curriculum.
In the 1990s Andersen was involved in the new curriculum of science/tech-
nology, Natur/Teknik, for the first six years of schooling in Denmark. It
manifests a sense of the democracy concept by not specifying any detailed
conceptual content to be learnt. In this way it stands in stark contrast to all
other post-1990s curricula for these levels, that have been marked by the
specification of topics to be taught and learnt in quite detailed ways (Andersen,
Schnack and Sørensen, 1995).
Harvard Project Physics was a second phase curriculum project in the
USA during the 1960s that was led by Fletcher Watson, Gerald Holton and
James Rutherford. Its materials contrasted markedly in their emphases with
those of the earlier Physical Science Study Committee’s project and this
contrast was what made several respondents list the Project Physics mate-
rials as a major influence on their thinking. One of these was Paul Black,
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 169

England, who came into the science education research, like me, from uni-
versity science teaching – in his case, the Physics Department at Birmingham
University. Harvard Project Physics broadened and shifted his view of what
science education should really be about.
What was remarkable was that it here were people trying to do a job about science teaching
in which they had deliberately said, ‘Let’s think broadly about the cultural embedding and the
influence and significance of this work of humankind’. It was a broad humane view in which
you’ve got to say something about historical antecedents and the way things happen in physics.
It was so different from the physics of PSSC. Black, England

One of Black’s earliest projects was as part of a team of physics lecturers

from several universities in Britain who worked together on the Higher
Education Learning in Physics (HELP) project to produce curriculum support
materials for the teaching of university first year physics. A publication from
HELP in 1977 that he felt was significant was one on small group teaching,
an aspect of teaching in science departments which is commonly ineffective
in comparison with the positive contribution it often makes in the humani-
ties.
For his work in the HELP project Black had another model or exemplar
as an influence. It was a little known book called A Strategy for Education,
by H.T. Epstein. He read it in the early 1970s when he was teaching under-
graduate physics, and thinks that it shows his pragmatic cast of mind at that
time. Epstein was an American biology professor and in the book he describes
a biology course for non-specialist freshmen, who were required to take one
science course. For several years it seemed to him to be a waste of time. He
and the students were just going through the motions. Either he should stop,
or try something better. Accordingly, he devised a course based on a series
of research papers on a biological topic he knew something about. He chose
the first paper and gave instructions to the class at their first meeting to go
and read it. Because they knew so little about biology, he asked them to
make a list of the words they couldn’t understand for the next session, when
he would try to make it more understandable. Epstein described how an inner
voice was saying to him that this just wasn’t going to work, and that the
next session would be a disaster, for which he better prepare an alternative.
Black empathised with this feel of fragility as he had felt the same on
occasions in his teaching. In the next session the students started asking
questions about this, and about that, for two hours going through the paper
in depth. Then he gave them the next paper in the series, and so on. When
he had time to reflect on what had happened, he realised he would never, in
his usual teaching, have dealt with so many defined terms because they would
be so boring! Now he had done it just responding to the students’ interest in
where this series of papers was going!
It just blew my mind and had a powerful impact. Black, England
170 CHAPTER 11

Glen Aikenhead, Canada, was another respondent who was influenced even
more strongly by Harvard Project Physics. He had not only read these exciting
materials, but after his doctoral studies at Harvard, he had joined the team
evaluating the project’s materials in action in classrooms. To the influence
of the materials from Project Physics he added, as another influential publi-
cation from practice, the materials from the Dutch physics project, PLON,
in the 1980s, a derivative in a sense from Project Physics. Although Aikenhead
has been in the research field ever since his doctorate, it is interesting to
note his selection of his own three significant publications. They are all set
in arenas of practice he sees as important for determining the quality of the
practice of science education – policy, curriculum and assessment.
In research we tend to, and are able, to treat policy, practice and assessment as discrete sub-
fields for study. If research is to contribute to changes in practice, all three have to come together
in some orchestrated fashion. Aikenhead, Canada

His contribution to research methodology for assessment in STS science

teaching has already been referred to in Chapter 9. His significant publica-
tion for the curriculum arena is the textbook, Logical Reasoning in Science
and Technology, that he developed for use in the middle secondary curriculum
in several Canadian provinces. By producing an actual textbook he reckoned
there was more chance of having an STS science curriculum adopted, than
if STS remained a slogan, or a reasoned but abstract argument. Aikenhead’s
strong commitment to the importance of adolescents’ ideas, meant that much
research on their views, relative to the topics and themes in this curriculum,
went straight into the text itself.
It’s not an idea. It’s there, and it is being adopted in other provinces of Canada. In Saskatchewan
about a third of teachers use it. It’s too radical for many conservative teachers who see its
treatment of science as socially constructed knowledge as heresy. Aikenhead, Canada

Rosalind Driver, England, drew attention to her publication with Valerie

Oldham in Studies in Science Education as significant because she saw it
as the start of an answer, for the case of curriculum development, to the
question that appears as the heading of this chapter. In this publication she
and Oldham were grappling with how to operationalise curriculum develop-
ment so that it took account of children’s ideas, and brought teachers along
with why it was important to incorporate these in their teaching.
You need to take account of children’s reasoning if you’re interested in advancing their thinking,
but it you are concerned about transforming teaching in some way, you need to do the same thing
with the teachers you are working with. Driver, England

Maria Jimenez-Aleixandre, Spain, explained how the curriculum develop-

ment in Spain has been influenced by the research on alternative conceptions.
The book, Learning in Science, by Osborne and Freyberg (1985) and the many
short working papers of actual examples that the Waikato group produced in
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 171

the early 1980s, became important sources of ideas and evidence for the
development group.
It is now translated into Spanish and everybody in Santiago read it and it did influence us strongly
in our curriculum projects and in our research. Jimenez-Aleixandre, Spain

Harrie Eijkelhof, The Netherlands, worked for a number of years on the PLON
curriculum project before he undertook a study for his doctorate of the PLON
unit, Ionisation Radiation. He set out to find out in what aspects it worked
and in which it did not work, and to make a link between those curriculum
materials and conceptual change research. His findings on people’s ideas
about radiation, radioactivity, and the risk of radiation, have since been
incorporated by the authors of several physics textbooks as they revised their
chapters dealing with radioactivity.
In Norway in 1994 the remarkable document, The Core Curriculum,
appeared with its visionary goals of equipping learners in seven aspects of
human life (see Chapter 10). It led to a major curriculum project that made
science in the elementary years a more distinct area of study than it hitherto
had been. In these years Science had, for a number of years, been officially
part of an integrated subject involving science, history and social science. In
practice the science content tended to be neglected, compared to the other
two strands. Doris Jorde, Norway, was heavily involved in the development
of the materials to support the new curriculum. She and her colleagues built
their research experience into these materials, and then used them as a resource
in their work of initial and inservice teacher education.
When I work with teachers directly then I know they are very happy to get them. They come
back and say ‘I’ve tried this and I like it. Do you have more?’ The frustrating thing is that
they need more. You had hoped that you’ve given them a model, but the model is not taken on
board. ‘I can’t do it myself. I always need help with science’. Yet in history or social science
they are much more clever to let things evolve, and they are not afraid. Jorde, Norway

TEACHER EDUCATION

Quite a number of respondents referred to their work in teacher education.

Their regular personal interactions with student teachers in class, and with
more experienced teachers in inservice workshops, gave them many oppor-
tunities to put their research into practice. My constraint about publications
perhaps meant that fewer of them did cite a publication in this arena as sig-
nificant. Horst Schecker, Germany, was one of several respondents who were
concerned about the abstractness of physics, and how its powerful knowl-
edge could be related to the real phenomena that students encounter in the
everyday world. Schecker, however, extended his concern to the enterprise
of research in science education itself. He saw the danger I referred to early
in this chapter, namely, that as this area of research develops, some of its
172 CHAPTER 11

researchers will lose touch with science teaching and learning. His personal
means of maintaining contact has been to draw on his research on computer
simulations of real physical phenomena, to develop a book for teachers con-
taining a set of examples of how computer-aided modeling can be used in
several domains of physics.
It’s a book for teachers. It’s an outcome of research, but its whole trend is to share ideas of
the “how to use” type – not only the models, but also something a teacher can do. As science
education becomes a real science with shared theoretical backgrounds shared empirical findings
across the world, it is in danger of becoming self-contained. This has led in Germany at least
to losing touch with teachers. Schecker, Germany

In Chapter 4 reference has been made to publications by Jan Waarlo and

Theo Wubbels of The Netherlands, that have contributed substantially to the
practice of teacher education in that country. The former’s thesis about the
relation between health education and biology education in 1989 was specially
reprinted so that it could be disseminated widely to biology teachers and
curriculum administrators. The latter’s paper in Interchange in 1988 on
communication in the classroom, and how it can be improved has been used
in ‘every institute for teacher education’.
The National Board of Education in Sweden, as part of a review of the
Compulsory School asked Björn Andersson, Sweden, to write a report on
science education. He saw this as an opportunity to communicate research into
practice for teachers. He decided to include reports of research, and not make
it just a popularised version of research. The report expanded as he included
the teaching sequences used in the studies, the pre- and post-tests, and the
results, as well as the classroom dialogue between teachers and students
about the science topic and between the students themselves. The result in 1989
was the book, Grundskolans naturvetenskap – forskningresultant som
ger nya idéer (The compulsory school science – Research results and
new ideas). It is a detailed but direct example of writing about research for
teacher practitioners. The fact that the publication was a book, and not just
a report to the Ministry has meant that it has also been widely used in teacher
education in Sweden.
There were some strong reactions, particularly among senior secondary teachers, but the eyes
of a significant minority were opened by the findings on students’ reasoning in electricity, heat
and temperature re boiling and melting, and about oxidation. Andersson, Sweden

POLICY

The evidence relating to research having effects on, or implications for the
arena of science education policy is part of the sub-area of Politics and Science
Education that is more specifically presented in Chapter 13. Here, however,
three examples involving respondents in different countries are given to
illustrate the policy arena of practice.
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 173

Paul Black, England, was a key figure in the developments in England

and Wales in the 1980s and early 1990s that represented a new level of politi-
cisation of school education in those countries. In his position of Director of
the Centre for Science and Mathematics Education at Chelsea College (later
to merge with King’s College in the University of London) he had been close
to the science component of the project known as the Assessment of
Performance (APU). This was one of the early, seemingly innocent moves
in what was to become a centrally controlled system of school education
with a national curriculum, that was quite unlike the ways schooling had
been managed and monitored before. Black chose as significant a paper that
was the published form of an address he gave at the annual meeting of the
ASE in 1990. In it he drew together a number of lessons about assessment
from the years of research in the 1980s that had gone into the APU project
study of the assessment of practical work in science. He stressed, for example,
to his original audience of teachers, curriculum advisers and science policy
personnel that there are no surrogates for the valid assessment of practical work
in science.

‘You’ve either got to study them doing the task or not do it at all’. Furthermore, that means
that the business of judging where pupils are for external accountability on some of the most
important aims of science education has got to be in the hands of their own teachers. Whether
the teachers like it or not, there is no other way. Other ways will be distorting by the very
exigencies of external testing. Black, England

In 1991 when the National Curriculum for Science in England and Wales
was announced it seemed as if this lesson had been absorbed. There were
four attainment targets in the Science Curriculum – three content targets
corresponding roughly to biology, chemistry and physics plus one called
Scientific Investigation that was concerned with the process aspects of what
was initially intended to be broader appreciation of the Nature of Science.
In the now very politically-driven climate of accountability, the three content
targets became the subject of national external testing, but the attainment target
of Scientific Investigation was excluded, in line with Black’s lesson. In such
a climate, there was no possibility, however, that the other part of his lesson,
namely, to ask teachers to test their students on this attainment target, would
be enacted as part of new policy.
The policy for the National Curriculum came out of a political view that
teachers are not to be trusted. Rather, they are to be monitored. This left
Scientific Investigation listed separately from three traditional looking content
targets, and without the status and reinforcement they had been afforded by
formal national testing. One lesson from the research had been heeded, but
then its correlate was ignored in a way that reduced the worth of practical work
in school science in the eyes of teachers and students!
Probably the most successful example of research and a publication
174 CHAPTER 11

impacting on policy is the Science Council of Canada’s investigation of school

science in the Canadian provinces in the early 1980s. Three respondents,
Douglas Roberts, Graham Orpwood and Glen Aikenhead, all Canada, were
involved in this policy-directed, large-scale study. Compared with several
parallel national reviews of science in the same period, there are clear lessons
to be learnt from the design that was used in the Canadian case. It encour-
aged policy makers in Canada at a number of levels to engage with the report
of the investigation in ways that related directly to their decision making,
something that did not occur with the other national reports.
In the USA, Paul De Hart Hurd was the respondent, who had had the greatest
and longest experience in the area of science education policy. Publications
that had a major influence on his own thinking and writing (in addition to John
Dewey) stretch back to the 1930s. A Program for Teaching Science, produced
by S.R. Powers in 1932, and Science in General Education by V.T. Thayer
in 1938 stood out for him as influences. He saw them as each being the product
of serious work by groups who were seeking new directions for science
education, a task Hurd himself has pursued for all the intervening years.
Hurd’s own choice of significant publications was both directly related to
practice. They cannot simply be slotted into one of the four arenas of practice,
because in the case of the first all four arenas are involved, and the second
one related to three of the arenas. Remarkably, these publications were pub-
lished in 1997 and 2000, half a century after Hurd began his work. Inventing
Science Education for the New Millennium is a prophetic text that, after
charting the discourse and evolution of science education since 1970, moves
on to address the major issues confronting education in the sciences as the new
millennium begins.
At no period in human history have so many interacting changes taken place in a society in so
short a period of time, each calling for a new view of education in the sciences. Hurd, USA

Transforming Middle School Science Education sets out Hurd’s opera-

tional answer for adolescents in the middle years of schooling to the question
he asks in this quotation. The curriculum he proposes presents today’s young
people with the culture of science and technology in a manner that recog-
nise their biological, social and emotional needs and in ways that are important
for their lives.
My books and papers over the past 50 years have been directed towards a philosophical base
for research in science education. Without such a base there is no significance to the statis-
tical research projects that now are typical in so many of the journals for science education.
Hurd, USA

In this chapter I have intermingled publications of major influence and the

significant work of the respondents whose work presents evidence relating
to the Outcome criterion O1. Implications for practice, since for these persons,
research and practice are so integrally combined.
 RESEARCH TO PRACTICE 175

In Chapters 12–14 the significant publications of some of the respondents

are used to discuss trends in the research in three sub-areas of science edu-
cation – gender, politics, and technology – that are less mainstream than
those that have been discussed in the chapters concerned with the criteria
for a research field. The choice of these three sub-areas was conditioned by
them being represented among the studies of the respondents and by my
belief that they are of considerable importance in relation to my own abiding
interest in Science for All.

REFERENCE

Andersen, A.M., Schnack, K. and Sørensen, H. (1995) Science-Natur/Teknik, Assessment and

Learning. Copenhagen: Royal Danish School of Educational Studies.
Bassey, M. (1995) Creating Education through Research. Paper presented to the British
Educational Research Association, Edinburgh.
Jenkins, E.W. (2001) Research in science education in Europe; Retrospect and Prospect. In: H.
Behrendt and H. Dahricke (Eds.), Research in Science Education – Past, present and future,
pp. 17–26. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
 CHAPTER 12

G E N D E R A N D S C I E N C E E D U C AT I O N

My professor was a man, everyone I worked with were men

– and I couldn’t handle it. I refused to work in that environ-
ment. Because I couldn’t laugh at their sexist jokes, if I
couldn’t be a part of the “boys”, then I wasn’t really welcome.
I wasn’t one of the original people strong enough to get things
changed. I couldn’t do it by myself. I went searching for
something else.
Doris Jorde, USA, later Norway

Research into the important issue of gender in science education has seemed
to me to have had a somewhat ironic origin. In 1981 Alison Kelly produced
The Missing Half: Girls and science. This book has ever since been regu-
larly cited by researchers, including most feminist ones, as the inspiration
for this sub-area of research in science education. It is also often quoted as
the basis for the very strong movement of concern about gender issues in
the science curriculum that arose during the 1980s in a number of countries.
Internationally, this concern manifested itself in the Girls and Science and
Technology (GASAT) organisation, that has held biennial conferences around
these issues, beginning in Norway in 1981. The concern stemmed from the
fact that girls were participating less than boys in school science, particu-
larly the physical sciences, and consequently females were under-represented
in most countries in the many professional roles for which success in these
physical sciences is the gatekeeper.
The evidence for these outworking of the gender bias in school science
was provided by the first IEA Science Study in which 19 countries had
participated. The alarming, gender-related findings from this study was just
what was needed, to turn the attention of the strong tide of the women’s
movement in the 1970s to this curricular source of disadvantage to girls. It
is probable that the relation between girls and science is the single aspect of
science education that has benefited most from the research findings of first
and second IEA Science Studies.
Since the mid-1980s policies about gender equality in school science have
appeared in country after country in the Western sphere of influence. A new
consciousness emerged about the sex bias in science textbooks and in other
curriculum resources for school science. Women with very significant con-
tributions in science and mathematics were rediscovered and portrayed as
role models to stand alongside the men who hitherto had had a virtual
monopoly of recognition. New funds were made available for mini-curriculum

176
 GENDER AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 177

projects on this theme, and in a number of them there was an emphasis on

allowing the subjective features of scientific work to become more evident
in the way science in school should be seen and taught. The aim of these
reforms was to make the teaching and learning of science gender neutral.
The irony to which I referred in the opening sentence is associated with
the IEA Science Studies being almost the epitome of the positivist, quantita-
tive research paradigm in science education (see Chapter 8). Feminist
researchers have been in the forefront of revealing the limitations of this
paradigm, and in general, researchers in the gender sub-area have been inclined
to more holistic and qualitative paradigms. Some of the more imaginative
methodologies have been developed in their studies.
Despite the revelation that science education is disproportionately ser-
vicing the two sexes, and hence that there is a gender issue in science education,
the researchers who have been attracted to study it have been predominantly
women. I remember being one of the less than ten percent of males who
participated in the fourth GASAT conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1987!
It is thus interesting to note that of the eight respondents, who identified gender
publications as influential or significant, three were male. With such a small
representation, the discussion of gender-related research in this chapter, can
only offer a taste of the trends in research that this issue has provoked in
the last twenty years. More comprehensive reports of this research are to be
found in the book, Gender, Science and mathematics: Shortening the
shadow, that was co-edited by two of the respondents, Léonie Rennie and
Barry Fraser, Australia (with Lesley Parker), in 1996.

QUANTITATIVE STUDIES

Léonie Rennie, Australia, is one of these researchers who is comfortable with

some of the more sophisticated, quantitative approaches to the analysis of
educational data. She and Keith Punch designed a study (reported in JRST
in 1991) of middle secondary students to clarify the bewilderingly low cor-
relations that are so often reported between affect and achievement in school
science. They used path analysis to test a model involving students’ attitudes
to, interests in, and perceptions about science at school, and then applied
multiple regression to apportion the variance between previous and subsequent
achievement and the components of science-related affect. They found that
students’ perceptions of their past performance in science formed the most
important component of their science-related affect that was associated with
both past and subsequent achievement study.
The significance of this paper lies in the fact that it provides at least partially an explanation
of the low correlation. By taking a broader definition of affect, the direction of the relation
between attitude and achievement in science has been clarified for this sample of students.
Rennie, Australia
178 CHAPTER 12

No consistent sex differences were found in this fairly large sample. This
finding may be related to the shared values and interests relating to science
that other researchers have found across boys and girls in a number of soci-
eties, when a small group of high achieving boys are excluded from the
analysis.
Rennie was, however, well aware of other ways in which gender differences
were evident in relation to science at school, and she listed Telling Tales: Girls
and schools changing their ways as one of her major influences. This report
was the outcome of a large action research study by Jane Kenway and Sue
Willis, who worked with teachers to try to change blatantly gender-biased
features of schools and classrooms in Australian secondary schools in the early
1990s.
Another respondent, John Keeves, Australia, did for the I.E.A. Second
Science Study what Alison Kelly had done for the first. In volume III of Second
Study’s report Keeves and Kotte (1992) presented the disparities between
the sexes that had appeared in that multi-country study. In 1996, these same
authors discussed the significant gains in achievement that girls had made in
some countries in the decade between these two studies. They pointed out,
however, that these gains need to be set against overall significantly better
achievements and attitudes to science among boys at age 10 that become
more marked as students progress through secondary schooling.
Almost as an appendix to his interview, David Treagust, Australia, men-
tioned that he had published a paper in 1980 in JRST entitled Gender related
differences of adolescents in spatial representational thought that came out
of his doctoral work in Iowa. Subsequently, he had had comments from Jane
Kahle and other leading gender researchers that it had been influential on
their thinking about gender issues. It was in this then very contentious area
of spatial abilities and gender that Marcia Linn, USA, identified her most
significant publication. Her paper (with Ann Peterson), in Child Development
in 1985 reported a meta-analysis of many studies of spatial ability, such as
the Treagust one. The findings of Linn and Peterson spelt the end to the
simplistic notion, that inherent gender differences in spatial ability were
inherent and could be used to explain differences in participation and per-
formance. This publication is a kind of root paper, that has been cited in the
research areas of psychology, cognitive psychology, science education and
mathematics education where gender differentiation is considered. Linn, with
J. Hyde, took up the wider implications for science and mathematics educa-
tion in an important paper, Gender, Mathematics and Science, in the
Educational Researcher in 1989.
Prior to it (the meta-analysis), I had earlier studies that sometimes showed gender differences,
albeit unevenly, on certain science reasoning tasks. It made me angry when I gave talks on
these findings, people would pick out one where males did better, and say, “Isn’t that because
males are just better at science.” Linn, USA
 GENDER AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 179

GENDER IN THE CLASSROOM

The gender-related publications of influence begin, of course, with The

Missing Half (Else-Marie Staberg, Sweden, Elizabeth Whitelegg, England,
and Doris Jorde, Norway); but more subtle aspects of the issue were written
about as the spotlight of research moved to focus on different aspects of the
gender bias in school science. The work of Valerie Walkerdine, although
primarily in mathematics, such as Girls and Mathematics: From primary
school to secondary school, was listed as an important influence by Else-
Marie Staberg, because it gave her a new theoretical way of thinking about
and analysing what went on in classrooms. She added the interesting studies
of Kim Thomas (1990) in the book, Gender and Subject in Higher
Education, about the experience of two minority groups at the level of higher
education – males in English and females in physics. The females in physics
felt they have to become like the males to be real physicists, whereas the males
felt they were special in English.
To get beyond the counting of participation rates and the obvious attempts
that had been made to render science classrooms gender neutral, Else-Marie
Staberg talked with a number of students over a three year period about their
experience of science classes. In a paper in Gender and Education in 1994,
she reported about the hidden curriculum that regular reminds the students that
science is for boys, and how over the years of schooling this differentiation
gets worse. The boys act as if it is theirs, and the girls, except for the talented
and most interested, get more and more uncertain about what they are to
understand.
At the school level there is a masculisation of science that has important effects, especially for
girls if they have no experience of science from home. There were more and more things they
didn’t understand, and then they don’t care they don’t understand, turning their backs on science.
Staberg, Sweden

Half a world away in British Columbia, Jim Gaskell, Canada (with Arlene
McLaren) about the same time was also looking beyond the gender neutrality
of classrooms. In 1995 they reported in Now you see it, now you don’t: Gender
as an issue in school science, that when you first ask girls about it they say
that there is no problem. There was a sense that, because girls and boys are
now treated the same in the science classroom, the gender issue becomes
invisible. Gaskell and McLaren worked with the teachers to make gender again
a visible component of the science classroom – the gender relations and the
way gender is constructed in the teaching in those classrooms.
One of the things we had to do was make gender visible and talk about gender sensitivity as
opposed to gender neutrality. This presents a challenge to a lot of the work in gender and science
education. Gaskell, Canada

It was consistent with Gaskell’s interest in the deeper features of gender bias
180 CHAPTER 12

in science education, that he chose as publications of influence, several that

discuss the masculine dominance in science itself, and that raise alternative
ways of approaching and expressing science. His publications were the much
quoted A Feeling for the Organism: The life and work of Barbara
McClintock by Evelyn Fox Keller, Catherine Manthorpe’s early review in
Studies in Science Education of Men’s science, women’s science or science?:
Some issues relating to the study of girls’ science education, and Sandra
Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism.

OTHER REFERENCES

Doris Jorde, Norway, had experienced the maleness that dominates some
scientific communities. She had chosen a non-traditional women’s area, plant
pathology, when she was doing microbiology. Most of the women who studied
microbiology went into hospitals and worked on blood, but she worked for
her masters degree on grapes, which took her outdoors to work with farmers.
When she decided she must find another field in which to do her PhD, Robert
Karplus at Berkeley provided the inspiration with his learning cycle in the
Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) project. It challenged her to
try to include its ideas about activity-based learning and about relating things
to daily life in her teaching of the microscope and the products of micro-
biology. It was, for her, a wonderful, wonderful reflective challenge as I was
working on my PhD.
Beverley Bell, New Zealand, whose later work has involved discourse
analysis, made special mention of Peggy Lather’s book, Getting smart:
Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. It helped her move
her thinking from individuals to considering the social worlds in which people
live and move.
The people who stop me in my tracks and make me stop and think are actually now, like Lather,
outside science education. Bell, New Zealand

Elizabeth Whitelegg, England, listed her Open University textbook, Challenges

and Opportunities for Science Education, edited with Jeff Thomas and S.
Tresman, as significant because of the way it brought together articles about
special needs, gender, ethnicity, all under the umbrella of Science for All
and drew similarities between them.
Courses can focus on each of these without thinking about gender as a category of special
need, or race as a category of special need. Gathering together a collection of areas that are
usually disparate makes the idea of Science for All reach a wider audience, and certainly the
student response has been positive. Whitelegg, England

Whitelegg learnt a great deal from her colleague at the OU, Patricia Murphy
whose book with Robert Moon on Curriculum in Context, among other
 GENDER AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 181

publications of theirs, described how boys and girls approach context differ-
ently.
I had read some of her papers and they really struck home. I helped me understand my own
physics learning, and why I liked certain parts of it more than others. Whitelegg, England

Marilyn Fleer, Australia, in her doctoral study, reported examples of gender

differences in behavioural responses to context among young children. She
observed and talked with 4 year-old children, who were involved in pre-school
sessions that had a science topic. In one, where clocks and time were the topic,
she observed that the boys tended to smash the clocks to pieces, whereas the
girls took them apart but then made earrings and belly button accessories
from the pieces.
Randy McGinnis, USA, was influenced by the edited work, Windows into
science classrooms: Problems associated with high level cognitive learning.
This volume resulted from the strong and fruitful collegial links between
Jane Kahle and Ken Tobin and the group at the Science and Mathematics
Education Centre at Curtin University, where Barry Fraser is Director and
the gender issue was a priority research interest.
I found the contrast striking between the perspectives of the qualitative and quantitative research
methodologies, as well as the difference between the perspectives of the qualitative researchers.
McGinnis, USA

In a study he saw as significant McGinnis (with M. Pearsall) used a practi-

tioner research perspective, to keep a record of the reactions of predominantly
female student teachers in a Science Methods class to innovative pedagog-
ical practices that were designed to break the cycle of bias in science. It was
reported in Teaching elementary science methods to women, in JRST in 1998.
I believe the risk I took in attempting this innovation and the way we constructed the written
pieces to present the multiple perspectives make this paper noteworthy. McGinnis, USA

PARADOXES

There are some paradoxical findings in this sub-area of research in science

education. The lack, mentioned earlier, of a consistent gender difference in
the findings of Rennie and Punch may be one. A second is associated with
the studies of alternative conceptions. Although not many of the large number
of researchers in this sub-area (see Chapter 9) have given attention to gender
differences, enough have done so to make their generally nil finding to be
surprising. When one considers the different experiences girls and boys have
in their lives out of school, many of which could link to science (e.g. Sjøberg,
2000), it might well be expected that they would lead to different concep-
tions. Quite major cultural differences have also not led to different
conceptions. Together these findings do raise interesting further questions about
182 CHAPTER 12

both the origins of these alternative conceptions and about the schoolish
character of the methodologies being used in these studies.
It was with The Missing Half in mind that I was alerted by Sunee Klainin
to some differences in the way Thai students thought about chemistry when
she came to Monash to do her doctorate. For certain social and cultural reasons,
Thai students associate chemistry with the operations in the home kitchen,
and thus Thai girls, unlike their western counterparts, have positive attitudes
to it. In her wide ranging study of the implementation of the new Thai chem-
istry curriculum, it was thus interesting to find that girls outscored boys
significantly on most of the achievement and performance measures she used
(Klainin and Fensham, 1987).
On her return to Thailand, Klainin undertook a parallel study of physics,
towards which the Thai students showed the same attitudinal bias to males that
has been found in other countries. In the large Bangkok school district with
more than 10% of the age cohort studying physics in grades 10 to 12
(comparable or better than many western countries), girls performed equally
with boys on most of the measures of achievement. We believed that this study
by Klainin is the first to have reported such equality of achievement (Klainin,
Fensham and West, 1989). One of the keys to this remarkable achievement
was the requirement in Thailand that aspiring senior secondary students study
all three sciences in grades 10 to 12. As my Thai friends said in their gentle
but firm way, ‘we have been told that getting girls to choose to study the
physical sciences has been a problem in several Western countries, so we
removed that option. You cannot do well in a subject you are not studying!’

REFERENCES

Keeves, J. and Kotte, D. (1992) Disparities between the sexes in science education. In: J.
Keeves (Ed.), The I.E.A. Study of Science, Vol. III, pp. 141–164, Elmsford, NY: Pergamon.
Keeves, J. and Kotte, D. (1996) Patterns of science achievement: international comparisons.
In: L.H. Parker, L.J. Rennie and B.J. Fraser (Eds.), Gender, Science and Mathematics, pp.
77–94. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Klainin, S. and Fensham, P.J. (1987) Learning achievement in upper secondary school chem-
istry in Thailand: Some remarkable sex reversals. International Journal of Science Education
9(2): 217–227.
Klainin, S., Fensham, P.J. and West, L.H.T. (1989) Successful achievements by girls in physics
learning. International Journal of Science Education 11(1): 101–112.
Parker, L.H., Rennie, L.J. and Fraser, B.J. (Eds.) (1996) Gender, Science and Mathematics.
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sjøberg, S. (2000) Interesting all children in Science for All. In: R. Millar, J. Leach and J. Osborne
(Eds.), Improving Science Education: The contribution of research, pp. 165–186. Buckingham,
England: Open University Press.
Thomas, K. (1990) Gender and Subject in Higher Education. Buckingham, England: Society
for Studies in Higher Education/Open University Press.
 CHAPTER 13

P O L I T I C S A N D S C I E N C E E D U C AT I O N

Teachers, I’m asking you to put down what you have been
doing already, because the nation has another purpose for you.
J.J. Schwab as quoted by Rod Fawns, Australia

I’ve always seen the function of science education research

as being to somehow influence the way society is to evolve.
Fawns, Australia

In the 1970s as the first disappointments from the implementation phase of

the great curriculum reforms became known, it was noted, on both sides of
the Atlantic, that these curriculum development projects had been under-
taken, as if science education took place in a political vacuum. The critical
analyses of these projects, and their impact on schools and science educa-
tion, by persons like Apple, Gintis, and Stake and Easley in the USA, and
Young, Waring, and Jenkins in Britain disabused this naivety with a vengeance.
In preparing for, and writing Science for the People, David Layton,
England, uncovered the essentially political nature of curriculum reform and
particularly of the curriculum for school science. This was what the ideal-
istic reformers in the 1960s failed to accept, or even to recognise. School
knowledge and the curriculum of schooling are very contested arenas. Layton’s
book is an historical study of attempts to introduce science into the cur-
riculum of schooling in England. He demonstrated that in 19th century England
there were a number of groups, inside and outside the school system, who
had vested interests in whether or not the subject area of science was intro-
duced into schooling; and if that struggle was won, what the science content
of this subject should be.
It did a lot of other things for me. It uncovered some of the social and political origins of that
scholastic version of school science I encountered as a boy, and not just as a boy – as a uni-
versity student and beyond. It helped me to recover some of the possibilities from the past,
and it exposed some of the casualties in the conflict over what counts as school science.
Layton, England

Science for the People introduced me personally to the political nature of

the curriculum, and immediately to a sense-making frame for my attempts at
that time to understand why the new curricula for school physics and chem-
istry were so limited to long established content, whereas the new school
biology in Australia was including excitingly fresh content. As the 1970s
progressed, I was involved first in the development of a curriculum project
for science in the junior secondary years, and then as the director of a project

183
184 CHAPTER 13

to produce Physical Science as a subject for the senior years. The latter
project was established because there were already, in 1975, signs that fewer
students were choosing to take physics, chemistry and mathematics, a tradi-
tionally very common final year of study that opened the way for science
and science-based courses at the university, including the prestigious field of
medicine. By producing a single weight subject covering the essentials of
the curriculum of the two physical sciences, it was thought that more students
may be attracted to them. Soon after the start of both these ventures, I was
to experience at first hand the strength and deviousness of educo-political
forces, like those I had read about in Layton’s book and in the works of the
other authors above.
We did not have any sense at the beginning that the curriculum for science, even at the junior
secondary level, is competed for by different interest groups, for whom the science content to
be learnt would be defined quite differently. Fensham, Australia

The interest of Douglas Roberts, Canada, in the differences in school cur-

ricula began when he tried to fathom why Harvard Project Physics was so
different from PSSC Physics. From this his attention moved to the North
American science curricula more widely and he became aware of the dif-
ferent perspectives of various interest groups. The compromised curricula
that result from attempts to accommodate these diverse views tended, in
practice, to revert to the interests of the more powerful groups. In other
words, the aims are not complementary, and not even mildly competitive. They
are conflicting and the intentions of all interest groups cannot at the same
time be achieved. It is, as Roberts described it, a struggle.
I could never quite understand why people put so much passion and political clout behind
positions that seemed so different, and always one was ridiculed while the other was elevated.
It seemed to be a matter of people in ideological warfare over these things. Roberts, Canada

Roberts introduced the notion of curriculum emphasis in a paper in Science

Education in 1982. He set out seven possible emphases for school science,
with the suggestion that, at any level of schooling, just two or at most three
of these should be the determinants of the curriculum. As the years of schooling
proceeded, the chosen emphases could change. Roberts used the word
‘emphasis’ very deliberately, instead of ‘aim’ or ‘purpose’ to make it clear that
a real choice has to be made, rather than the usual compromise, for which more
and more aims are listed, but then are mostly neglected in practice.
Those who are engaged in the curriculum debates and in the curriculum
development projects are often not aware of the magnitude of the struggle
in which they are engaged. It can seem simply like nitpicking arguments,
and commonality of phrasing is used to achieve apparent consensus and com-
promise, when there are still chasms of difference in what is meant.
As participant observers in more recent reforms of the senior secondary
science curriculum in Canada and Australia, David Blades (1996) and Christina
 POLITICS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 185

Hart (1998, 2001) have, in different, but very vivid ways, respectively por-
trayed how this struggle for the school science curriculum has gone on in
Canada and Australia.
In the late 1970s Robert Stake and Jack Easley reported a project in which
eleven schools or school districts had been intensively and extensively studied
some years after the materials of many of the curriculum reform projects had
become available for use. The Case Studies of Science Education (CSSE,
1978) are detailed portrayals of how the struggle for the science curriculum
manifested itself at these more intimate levels of the wider system. A wide
range of factors were found, in case after case, to interact with how science
was viewed and decided about in the schools. These factors overwhelmed
the possibilities of objective debate and decisions about which curriculum
package would be adopted. Yet other factors came into play at the level of
the classrooms to produce the slippage between what was the intended cur-
riculum and the actual curriculum. Researchers who are now working at school
or district level on curriculum innovation would find these classic studies
well worth revisiting. They would confirm the magnitude of the task of
bringing about real change, indicate the educo-political complexity of even the
simpler schools, and provide cause for celebrating the breakthroughs that
persistent support and the creativity of teachers have, and can achieve.
John Olson, Canada, in 1982 published a book, Innovation and the Science
Curriculum. He saw it as significant because, in studying what teachers do
with imposed or suggested innovations, it is possible to reveal what they really
believe in as teachers of science. The Schools Council Integrated Science
project in England was a good one for him to study because it was unusual
as a science curriculum because of its early emphasis on socio-scientific issues.
It attempted to interconnect science within itself, and to reposition science with
other parts of the curriculum (but see Chapter 10 for some critique of this
project). The response of schools was varied. Some took up the innovation
solely because to do so gave them added resources or status, while others
had just one teacher who was enthusiastic about the emphases of this type
of science.
One teacher really understood the intended curriculum, but was frustrated by his colleagues,
becoming in the end a voice crying in the wilderness. The way teachers construe their work,
and their role as teachers was the interesting thing. Olson, Canada

Another respondent with a strong interest in the way teachers perceive science
and how it should be taught is Roger Cross, Australia. He had been very
influenced by John Bernal’s (1946) book, The Freedom of Necessity and
the essay in it that recalls Bernal’s appeal to science teachers in America in
1938/39, as the one group of scientifically educated persons, who were not
associated with another powerful interest group in American society. He
asked them to reconceptualise their role beyond the mere reproduction of future
186 CHAPTER 13

scientists, and to present in their teaching and actions science’s responsibili-

ties in society. This essay made Cross personally aware of the way the
institution of science exercises a strong socialising effect on teachers. They are
members of the scientific community, albeit lowly ones, who take on a mes-
senger role for the institution of science about an idealised form of science.
An interview study of teachers provided Cross with the opportunity to report
about how this messenger role works out in practice. His paper in 1997 in
the IJSE was significant to Cross, both personally in his own professional
development, and because he felt the findings are so important and yet so often
ignored during attempts at curriculum change. The science teachers Cross
interviewed, along with other colleagues in the school, were furthermore con-
strained by an ideology the school had about the purposes of teaching. These
pressures, together, led the science teachers to confine themselves to teaching
an abstracted form of science, closing their eyes to the realities of science in
society.
Science teachers are enormously straitjacketed by this overall concept of teaching science.
They are reluctant to question the sorts of mythologies which have been impressed on them during
their scientific studies. That’s something I’ve deliberately tried to break down in my profes-
sional courses with science teachers. Most of my research efforts have been in that area.
Cross, Australia

Cross’ reference to the socialising effects on science teachers of ‘the institu-

tion of science’ and to ‘an ideology of the school’ are further explored by
Jim Gaskell, Canada, who identified his paper, with Pat Rowell, in Historical
Studies in Education as significant. As part of a social history of the physics
curriculum in British Columbia, these authors looked at the contrasting roles
played by the union for specialist (science) teachers and the general teachers’
unions with respect to the control of the curriculum.
The general teachers’ union was not able to gain access to curriculum
decision making because they were unwilling to identify with one subject over
others. The best they can achieve is to nominate teachers, some of whom
were then invited to join the curriculum committees, but as individuals rather
than as union representatives. Accordingly, what the general union did was
to emphasise the individual teacher in the classroom, making decisions for
his or her students in this particular school community and subject context.
The science teachers’ union, on the other hand, was able to be represented
on the science curriculum committees, extending its role beyond representa-
tion to a collective control that maintained the status of science subjects and
their standards. These standards, of course, fed and maintained the status of
science in the curriculum.
You take the best teachers and determine the curriculum in terms of their knowledge, their
professional knowledge, and then you find a mechanism for enforcing that on everybody else
through collective control. Gaskell, Canada
 POLITICS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 187

With such strong evidence of the political nature of school science educa-
tion, it is surprising that so much of the published research in the field seems
to continue to assume the political vacuum condition. The dominance of psy-
chological views of teaching and learning and of reductionist frameworks
for so many of the research designs are no doubt largely responsible.
Furthermore, in the practice of research it is not easy to give adequate atten-
tion to both the nuances of teaching and learning in the classroom, and at
the same time to do justice to the school-based, and wider educo-political
constraints under which these processes occur.
Edgar Jenkins, England, pointed out that many studies in science educa-
tion suggest or explicitly claim that the findings about science teaching and
learning in one school, or one school district, or one country will hold gen-
erally. He identified the naivety of these reports as a major influence in making
him devote so much of his research energy to promoting the role of histor-
ical and other studies, that emphasise the complexity and political character
of the contexts in which school science has and continues to take place.
Douglas Roberts, Canada echoes a similar critique about so much of the
published research.
I do not see in the journals or in the NARST conference proceedings very much critical debate
about the content of the curriculum, which I do think is a NARST responsibility. I don’t see
much evidence of people trying to conceptualise the ground that we work in – How is it that
the struggle goes on? and What is it that happens in the curriculum area? All the questions of
learning in the long run are derivative on what is to be learnt. Roberts, Canada

Fortunately, there have been a small, but persistent number of researchers, who
have given attention to these political aspects of science education. One of
these researchers is Leif Östman, Sweden. He identifies himself with a strong
research tradition in Sweden (names like Urban Dahllöff, Ulf Lundgren and
Tomas Englund) with respect to curriculum more generally, but has himself
concentrated on science as a special case to show how its content and teaching
can be seen as an example of moral and political education.
Science education always has political consequences for how students will view themselves in
society in relation to participating in it democratically. . . . All teaching about the natural
world in one way or in another is going to communicate a certain view of how human beings
should see themselves in relation to nature. Östman, Sweden

His book with Douglas Roberts, Problems of Meaning in Science

Curriculum, extends the latter’s important concept of curriculum emphasis
in the 1980s beyond its principally pragmatic sense of school science into a
much wider political arena. They make use of the notion of companion
meanings to identify and describe how particular forms of social and scien-
tific power and ideology can be conveyed to teachers and exercised on students
through a curriculum document, a textbook and a teacher’s teaching of science.
188 CHAPTER 13

People try to teach about the environment conceptually, treating it as morally neutral. But the
reason for environmental education are environmental problems, and these have immediate
and pressing moral dimensions about science and society. Östman, Sweden

Rod Fawns, Australia, is another respondent for whom science education and
research about it have the political goal of ‘affecting the world for the better’.
His studies of the transitions in the science curriculum over time have been
analysed in terms of a struggle for science education’s democratic sense. He
likens his work to that of Jenkins in England and Schwab in the USA, although
they may not express it with the same sense of urgency he feels.
Jenkins’ Armstrong to Nuffield has been like a bible to me. I dip back into it and feel I under-
stand Armstrong’s futurism battling with Nunn’s psychological stage theory and the interioration
in some people’s interpretation of psychology. Schwab distinguished between “enquiry” and
“inquiry” on the basis that we are not simply teaching students to think – an aim the corrup-
tion of education by psychology promotes. “Enquiry”, on the contrary (for Schwab), was an
induction into a type of practical discourse (for me a political discourse). Fawns, Australia

Since Schwab originally preferred enquiry, it is ironic that he is now so uni-

versally associated in the science education community with inquiry. Fawns
was also influenced by Richard Livingstone’s defence of classical education
in Education for a World Adrift. Through it he learnt to understand some
of the strong resistances, both outside and inside schools in liberal democ-
ratic societies, to science as it is so often presented in school. It tells us
hardly anything about man – the man who is our friend, enemy, colleague,
kinsman, partner, with whom we live and have our business.

SCIENCE FOR ALL – A DEMOCRATIC VISION

A new element appeared in science education during the 1980s. In high level
reports on the state of science education country after country endorsed what
became known by the slogan, Science for All. In various ways, each of these
reports recognised that, hitherto, school science had had too narrow a primary
focus. The preparation in science of a minority of students, from whom the
next generation of scientific and technological professionals would develop,
had dominated the curriculum, and consumed the resources for science teaching
and learning. Now it was being agreed that a parallel purpose must be the
education in science of that majority of students, who will not go on to
scientific careers, but who will live in societies increasingly influenced by
science and technology. The more complex issue of how to achieve this has
occupied curriculum decisions and development ever since and it is still very
much an unresolved issue.
The report, Beyond 2000: Science Education for the Future, is an attempt
in England to set out how contemporary school science has come to be what
it is, and then to suggest ways in which this curriculum area needs to be
radically changed, particularly in its science content. The magnitude of the
 POLITICS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 189

problem is encapsulated in the statement. The current curriculum retains its

past mid-20th century emphasis, presenting science as a body of knowledge
which is value-free, objective and detached – a succession of ‘facts’ to be learnt
with insufficient indication of any overarching coherence. Jonathan Osborne,
England, was a co-director of the project that led to this report, and edited
Beyond 2000 with Robin Millar.
It is probably one of the most significant pieces I have been involved in. It has been jointly written
by a talented group. It is succinct and the quality of the writing and ideas are generally good,
if somewhat vague. It is also timely. Science for All had become universally adopted as a struc-
tural reform, but the curriculum is still science for the few. It offers a vision of what a genuine
science curriculum might be. Osborne, England

Only one of these national reports from the 1980s figured as a significant
influence on any of the respondents. That was the Science for All Canadians,
the report generated by the Science Council of Canada in 1984. The origins
of this ‘arms length’ political body lay with an earlier Report which, among
other analyses of the neo-colonial state of Canadian society, had found that
there was little Canadian content in the curriculum of school subjects like
science. The Science Council’s mandate was to coordinate efforts (among
business, universities and governments) in various fields, including educa-
tion, that would foster achievements in science and technology. For its
investigation of the state of science education in Canada, the Council appointed
Graham Orpwood, Canada, to design how this should be conducted. With
help and advice from his mentor and doctoral supervisor, Douglas Roberts,
Orpwood proceeded with a study that not only presented the current situa-
tion with compelling clarity, but also pointed to the future. It was designed
very deliberately to have an effect on the policies for science education in
the provinces of Canada. One feature of the wide ranging design was that
the commissioning of a number of special topic papers that were not to be
balanced reviews in which a range of positions are presented and discussed.
Rather they were to be position papers which set out and argued for a par-
ticular position about science education. They gave curriculum committees and
the science teaching community clear options to accept or reject. The response
to the report as a whole, from the interest groups that mattered in the making
of science curriculum policy, was very positive and its effects continued for
a number of years. One of the position papers was on Scientific Literacy
by Douglas Roberts (1983) and another was on Social Issues in Science by
Glen Aikenhead, Canada. For the latter, the research he did in preparing this
paper was pivotal, and it became his guide for a decade of work on STS science
education.
Six or seven years later persons not only complimented me on it, but also said they were
writing policy for their School Boards that embodied some of its ideas. And this was before
STS had become familiar. Aikenhead, Canada
190 CHAPTER 13

One more significant publication that involves politics of the curriculum at

the level of national government is the article by Paul Black, England, paper
in a book edited by Ohear and White in 1993. Black had had a key role in
the development of the national curriculum for England and Wales in the
late 1980s. He was co-chair of the group that developed an imaginative assess-
ment framework which provided, for a government committed to the
accountability by national testing, both a driving force, and a constraint on
what the individual subject advisory groups could suggest. Black first pre-
sented what is in the article as a conference lecture, when he was free to
give it after leaving his national advisory role. In it, he described how the
policy that the Minister for Education, at the time of the framework, managed
to persuade the government to accept, was then dismantled piece by piece.
I now understand I should not have expected anything different. The Minister, Kenneth Baker,
was in fact too far to the left of the Conservative Party, he was removed, and they have eroded
and taken away every bit of it. Black, England

In this chapter I trust that enough evidence has been provided for researchers
in science education to note when they are carrying out more direct studies
of instruction and reading the studies of others, that they need periodically
to pause and seek out the less direct, but important attempts of their colleagues
who do try to illuminate, or as Roberts puts it, conceptualise the larger
ground in which all our work is set.

REFERENCES

Blades, D.W. (1997) Procedures of Power and Curriculum Change. New York: Peter Lang
Publishing.
CSSE (1978) Case studies in Science Education. Urbana-Champaign, Il: CIRCE and CCE,
University of Illinois.
Hart, C. (1998) Addressing participation and the quality of learning through curriculum change:
Some lessons from the experience of VCE Physics. Australian Educational Researcher 25(2):
19–37.
Hart, C. (2001) Examining relations of power in the process of curriculum change: The case
of VCE physics. Research in Science Education 31(4): 525–552.
Roberts, D.A. (1983) Scientific Literacy. Ottawa: Science Council of Canada.
 CHAPTER 14

S C I E N C E E D U C AT I O N , T E C H N O L O G Y A N D I T

We have a big battle on our hands over the years to come,

trying to raise the esteem of technology education, because
its poor cousin relation relative to science as a high status
subject is unhelpful to both.
Paul Gardner, Australia

INTRODUCTION

Many natural phenomena can be described mathematically in the sciences.

Indeed, these mathematical descriptions are often the goal scientists seek in
order to enhance the predictability of their theoretical models. In education
strong connections are often made between science and mathematics. It is
thus surprising that so little attention has been given by science education
researchers to the mathematical aspects of science teaching and learning.
In 1978 Hans-George Steiner invited a number of mathematics educators
and science educators to a meeting at the Volkswagen Centre for Mathematics
Education in Bielefeld, Germany. The purpose was to stimulate co-operation
between researchers in these two areas. The report of the meeting, Cooperation
Between Science Teachers and Mathematics Teachers (Steiner, 1979)
opened up several possible areas of mutual interest, but little attention has since
been paid to them. At that time both Joseph Novak, USA, in the Learning
to Learn project and Leif Lybeck, Sweden, in studies that preceded his work
on Archimedes in the Classroom (see Chapter 4) were aware of the differ-
ential difficulties in learning that are associated with direct and inverse
proportion – two very common ways in which relations between concepts
are expressed in the sciences.
The very great attention paid in the next fifteen years to students’ alter-
native conceptions in science was much focussed on the science concepts
themselves, and their associated natural phenomena. Surprisingly, little atten-
tion was given to how students conceived of, and understood the mathematical
expressions for the concepts or the relationships between them. One excep-
tion was the extended study by Leif Lybeck, Helge Strömdahl and Aina
Tullberg, Sweden, of the conceptions of teachers and students of quantity
calculus relationships in chemical stoichiometry involving the mole as the unit
of amount of substance (see Strömdahl, Tullberg and Lybeck, 1994 and
Tullberg, Strömdahl and Lybeck, 1994).
Later in the 1990s, Ruth Stavy, Israel, a science educator, joined forces with

191
192 CHAPTER 14

Dinesh Tirosh, a mathematics educator, and did begin to explore the way
students respond intuitively to several what they called intuitive rules, like
the more-the more, that underpins direct proportionality. This work began to
be reported in a significant paper in IJSE in 1996, and in 2000 a book, How
Students Mis-Understand Science and Mathematics: Intuitive rules, was
published by these two authors on their work.
The International Association for Evaluation in Education (I.E.A.) launched
in the 1990s the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
Its earlier studies of science achievement and of mathematical in the 1970s
and 80s had been conducted separately. In TIMSS, despite the relational
possibilities this organisational conjunction suggested, the association of these
two subject areas turned out to be for administrative convenience, rather than
to explore the interconnections of mathematical and scientific learning. The
many participating countries varied considerably in how closely associated
science and mathematics were both seen to be, and operationally were, in
their school systems. While now almost all primary or elementary teachers
are expected to teach both subject areas, little connection is expected at these
levels between the newcomer, science, and the long established, mathematics.
At the secondary levels it is common in some countries for teachers to teach
in both subject areas, but in many others the teachers are in separate non-
overlapping divisions in the school.
In my conversations with the 75 plus science education researchers there
was almost no reference to connections between the teaching and learning
of science and mathematics; and certainly no publications of significance, or
of influence, about the relationship were identified.
In contrast, there was a strong interest in the relations between technology
and science, and in what the emergence of technology as a school subject
may mean for science education. Twelve of the respondents chose publications
relating to these issues as among their significant or influential ones.

TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Among this group of respondents Heinrich Stork, David Layton and Paul
Gardner have each made major contributions to understanding the nature of
technology and its various relationships with science. As early as 1977 Heinrich
Stork, Germany wrote a book, Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology
(third edition, 1992), which has had a wide influence in Germany. It was
read by academics, but also by persons in the school system, and outside it
– chemists, physicists, philosophers and theologians
It’s a philosophical book with a description of technology and a discussion of the relation between
science and technology. Its longest chapter is about Technology and Society, and what we are
going to do with technology. Stork, Germany
 SCIENCE EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND IT 193

During the 1980s David Layton, England, moved from his historical work
on science education towards the history of technology and the history of
technical education in schooling. With Edgar Jenkins, England, and Gary
McCullough (1985) he wrote Technological Revolution? The politics of
school science and technology in England and Wales since 1945. In the later
1980s he was a very influential figure in the way technology would appear
as one of the key learning areas in the National Curriculum for England and
Wales.
Although Layton modestly did not choose his book for Open University
Press, Technology’s Challenge to Science Education, as one of his two
significant publications, it was chosen as influential by respondents from
four different countries. This qualifies it for seminal status as far as my
respondents are concerned (see Chapter 5).
For Edgar Jenkins, England, the significance of the book with McCullough
and Layton was the way it opened up more sharply, than he had experienced
with From Armstrong to Nuffield (see Chapter 11), the school-based, and
institutional conflicts between people who wanted particular versions of
technology, those who did not want it at all, and those concerned about its
relation to science.
That’s why I came to choose that one because its issues remain on the agenda as people try to
construct and put technology into schools What does technology mean in schooling? What
might it mean for the science curriculum? I see these as really sharp questions.
Jenkins, England

David Layton identified the journal, Technology and Culture (formerly the
Journal of Technology and Culture) as a most important influence and an
essential source of papers for anyone interested in science/technology relations
and their place in the curriculum. It is said about Technology and Culture
that, it came about in the 1950s because some of its early authors had their
articles rejected by Isis, a leading journal for the history of science. As a result
they decided to establish their own journal and society, The Society for
Technology and Culture.
When David Layton’s interest was turning to technology and technology
education, he was excited to find John Staudenmaier’s (1985) book, Story
tellers: Reweaving the human fabric. This is an impressive historiograph-
ical analysis of the issues that were coming through the papers in the Journal
of Technology and Culture (Technology and Culture) about the nature of
technology.
One of the issues that came through strongly in one of his chapters is the nature of technolog-
ical knowledge as a distinct epistemological species. He certainly pulled together for me a lot
of the writings I had been struggling with in the mid 1980s. Layton, England

Paul Gardner, Australia, the third of this trio of major contributors, only dis-
covered Technology and Culture a decade ago during a period of study
194 CHAPTER 14

leave at UBC, Canada; but its articles have been a mine of information and
ideas for him.
I’ve cited many of them. It was very influential and helped clarify my thoughts about the nature
of science and technology. Gardner, Australia

In due course (1994/95), he published in the International Journal of Design

and Technology Education a pair of long articles on Science/Technology
relationships. In them he was trying to mount coherent arguments about the
nature of the relationships between science and technology, bringing together
a lot of thoughts that had been in the literature for the past twenty or so
years, but looking also at how they can impact on curriculum issues and on
educational practice. He concurred with Jenkins about the tensions that have
been raised by the idea and practice of technology education in the cur-
riculum of schooling since 1990.
They are the largest journal papers I have written, and I hope they will be significant. The
implications are that we need to look more closely at the way science makes use of technology
in the teaching of science; and much more about how science can be drawn into the teaching
of technology. Gardner, Australia

These papers have been widely cited, and are perhaps still the most substan-
tial writing on science/technology and science education/technology education
that is readily available to both these groups of educators.
They were really interesting, because at the time I was trying to work through, What is this
thing called science? and What is this thing called technology? Paul Gardner’s work really began
to make the relationship between them clearer for me, and the sort of processes that were
important in technology education. Marilyn Fleer, Australia

In 1982 I published in Science Education a small paper, Some new objec-

tives for science education, that I regarded, on reflection as being personally
of significance. In it, I was attempting to crystallise, in the light of my
experience at that time, what some limits for science education might be,
and hence to rethink my expectations of the subject and my research agenda.
The paper has turned out to also have some external significance because I
did foresee some things that are now quite well established and accepted.
One of these fore-seeings was about technology. It was that ‘the science of
a technology’ is not the same as ‘science with examples from technology’.
Through the 1980s, most curricular attempts to give relevance to science
teaching were using the latter approach, with the technological examples simply
appendages to the usual sequential development of the science. Later in that
decade, as the STS movement was gaining momentum, the former approach
in which the technology determined the science was becoming more common.
Alas, the introduction of technology in a number of curricula as a separate
learning area meant that these developments in the science curriculum were
cut short. It is of interest to note that the authors of Beyond 2000 (see Chapter
 SCIENCE EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND IT 195

13) argued that the relationship of technology to the curriculum of school

science urgently needs to be re-examined.

TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION

Alistair Jones, New Zealand, has experienced a shift, like Layton’s above, from
being a science educator with an interest in technology to being now concerned
more totally with technology education, without regard for its relationships
with science. His paper with Kirk (1990) in the IJSE was a study of teaching
physics with various technological applications as the contexts for this teaching.
The technological applications also enabled students’ interest in the various
contexts to be considered as a variable.
Human interest was crucial. If there was no human interest then there was not much interest.
In other words, some relationship with people had to be there. That then motivated the students
to engage with the problem. The problem also had to be authentic. Jones, New Zealand

Jones went on to describe how, in a post-doctoral position with Paul Black

at King’s College, London, he became aware that there was a large social aspect
in technology. This was not being addressed adequately in learning models,
such as the generative learning model that Osborne and Wittrock (1985) had
introduced to science education. He further realised that, in his earlier
teaching/learning studies, the learning outcomes that were recognised in the
students’ formal assessment were the straight physics ones, and this meant that
the technology ones were not being seriously taught or learnt.
All the learning the students were doing in their investigations of the technological applica-
tions was not acknowledged. It was quite a major shift for me to go beyond STS to say, “Hang
on, there is something called technology that is worth learning in itself”. I moved back to New
Zealand to take charge of technology education as a new component of the curriculum, and to
begin to look at learning theories in relation to technology education. Jones, New Zealand

Leo McDonald, a doctoral student in science education in Alberta, Canada,

with whom I had some involvement as a co-supervisor with Heidi Kass,
made a similar shift, from initially being interested in technology as an adjunct
to science learning to a primary focus on learning in technology education
itself. He was a participant observer of groups of Grade 8 students in Alberta,
who were undertaking a new science/technology curriculum. He particularly
focussed on the groups as they worked on a several essentially technological
tasks. In making sense of his observations, the actions of the students, and
what they said they were thinking and doing, he found that Maturana and
Varela’s (1987) quasi-biological theory of enactivism was useful. Some of
its concepts and metaphors enabled him to describe well the ways the students
moved to understand and undertake these technological tasks (see MacDonald
and Kass, 1998). MacDonald’s doctoral thesis and his paper with Kass are
other interesting examples of the selective borrowing of theory that has been
196 CHAPTER 14

discussed in Chapter 7. Ideas from the theoretical model that was developed
in a quite different research context are used to illuminate in an interesting
way what is occurring in a science/technology classroom; but the research does
not contribute to the theory’s status or to its refinement. Enactivism as a theory
has attracted a number of researchers in mathematics education, but I am
unaware of other substantial use of it in science education
In 1989 Reg Fleming, Canada, published a paper in Science Education
on Literacy for a technological age. The genesis of this paper was the argument
in his provincial government circles as to whether there was such a thing as
technological literacy. In contributing to this debate Fleming had delved into
some intriguing literature and he presented some of it in this paper. At the time
he regarded the paper as an unfinished work, but later he became aware that
it has been quoted quite often, and hence realised it did have external signif-
icance.
Nothing has been done to my thinking in an educational sense with regard to the concept of
an understanding of technology. A paper in Science Education recently asked, What do social
studies of science say to science educators? And that said to me, that there is also the question:
What do social studies of technology say to science educators? Fleming, Canada

SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-SOCIETY

Several respondents, Joan Solomon, England, Robert Yager, USA, Harrie

Eijkelhof, The Netherlands and Glen Aikenhead, Canada, have been important
leaders in the Science/Technology/Society (STS) movement that did so much
in the 1980s to transform the way the science curriculum was conceived and
developed.
Solomon was involved as a developer and teacher in Science in a Social
Context (SISCON), an early attempt in England to add a societal dimension
to science teaching. Joan Solomon, in reporting the SISCON project at various
fora, had been writing and speaking about STS for a number of years. However,
in 1988 she published a paper in the IJSE about Science, technology and
society courses: Tools for social justice, that she described as significant
because it was the first one in which her own original thinking came through.
Later she wrote a paper, Towards a notion of home culture, in the British
Education Research Journal, that she also chose as significant because it
highlighted how differently science was understood by parents, who were
helping their young children with science activities in their home settings.
Solomon linked this differential understanding of science in the wider society
to the difficulty of doing research on STS science in the real contexts that
society presents. It was on this point that she found Clifford Geertz’ book, The
Interpretation of Cultures, a helpful influence, as did John Olson, Canada,
when he was trying to understand schools and teachers response to innova-
tion and change (see Chapter 13).
 SCIENCE EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND IT 197

I realised that once you have STS teaching and it’s in a social context, it assumes different shapes,
very much according to the attitudes and preferences of the people who take it on – much
more than normal science does. Solomon, England

Robert Yager, USA, was a champion of STS teaching of science when powerful
forces in American science teaching were opposed to it. All three of his sig-
nificant publications, an edited book in 1992 and Volume 7 in the NSTA series
of What research says to the science teacher, and another book, Science/
Technology/Society as reform in science education in 1996 relate to STS.
In each he has explicitly attempted to relate this approach to science teaching
to a research base.
The publication in 1981 of Physics in Society by the Association for Science
Education in Britain was likewise an important awakening of interest in STS
ideas in that country and other English speaking ones. Harrie Eijkelhof, The
Netherlands, wrote it with colleagues at the Free University in Amsterdam,
initially in Dutch. It was significant because of the effect it had on physics
teachers in The Netherlands, helping them to think about another way of
teaching their subject. Some of the ideas in this book were then integrated
into the very influential PLON physics materials that Eijkelhof and others
developed during the 1980s. From these exemplary materials, the influence
of a particular interpretation of STS spread to the new physics curriculum in
The Netherlands, as it did to physics curricula in several other countries,
including Australia.
It started people thinking about the development of physics, the development of science research,
and the relation between science and technology – the whole dynamics of all that.
Eijkelhof, The Netherlands

Another important step in the development of STS science teaching occurred

in 1991 when Glen Aikenhead, Canada, published Logical Reasoning in
Science and Technology, a school text for the middle years of secondary
schooling. It was significant because it provided a concrete example of how
STS teaching is possible even though the knowledge involved is drawn from
several scientific disciplines as well as from the social sciences, and in the case
of this text, the law. The socio-scientific issue that is central in this science
course of study is the highly motivating one for adolescents of the connec-
tions between drinking alcohol and driving cars. The technology in focus is
the breathalyser and its use to measure blood alcohol levels.
There’s lots more in the environmental context than drinking and driving, but that overall
theme gets the students into other things. The way it was developed was by the kids with whom
I was doing research. I had to find out what they thought about these things, and those research
results went right back into the textbook. Aikenhead, Canada

In Chapter 8, reference has been made to the fact that Aikenhead and Ryan
adopted the same approach of using students’ views to develop the VOSTS
instrument to evaluate student and teacher views of science and technology.
198 CHAPTER 14

Through these products from Aikenhead and his colleagues and from similar
efforts in other countries, the STS movement had a strong rationale, good
curriculum materials and evaluation instruments. As indicated already, the
emergence of Technology as a subject in its own right in the 1990s has, to a
considerable extent, blocked the implementation of STS in school science
that appeared to be about to start. Without the central T for technology in
STS, the final S for society is emasculated. The plea by Gardner that heads
this chapter comes out of this frustrating development in the curriculum of
schooling.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Among the respondents there was also some interest in the manner in which
information technology could be used to enhance and redefine science edu-
cation. These examples are, however, quite inadequate to represent the trends
in the electronic revolution and how it is being responded to by researchers
in science education.
In Chapter 4 attention was drawn to the sense that a number of the
respondents had that they were ahead of their time. A striking example of
this is Vince Lunetta, USA, who in the 1960s was one of the pioneers of the
use of computers in relation to science education. This was in the days of main
frame computers with all their impracticability for use in schools. Nevertheless,
Lunetta saw the potential they had for using simulation to achieve concep-
tual change in physics, by engaging students with integrative graphics. In 1974
he published this work in The Physics Teacher, but it was many years later
that the advances in computer technology made his dreams possible in
classrooms on a regular basis.
John Olson, Canada, chose as significant his studies of how children think
about an actual physical phenomenon, and how they think about it as a
computer simulation. As an outcome of these studies, he discussed in one of
the chapters of his book, School Worlds, Micro Worlds, what we can learn
from the synergy between these two sets of student views. Independently,
but around the same time, the Open University in Britain was developing a
course for teachers to introduce them to computers in education. This course
included a software program called Flame Life, that Olson had in fact designed
and written. It is an example of a science simulation based on the experi-
ence of putting a beaker over a burning candle floating on water. In the book
for this Open University course, Olson’s research was cited, thus presenting
this computer program as a case of a simulation for use in schools that had
also been developed in a research context.
So it’s not just software coming out of nowhere; it’s software that has been studied as to its
effects or potential effects. For candles floating in small to medium beakers there is a linear
relation between candle life and beaker size, but as the beakers get larger the linearity fades
away. Other factors than oxygen availability come into play. . . . Kids can handle the range of
 SCIENCE EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND IT 199

smaller beakers, but they can’t all explore big ones (5 l plus). Scale becomes an issue. The
computer speeds up the process, and extends the scale into zones that are beyond the prac-
tical possibilities. Then when you raise with them the additional dimension of what’s missing
in the computer simulation compared with actual experience, all sorts of riches open up.
Olson, Canada

The Technical Education Research Center (TERC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts

has been a major ongoing source of ideas and work in relation to the use of
educational technology (ET). In a conference paper (later published), Robert
Tinker, the Center’s Director reported a project on measuring and modeling
which brought together students make actual measurements of a phenom-
enon, and then with a software program developing a model for the
phenomenon. Horst Schecker, Germany, was very influenced by Tinker’s paper,
and it inspired him to try to use ET to bring more complex phenomena in
the real world into the classroom. In Schecker’s work the use of a spread-
sheet or some other computer tool enabled quantitative work on problems, that
would be not soluble otherwise because of the complexity of the mathematics
involved.
The one or two examples of bringing these activities together in this paper inspired me to work
with students on real situations like in bungy jumping, where the oscillations are not simple
and the force is not just a linear one. Schecker, Germany

The constraint about the number of publications I imposed on the respon-

dents was unfortunate in relation to the link between IT and science education.
I know that Marcia Linn, USA, and Dick Gunstone, Australia, have both
been involved in very interesting studies with doctoral students that should
also be reported in this section, but I cut off their significant work before
these surfaced. No doubt, a number of the other respondents were in a similar
situation.

REFERENCES

MacDonald, A.L. and Kass, H. (1998) Patterns of Student Thinking in Creating Paths of Embodied
Action in Modelling Activity in Physical Science Environments. Paper presented at 1998 annual
meeting of NARST, San Diego, CA, April 19–22,
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1987) The Tree of Knowledge: The biological roots of human
understanding. Boston, MA: Shambala.
Solomon, J. (1988) Science, technology and society courses: Tools for thinking about social
issues. International Journal of Science Education 10(4): 379–387.
Stavy, R. and Tirosh, D. (2000) How Students (Mis-)Understand Science and Mathematics.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Steiner, H-G, (Ed.) (1979) Cooperation between Science Teachers and Mathematics Teachers.
Bielefeld, Germany: Institut für Didaktik der Mathematik der Universität Bielefeld.
Strömdahl, H., Tullberg, A. and Lybeck, L. (1994) The qualitatively different conceptions of
one mol. International Journal of Science Education 16(1): 17–26.
Tullberg, A. Strömdahl, H. and Lybeck, L. (1994) Students’ conceptions of one mol and edu-
cators’ conceptions of how to teach the mole. International Journal of Science Education
16(2): 145–156.
 CHAPTER 15

C O N C L U S I O N : L A N G U A G E A N D S C I E N C E E D U C AT I O N

In this last chapter I return, as might have been expected, to the first of my
perspectives – the identity of science education as a field of research. However,
I do not intend to summarise the evidence that relates to the criteria against
which science education has been judged as a field of research and hence as
having a distinctive identity. My intention for the book was to let researchers
in science education speak for themselves, and thus argue their own case.
This has been done at quite some length in Chapters 6–11 and readers will
judge the extent to which the case has been made, and with respect to which
criteria the case is strongest, and to which it remains a contextual sub-area
of other disciplinary fields.
I will, however, use one of the newer frontiers of the research area, language
in the science classroom as a reference to illustrate how the research is maturing
as its researchers respond to the exciting questions that this frontier is raising.
I suspect had I chosen one of the other new frontiers, such as culture and
science education, or multi-culturalism and the science classroom, or IT and
science education, the same pattern of extensive borrowing of concepts and
theories, with some attempts to indigenise them would have emerged.

LANGUAGE AS AN ISSUE

Since 1990 there has been a rapidly growing awareness among science edu-
cators that the use of language in the science classroom is of central importance.
This importance relates not only to how science is taught and learnt, but also
to issues of what the content for learning science should be. The awakening
of science education researchers to these questions has been so recent that only
a few of my respondents identified their work on this frontier as significant,
although publications about language, by authors outside the science educa-
tion community, were cited several times as major influences.
My views of learning in recent years have been really pushed by two people – the social con-
structivist, Kenneth Gergin and the feminist scholar, Peggy Lather from considering individuals
to considering the social world in which persons move. Gergin’s The Saturated Self taught
me more about postmodernism than any other book I have read. He says it was written for
“his next door neighbor”, whoever that might be! Lather’s Getting Smart: feminist research
and pedagogy with/in the postmodern, helped me through her work on discourse analysis.
Bell, New Zealand

Bell’s early mentor, Rosalind Driver, England, also referred to the language
of the classroom and socio-cultural aspects of learning becoming prominent

200
 CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 201

in her thinking about learning. She linked this initially to Douglas Barnes’
From Communication to Curriculum (see Chapter 5) and to Jerome Bruner’s
(1990) Acts of Meaning, but finally chose Common Knowledge by Edwards
and Mercer (1987), because of how that book brought things together for
her. Philip Scott, England, who did his doctorate with Rosalind Driver, not sur-
prisingly also endorsed Common Knowledge, as the major influence that
introduced him to Vygotsky’s arresting idea that all learning is based on
language.
If you want to analyse what’s going on in classrooms, you need to pay attention to all the talk
that goes on, and how the talk is used. Scott, England

The paper, Wolff-Michael Roth, Canada, published in Science Education in

1992 stemmed from studies of the use of concept mapping in science class-
rooms. At that time, he thought it was rather outside the mainstream of thinking
because of its focus on the social rather than the individual, as he sought to
open up new avenues for looking at social thinking in the classroom. It also
took the concept map beyond being a useful representation of knowledge to
being a tool for social thinking. Finally, although it did provide a descrip-
tion of what social construction among students is like, he believed it went
beyond mere description to formulating a theoretical perspective that relates
to Vigotsky’s mechanism of learning.
I think it helped me think through some important issues in group work and what social con-
struction could mean in the science classroom. It focussed on the group, the social, as a location
where things happen that then become important to individual cognition. Roth, Canada

In 1990, no papers on language in the science classroom were published in

the three leading journals, Science Education, the JRST and the IJSE. In
1994, there were 20 and in 1998, 18. During this time probably just as many
papers on language in science classrooms, including some by science educa-
tors, were published in journals that are identified with a range of other
disciplines, such as cognitive science, educational psychology, general edu-
cation, language arts, language in education, the teaching of English, etc.
Indeed, the use of language in science classrooms was first recognised as a
frontier of great research interest by scholars in these other fields, and they
had begun to publish in their familiar journals before the science educators
began. It was thus natural that some science educators, whose studies were
directly derivative from the work of these outside authors, would also seek
to publish in these other journals. Thus Jay Lemke, probably the best known
of these science educators through his pioneering book, Talking Science:
Language, Learning and Values, in 1990 had been publishing his work in
such journals, throughout the 1980s. His work is discussed later in the chapter.
This is similar to earlier phases of research in science education that had
a derivative character. For example, Ken Tobin, USA and Barry Fraser,
Australia, in discussing their significant publications both made reference to
202 CHAPTER 15

the fact that its acceptance by the Journal of Experimental Psychology was
a real endorsement of the quality of the research being done by science
educators. It was science education in its classroom contextual sense, but it
was primarily high quality psychological research. The derivative nature of
this new research frontier of language is one of the features that makes it of
interest in considering the maturity of science education research as a field.

WORDS IN SCIENCE

Just as students’ alternative conceptions had its precursive explorers in the

early German scholars and Marvin Oakes (see Chapter 8), so there were
some science educators with an interest in the language of science before it
became commonly recognised as worthy of more general exploration in the
classroom. Alex Johnstone, Scotland, chose his study of Words in Science
as one of his significant publications. It had been inspired by the work of
Paul Gardner (1972), who had, a few years before, published a book with
the same title, Words in Science, following studies in New Guinea, the
Philippines and Australia. Both these researchers focussed on how single words
that are commonly used in science are understood and misunderstood. As a
result of Gardner’s work in particular, appreciation was heightened of the
problems faced by many students in non-Western countries. They have to learn
science in a European language, that is not their mother tongue, or in their own
language, in which there are no simple translations for many words in science,
and perhaps no parallel metaphors of description.
Johnstone moved from his study of words to the application of informa-
tion theory to the verbal and written instructions that are commonly used in
chemistry classes. In many classrooms he and his colleagues found that
overload, in an information sense, was the norm rather than the occasional
exception. As a result, he recommended various ways in which chunking of
the science statements could be used. For example, in relation to the symbolic
language of chemistry, he proposed presenting the same information in a
chunked form in the early stages of teaching and learning (Johnstone and
Kellett, 1980). Gardner (1977) did carry out some further studies in which
his focus was now on the comprehension students have of logical connec-
tives, words in English like because, therefore, since and so. These are
commonly used in the oral or written discourses of science to link observa-
tion to inference, theory to explanation, hypothesis to experiment, experiment
to findings, etc.
A few other researchers like Sutton (1974) in England, and Munby (1976)
in Canada drew attention to the centrality of language in science classrooms,
but it did not become of interest to researchers more widely until the 1990s.
 CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 203

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

Because science has developed such a specialised set of conceptual words

and its own dialect for internal communication, it is not surprising that,
sooner or later, scholars with a general interest in linguistics would turn their
attention to the discourses of science and of science classrooms. Michael
Halliday was one such socio-linguist. More recently, with his colleague, Martin
(1993) he has published extensively on the form and other characteristics of
language in science, in particular the use of the grammatical metaphor of
nominalisation. This, they pointed out, is regularly used as a key linguistic
resource in science. For example, expressing a series of events as a thing allows
this chain of events to assume a participant role in the next part of an
explanation or in the description of some other related phenomena. A case
in point would be the use of the noun, weathering, for the long chain of
processes that break down rocks.
It is not usual for scholars like these linguists to publish in science edu-
cation journals, so their work remained unread for a number of years. Jay
Lemke, whom I first met at the UNESCO Integrated Science Conference in
Nijmegen in 1978, was perhaps the first science educator to become aware that
these scholarly interests could be fruitful in relation to the language in science
classrooms. For a number of summers in the 1980s, he made an annual pil-
grimage from New York to Sydney to learn the tools of the research approach
that had led Halliday (1976) to develop his functional view of language. The
presence of Francis Christie at Deakin University in Victoria, another student
of Halliday, meant that several times in this period we had Jay at Monash,
and hence were made aware that something new was about to happen in our
research field. Receiving a copy of his first large report to the National Science
Foundation confirmed this potential (Lemke, 1983) and prepared the way for
Talking Science: Language, Learning and Values, that opened the frontier
in a most exciting way to the science education research community. It is
still probably the most commonly cited source among science educators of
language studies in classrooms. The methodologies with which he analysed
his transcripts of the classroom oral interchanges make use of (i) activity struc-
tures and (ii) thematic systems, ideas borrowed from the register theory,
semiotics and discourse analysis of Halliday and Hasan (1976). Activity
structures are essentially concerned with how language determines the
dynamics of the social interactions, and thematic systems are about how the
content of the subject is being taught. In the classrooms Lemke studied, this
content was primarily the conceptual descriptions of various topics in a science
curriculum. Consequently, his findings have particular implications for more
effective teaching in this type of conceptually-oriented science curriculum.
In Chapter 5, reference was made to Douglas Barnes’ (1976) studies of
the language in classrooms in the 1970s, and the profound way in which his
204 CHAPTER 15

slim book, From Communication to Curriculum. That book and the one
(with Frankie Todd) that followed in 1977 about communication in small group
discussions in classrooms, influenced science education researchers in a number
of countries. In the former, Barnes identified the dominance and limitations
of teacher talk that is transmissive in function and contrasts it with interchanges
that are interpretive in function. This distinction made good sense to the science
educators who were working on conceptual change and other pedagogical
strategies that were based on constructivist learning. In the second book, the
talk in small groups (some of which involved science topics) was analysed
in terms of its social and cognitive functions, but with cautionary warnings
about the difficulties of using linguistic forms consistently.
In Chapter 5, Marcia Linn, USA, pays tribute to the Russian social psy-
chologist, Vygotsky, and few other science educators were alert to his ideas
so early. Now he is very much in vogue, and a number of these researchers
are making use of his theoretical ideas to describe their data and the modifying
effects that their interventions produce. The same can be said for the work
of Wertsch (1991) in the USA and Edwards and Mercer in Britain (see Scott
in Appendix B) and a number of other socio-linguists. The belated discovery
by science educators of Vygotsky’s work on the social aspects of learning
provided them with a psychological, and thus a more familiar theory on
which to base or interpret their studies of the language in science classrooms,
than the grammatical ones of the linguists like Halliday.

SCIENTIFIC LITERACY

As the main task of school science education was redefined around 1990
from Science for All to Scientific Literacy, the comparison of the role of
science in school with the task of creating language literacy became more
obvious. There was, at last, a pressure from within the science education
community itself to open up the possibility of exploring its teaching and
learning in terms of the language of science, and not just in terms of its con-
ceptual content. The first curricular responses to the challenge of scientific
literacy did not, however, emphasise the discourse of science as a primary goal
for learning. Rather there was a focus on expanding the years in which serious
schooling in science could occur, and on defining a wider range of scientific
topics to be developed as conceptual learning. This was consistent with the
manner in which Hirsh (1987), the author of Cultural Literacy: What every
American needs to know had dealt with science, namely, as a list of scien-
tific terms that were ‘truly essential to a broad grasp of a major science’.
Nevertheless, as the debate about what scientific literacy entails continued
through the 1990s, a number of researchers did see that the pressure for
scientific literacy could be linked to another emerging pressure. This second
pressure stemmed from school science’s failure to distinguish adequately
 CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 205

between the established body of knowledge in science and the nature of

science, the human enterprise that is responsible for the generation and ongoing
development of the knowledge. Most of the successful science learners in
school master a lot of conceptual science content, but have little sense of
the nature of science itself.
The view of literacy presented by Hirsh can be contrasted with that of Olson
(1994). In a chapter called The Making of the Literate Mind, Olson draws
on Kuhn’s idea of the scientific community sharing a paradigm, to claim that
‘to be literate it is not enough to know the words; one must learn how to
participate in the discourse of some textual community. This implies knowing
what texts are important, how they are to be read and interpreted, and how
they are to be applied in talk and action’. Roger Bybee (1997) had a similar
view when he argued that scientific literacy is more than having a vocabu-
lary of words and their connections. He suggested a mutidimensional level
of scientific literacy needs to be aimed at in at least some important broad topic
areas. In this level there is (i) ability and appreciation of identifying ques-
tions and concepts that guide scientific investigations, (ii) awareness of the
design and conduct of scientific investigations, (iii) formulation and revision
of scientific explanations and models using logic and evidence, (iv) recogni-
tion and analysis of alternative explanations and models and (v) communication
and defence of scientific arguments. This is a very similar list to the proce-
dural discourses or higher order tasks Ohlsson (1993), a Swedish American
psycho-linguist with a strong science background, had linked to science
epistemologically.
The combination of the claim of Olson with Bybee’s list of new inten-
tions for school science sets an agenda for studies of how the language of
science occurs in science classrooms and how it can be improved to affect
scientific literacy. Furthermore, the possibility is opened up for research on
language in the various contexts of science education, namely, texts, instruc-
tional manuals, laboratories, and science classrooms. These would thus become,
not merely the sources for scholarly analysis by linguistic researchers, but
sources for the data that relate to questions that are indigenous to science
education.
However, to know what language data to collect, and then how to analyse
it, poses new challenges for science education researchers. Sensibly, some have
seen fit to work in partnership with scholars from one of the language fields.
An example of this cooperative research is reported in the book, Explaining
Science in the Classroom, a study of teachers’ talk in a number of science
classrooms. Its authors are Ogburn, Kress, Martins and McGillicuddy (1996).
The first two and the last are science educators but the third, Gunther Kress
is a socio-linguist. He is a member of the New London Group of scholars in
literacy education, who place emphasis on the fact that students and their
206 CHAPTER 15

teachers need multi-literacies in contemporary societies, that have a multiplicity

of communication channels and increasing cultural diversity.
I experienced the strength of such a partnership of expertise when Ference
Marton and I joined forces to analyse the views of a large number of Nobel
Laureates about scientific intuition, a study Seth Chaiklin had suggested
(Marton, Fensham and Chaiklin, 1994). I was interested to learn more about
the methodology of phenomenography, and so was an apprentice, gaining
valuable tutelage in that aspect from Ference Marton. In turn, I could inter-
pret for him the science being discussed in the data we had – transcripts of
round table discussions between the science laureates.
Shared research in science education is common enough, as the many
multi-authored publications in Appendix A and B indicate. Partnerships of
expertise where the authors are from different disciplines are, however, still
quite rare. This may in part stem from the tradition of the PhD degree, the
training ground for researchers, which still has a very strong expectation of
an individual working on an extended study, under a more experienced
researcher in the same field, as supervisor. It may also in part be a consequence
of the curriculum of school science being essentially aimed at producing future
scientists. The content to be learnt has been so intra-science that other exper-
tise has been excluded. As school science shifts to be more and more concerned
with students learning to live at the interfaces between science and society,
partnerships of expertise may well be particularly fruitful directions for the
conduct of research in science education to take.

LANGUAGE IN THE PISA SCIENCE TEST

The current OECD project, Programme for International Student Achievement

(PISA) has a Science component that involves 15 year-old students in a
comparative study of their scientific literacy, as defined by some of these
interfaces. It is a major example of how science education can emerge from
being a rather insulated component of the curriculum, primarily serving the
reproduction of a scientific elite, to be learning in science that is concerned
with the science education of all students in the new 21st century society
(Harlen, 2001). The first testing for Science in 2000 was made up of a number
of tasks associated with thirteen units, each of which was an actual story
about science in, or for the popular media. The tasks required the students
to use some science knowledge to answer a task (or question) about an aspect
of the story. The tasks involved the following science processes – (i) recog-
nising scientific questions, (ii) drawing and evaluating conclusions, (iii)
identifying evidence and data, (iv) communicating conclusions from evidence
and data, and (v) demonstrating understanding of scientific knowledge. In
comparison with the 1994 TIMSS test of Scientific Knowledge, the PISA
 CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 207

Science test has been described as a test of how well students can put their
scientific knowledge to use as an indication of scientific literacy.
Before the testing there was considerable concern about such an unusual
type of science test, and especially about the fact that the test required the
students to read so much prose before a question was asked. The results showed
that the 15 year olds in most of the countries did much better than had been
expected. Furthermore, in the PISA Reading test girls performed significantly
better than boys in all thirty two participating countries, but in the Science test,
with its high reading demand, there were no gender differences in twenty
six of these countries. In just three, boys were better than girls, and in three,
girls surpassed boys. This gender neutrality is a quite remarkable result, and
must be related to the language in the science stories motivationally out-
weighing the usual reading bias (OECD, 2001). This is a clear indication
that affective as well as cognitive aspects of science learning need to be
much more integrated in the questions science educators ask in their research
about the language of the classroom. It has not as yet been the case

ARGUMENT AS A DISCOURSE IN SCIENCE

The scientific discourse that has attracted the greatest attention since 1990
has been scientific argument – how science deals with competing knowledge
claims. This is an aspect of the nature of science that many authors have agreed
is peculiarly important for a future citizen’s understanding of the power and
limitations of science. It is interesting to note that Tom Russell, Canada,
chose as a significant publication a paper about which he still felt very pleased.
It was the only one he had published in JRST (volume 20, 1983). It reported
his analysis of teachers’ discourse in science classrooms, using the charac-
teristics of the model Stephen Toulmin (1969), a philosopher, set out to
distinguish between the practice of argument in linguistic contexts (in which
science is a sub-set) and its use in the contexts of mathematics. For the
former, an argument needs to appeal to warrants, backings, and qualifiers, each
of which can have scientific interpretations, such as the moves from issue to
appropriate instrument to reliable data to agreed conclusion.
I demonstrated how – by very plausible pedagogical moves to keep the lesson moving- the teacher
inadvertently leaves the argument for the point of the lesson incomplete. Thereby in arguing,
if you have not established it on a rational basis, the default source for the authority is the
traditional authority of the teacher’s position. Tom Russell, Canada

This early analysis of teacher classroom discourse in reference to scientific

argument was recognised by NARST as ‘an outstanding paper emphasising
classroom applications’.
Duschl (1990), Kuhn (1993), and Newton, Driver and Osborne (1999) are
among those scholars who more recently have discussed or reported studies
208 CHAPTER 15

of science learning involving argument. Methodology is being developed to

study students’ responses when deliberate opportunities are provided in class
for discussion of claims and counter-claims regarding scientific issues. The
common model for analysing the discourse as scientific argumentation is still
derived from the Toulmin model.

TALK IN THE SOCIAL CLASSROOM

There are at least six discernible current expectations or assumptions of the

role that talk in the classroom can play.
• Talk stimulates activation in working memory and elaboration improves
organisation of knowledge in long term memory.
• Talk promotes cognitive conflict within the individual that leads to learning,
as conflict is resolved.
• Talk provides access to socio-culturally held ideas and to negotiating oppor-
tunities that then influence their internal processing by individuals.
• Talk enables cognitions associated with particular community contexts to
be shared.
• Talk is the means of participating in, and contributing to a community’s
discursive practices.
• Talk is the way distributions of power are established.
A variety of theoretical orientations underpin the studies of these six aspects
of language in the science classroom. Clearly discernible among them are
(i) information/symbolic processing. (ii) cognitive constructivist, (iii) socio-
cultural, (iv) situated learning, (v) discursive psychological, and (vi)
reproduction/deconstructivist. The variety of terms that are being used for
describing this talk-inspired learning is reminiscent of the many terms that
were in use in the 1980s, when students’ alternative conceptions was the
research frontier. A particular term can help to identify the theoretical orien-
tation of an author, but then other authors can blur the terms by using them
indiscriminately among the theoretical orientations. This is especially likely
when the other authors are primarily science educators, rather than members
of these other disciplinary schools of thought. Because of this looseness in
some of the publications about classroom language, that are now appearing
in the science education journals, the theoretical orientation of the author is
not clearly discernible. Indeed, it is not uncommon for an author to cite,
quite eclectically, researchers with different theoretical perspectives about
language, as the inspiration for his/her study! It is thus not surprising, that
the findings from these studies are at best discussed descriptively in terms
of some of the theoretical concepts. Unless a particular theoretical perspec-
tive about language in the science classroom is taken seriously in the design
 CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 209

of a research study, it cannot be expected that the findings from it will be

able to advance the propositions of the theory itself by negation, elabora-
tion, or even by confirmation.
This is not a new occurrence for science education. Over the last 40 years,
science education researchers have been attracted by a number of theoretical
perspectives from other fields in the social or biological sciences. Some of
the concepts and mechanisms of these perspectives can be readily transferred,
with considerable descriptive power, into the teaching and learning contexts
of science education. They may also, by metaphor and analogy, suggest ways
of changing, and perhaps even improving these contexts of practice. This,
for many researchers in the field, is justification enough for such piecemeal
borrowing, since their interest in research is more the link with practice than
with theory development.
It is important, however, for science educators to realise that the task of
serious appropriation and re-construction of borrowed theory, when achieved
in terms that stem from the contexts of science education itself, can deepen
our understanding of these contexts and the practices occurring in them.
In this book we have seen, from the better studies of a large group of science
educators, the claim can be made that research in science education has realised
an identity in some sub-areas of the large domain its researchers now occupy.
In other sub-areas, such an identity still awaits.

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Solomon, Joan (England)

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 APPENDIX B

P U B L I C AT I O N S O F M A J O R I N F L U E N C E B Y
OTHER AUTHORS

Agarkar, Sudhakar (India)

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Aikenhead, Glen (Canada)

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Andersson, Björn, (Sweden)

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Bell, Beverley (New Zealand)

Osborne, R. and Freyberg, P. (Eds.) (1985) Learning in Science: The implications of children’s
science. Auckland: Heinemann.
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Basic Books.
Lather, P. (1991) Getting Smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New
York: Routledge.
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MA: Harvard University Press.

Black, Paul (England)

Epstein, H.T. (1970) A Strategy for Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rutherford, F.J., Holton, G. and Watson, F.G. (1970) The Project Physics Course. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

224
 APPENDIX B 225

Champagne, Audrey (USA)

Driver, R., Guesne, E. and Tiberghien, A. (Eds.) (1985) Children’s Ideas in Science. Open
University Press, Milton Keynes.
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science. Auckland: Heinemann.

Clement, John (USA)

Easley, J.A. Jr. (1974) The structural paradigm in protocol analysis. Journal of Research in
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Cobern, William (USA)

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Tobin, K. (1995) The Practice of Constructivism in Science Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E. and Scott, P. (1994) Constructing scientific knowl-
edge in the classroom. Educational Researcher 23(7): 5–12.

Stavy, Ruth (Israel)

Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Fishbein, E. (1987) Intuition in Science and Mathematics. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel.
Clement, J. (1993) Using bridging analogies and anchoring intuitions to deal with students’
preconceptions in physics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 30(10): 1241–1257.

Stork, Heinrich (Germany)

Adey, P. and Shayer, M. (1994) Really raising standards: Cognitive intervention and academic
achievement. London: Routledge.
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 APPENDIX B 235

Tamir, Pini (Israel)

Ausubel, D. (1968) Educational Psychology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
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Thijs, Gerard (The Netherlands)

Driver, R. and Erickson, G. (1983) Theories-in-action: Some theoretical and empirical issues
in the study of students conceptual frameworks in science. Studies in Science Education
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Gilbert, J. and Watts, M. (1983) Concepts, misconceptions and alternate conceptions: Changing
perspectives in science education. Studies in Science Education 10: 61–98.
Minstrell, J. (1982) Explaining the “at rest” position of an object. The Physics Teacher 20: 10–14.
Clement, J. (1981) Misconceptions concerning Newton’s laws of action and reaction: The
under-estimated importance of the Third Law. In: J.J. Novak (Ed.) Proceedings of the 2nd
International Seminar, “Misconceptions and educational Strategies in Science and
Mathematics”, Vol. III, pp. 39–53. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Tobin, Ken (USA)

Rowe, M.B. (1974) Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on language,
logic and fate control – Part I, Wait-time. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 11(2):
81–94.
Rowe, M.B. (1974) Relation of wait-time and rewards to development of language, logic and fate
control, Part II, Rewards. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 11(4): 291–308.
Rowe, M.B. (1974) Reflections on Wait-Time: Some methodological questions. Journal of
Research in Science Teaching 11(3): 263–280.
Erickson, F. (1986) Qualitative methods. In: M. Wittrock (Ed.) Handbook of Research on
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von Glaserfeld, E. (1984) An introduction to radical constructivism. In: P. Watzlawick (Ed.)
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Norton

Treagust, David (Australia)

Driver, R. and Easley Jr., J. (1978) Pupils and paradigms: A review of literature related to concept
development in adolescent science students. Studies in Science Education 5: 61–84.
Brown, G. and Desforges, C. (1979) Piaget’s Theory: A psychological critique. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Posner, G.J., Strike, K.A., Hewson, P.W. and Gertzog, W.A. (1982) Accommodation of a
scientist conception: Towards a theory of conceptual change. Science Education 66(2):
211–227.
Shulman, L.S. (1987) Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard
Education Review 57(1): 1–22.

van den Berg, Edward (The Netherlands)

Bates, G. (1978) The (in)effectiveness of laboratory instruction. In: M. Budd Rowe (Ed.) What
Research Says to the Science Teacher, Vol. 1, pp. 55–82, Washington, DC: NSTA
Gunstone, R.F. and White, R.T. (1992) Probing Understanding. London: Falmer Press.
Bibby, C. (1960) Race, Prejudice and Education. London: Heinemann.

Viglietta, Louisa (Italy)

Black, P.J. and Solomon, J. (1985) Life world and science world: Pupils’ ideas about energy.
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Vos, Wobbe de (The Netherlands)

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Waarlo, Jan (The Netherlands)

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Whitelegg, Elizabeth (England)

Wood, D. (1988) How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Woolnough, Brian (England)

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Medawar, P.B. (1970) Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. London: American
Philosophical Society

Wubbels, Theo (The Netherlands)

Leary, T. (1957) Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A functional theory and methodology
for personality evaluation. New York: Ronald Press Co.
 APPENDIX B 237

Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J.H. and Jackson, D. (1967) The Pragmatics of Human Communication.
New York: Norton.

Yager, Robert (USA)

Ziman, J. (1980) Teaching and Learning about Science and Society. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Solomon, J. (1983) Science in a Social Context (SISCON)-in-schools. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Solomon, J. (1988) Science technology and society courses: Tools for thinking about social issues.
International Journal of Science Education 10(4): 379–387.
Osborne, R.J. and Wittrock, M.C. (1985) The generative learning model and its implications
for learning science. Studies in Science Education 12: 59–87.
 NAME INDEX

Abell, S,, 79, 128 Chevallard, Y., 147, 160

Adams, R.J., 125, 131 Christie, F., 203
Adelman, G., 80 Clement, J., 49, 59, 68, 69, 86, 89, 90, 96,
Adey, P., 59, 81 125, 126, 141, 142
Agarkar, S., 31, 66, 166, 167 Cobern, W., 80, 101, 104
Aikenhead, G., 47, 56, 58, 76, 84, 87, 129, 170, Cohen, D., 27
174, 189, 196–198 Conant, J.B., 56
Andersen, A.M., 151, 160, 168, 175 Cosgrove, M., 40, 57, 80–83, 124–126
Anderson, H., 44, 50 Cronbach, L., 28, 50
Andersson, B., 24, 62, 63, 81, 84, 139, 172 Cross, R., 40, 58, 84, 185, 186
Armstrong, H., 20, 121 Curtis, F., 12
Arzi, H., 156, 157, 160
Ashton, B.G., 28 Dahloff, U., 187
Asoko, H., 160 Dahnke, H., 2, 8–10
Ausubel, D., 55, 105–107, 112 de Condillac, A., 6
de Vos, W., 51, 156
Baddeley, L., 105 Delacote, G., 26, 46, 84
Baez, A., 31 Dewey, J., 20, 54, 121, 174
Baker, J.R., 28 Dierks, W., 145, 160
Baker, K., 196 Doig, B., 125
Barnes, D., 46, 55, 127, 201, 203, 204, 208, Driver, R., xi, xiv, 37, 45–47, 49, 50, 53, 73,
209 76, 81, 88, 90, 95, 125, 137–140, 154, 160,
Bassey, M., 162 162, 170, 200, 207, 210
Beavin, J., 83 Driscoll, D., 122
Bell, B., 84, 86, 89, 95, 110, 112, 141, 180, 200 Duit, R., xiii, xiv, 10, 44, 57, 71, 74, 77, 88,
Berger, J., 78, 120 89, 94, 95, 137, 138, 144, 157, 165
Bernal, J.D., 58, 90, 185 Duschl, R.A., 112, 207, 209
Bishop, A.A., 28
Black, P., 69, 86, 94, 157–159, 163, 167–169, Easley Jr., J., 46, 49, 53, 78, 88, 95, 120, 125,
172, 173, 190, 195 137, 138, 183, 185
Blades, D.W., 158, 160, 184, 190 Edwards, D., 81, 139, 201, 204
Boenig, R.W., 12 Eggleston, J., 80, 102
Böhma, G., 77 Eijkelhof, H., 85, 86, 88, 155, 171, 196, 197
Bowen, G.M., 141 Einstein, A., 55
Brady, C., 28 El-Banna, H., 105
Broadhurst, N., 27 Englund, T., 187
Bruner, J., 19, 36, 55, 81, 105, 201 Epstein, H.T., 169
Burnett, R.W., 13, 14 Erickson, F., 85
Butterfield, H., 6, 10 Erickson, G., 38, 43, 44, 54, 56, 78, 125, 128,
Bybee, R., 205, 209 138, 139
Ericsson, K.A., 127
Carey, S., 45
Chaiklin, S., 206, 210 Fairbrother, R., 24
Champagne, A., 45, 46, 88, 89, 139 Fawns, R., 38–41, 56, 82, 122, 134, 183, 188

238
 NAME INDEX 239

Fensham, P.J., 23, 36, 39, 52, 60, 72, 74, 78, Halliwell, F., 23
92, 97, 100, 103, 112, 114, 115, 119, 122, Harding, S., 180
128, 131, 148, 149, 157, 158, 160, 182, Harlen, W., 31, 206, 209
184, 194, 206, 210 Harré, R., 57
Feynman, R., 126 Hart, C., 158, 160, 185, 190
Fischbein, E., 45, 83, 91, 109 Hasan, R., 203, 209
Fischof, B., 85 Hashway, M.Z., 84
Fisher, D., 116 Haslam, F., 63
Flanders, N., 46, 80, 102 Hawkins, D., 20
Fleer, M., 41, 65, 66, 89, 181, 194 Hecht, K., 25
Fleming, R., 78–78, 99, 102, 118, 129, 196 Heidegger, M., 37
Foster, L., 27 Hensen, K-H., 148, 160
Frey, K., 25 Herron, D., 44, 50
Fraser, B.J., 43, 72, 74, 77, 79, 99, 116, 117, Hesse, M., 57
131, 136, 177, 181, 182, 201 Hewson, P., 89, 110–113, 140
Freyberg, P., 35, 52, 73, 86, 89, 123, 170 Hewson, N., 111
Hirsh, E.J., 204, 205, 209
Gabel, D., 40, 44, 50, 72, 74, 83, 130 Hodson, D., 70
Gagné, R., 19, 45, 46, 55, 105, 109 Holton, G., 87, 168
Gallagher, J.J., 133 Holyoake, K., 82
Galton, M., 80,102 Hooper, D., 103, 112
Gardner, M., 31, 43 Hopmann, S., 146, 154, 160, 161
Gardner, P.L., 51, 83, 110, 115, 131, 191–194, Host, V., 26
197, 198, 201, 202, 208, 209 Hughes, M., 126
Garnett, P., 68 Hurd, P.deH., 31, 174
Gaskell, J., 58, 98, 99, 179, 186 Hyde, J., 178
Geertz, C., 139, 196
Genn, J.M., 27 Ingvarson, L., 119, 131
Gergin, K., 86, 200
Gertzog, W., 89, 110 Jackson, D., 83
Gick, M., 82 Jackson, P., 60, 74
Gilbert, J., 10, 46, 53, 59, 84, 88, 110, 112, Jacobson, W., 12
122–124, 138, 165 Jenkins, E.W., 9, 10, 28, 42, 82, 88, 117, 121,
Gilligan, C., 51 143, 144, 162, 163, 175, 183, 187, 188,
Gintis, H.M., 183 192, 193
Giordan, A., 26, 36 Jensen, A., 166
Gowin, D.B., 50, 107, 112 Jimenez-Aleixandre, M.P., 73, 89, 140, 166,
Gräber, W., 107 170, 171
Greene, J.C., 139 Jones, A., 139, 195
Gregory, R., 82 Johnson, M., 85
Guesne, E., 46, 73 Johnstone, A.H., 83, 105, 202, 209
Gudmundottir, S., 153, 160 Jorde, D., 50, 88, 171, 176, 179, 180
Gundem, B.B., 146, 147, 160 Joslin, P.H., 11, 36
Gunning, D., 24 Jueg, A., 24
Gunstone, D., 42, 51, 97, 100, 128, 139, 165, Jung, W., 51, 57, 77, 81
199
Kahle, J.B., 79, 131, 178, 181
Habermas, J., 57 Karplus, R., 20, 44, 46, 50, 81, 180
Hackling, M., 43, 68, 81, 89, 114, 124, 127, Kearney, M., 80, 104
140 Keeves, J., 56, 67, 115, 117, 178, 182
Halliday, M.A.K., 203, 204, 209 Keller, E.F., 180
240 NAME INDEX

Kellett, N.C., 202, 209 Martinand, J-l., 26, 36

Kelly, A., 90, 178 Marton, F., 206, 210
Kerr, J.F., 28 Mason, J., xii, xv, 37, 82
Kilpatrick, J., xii, xv, 1 Matthews, M.R., 85, 86, 92, 122, 131, 143, 144
Kim, I.J., 140, 165 Maturana, H.R., 195, 199
Kirk, C.M., 139, 195 Mayer, J., 43, 154, 155
Kjöllerström, B., 24, 36 MacDonald, A.L., 195, 199
Klafki, W., 147, 148, 150, 160 McCullough, G., 193
Klainin, S., 182 McGaw, B., 125
Knecht, M., 31 McGillicuddy, K., 205, 210
Koju, H., 24 McGinnis, R., 79, 82, 96, 128, 133, 141, 153,
Kotte, D., 178, 182 165, 181
Kraschulchik, M., 31 McKinnon, A., 43
Kress, G., 205. 210 McLaren, A., 179
Kuhn, D., 207, 209 McRobbie, C., 39, 133
Kuhn, T., 56, 84 Mead, M., 27, 36
Kyle Jr., W. 57, 99, 100 Menck, P., 146, 160
Mercer, N.M., 81, 139, 201, 204
Lakoff, G., 85 Meredith, H.M., 28
Lather, P., 86, 180, 200 Métraux, R., 27, 36
Latour, B., 58, 77, 78, 118 Millar, R., 47, 60, 189
Lave, J., 78, 80, 118 Minsky, M.L., 80
Lavoisier, A., 6, 10 Minstrell, J., 59, 86
Lawlor, E.P., 12 Misonda, D., 106
Layton, D., 24, 39, 45, 46, 58, 64, 65, 67, 85, Mitchell, I., 97, 129, 140, 155, 156, 165, 166
88, 90, 102, 121, 127, 183, 192, 193 Mohr, J., 78, 120
Lazarowitz, R., 73, 83, 136 Moon, R., 180
Leach, J., 47, 60, 160 Moos, R., 77, 116
Leary, T., 80, 102, 135, 136 Mortimer, E.F., 154, 160
Lemke, J., 31, 201, 203, 210 Mulcahy, M., 58, 78, 118
Licht, P., 123 Munby, A.H., 98, 137, 202, 210
Lichtenstein, P., 85 Murphy, K.S., 11, 36
Lie, S., 34 Murphy, P., 180
Lindauer, I., 43
Linn, M., 50, 54, 61, 65, 81, 117, 118, 178, Napper, I., 127
199, 204 Newall, A.B., 28
Livinhstone, R., 188 Newton, P., 207, 210
Lockart, D., 31 Niedderer, H., 17, 153, 157
Lui, J., 148, 160 Nisbet, J., 12, 36, 132, 162
Lucht-Wraage, H., 24 Niss, M., 1
Lundgren, U., 187 Norman, D., 105
Lunetta, V., 42, 53, 63, 64, 73, 83, 106, 107, Northfield, J.R., 135, 144
132, 144, 166, 198 Novak, J., 40, 50, 52–54, 62, 64, 79, 105–107,
Lybeck, L., 24, 36, 57, 64, 120, 140, 154, 191, 112, 131, 135, 141, 165, 191
199 Nussbaum, J., 79, 131

Mackay, L., 115 Oakes, M., 122, 131, 137, 144, 202
Malcolm, C., 99, 100 Obourn, E.S., 14
Manthorpe, C., 180 Ogburn, J., 205, 210
Martin, J.R., 203, 209 Ohear, P., 190
Martins, I., 205, 210 Ohlsson, S., 205, 210
 NAME INDEX 241

Oldham, V., 170 Schnack, K., 151, 160, 168, 175

Oliver, J.S., 96 Schön, D., 43
Olson, D.R., 205, 210 Schwab, J.J., 20, 56, 183, 188
Olson, J., 148, 160, 185, 196, 198, 199, 204 Scott, P., 81, 140, 141, 155, 160, 165, 201
Orpwood, G., 56, 57, 130, 131, 174, 189 Semes, C., 28
Osborne, J., 47, 60, 57, 88, 143, 189, 194, Senn-Fenell, C., 148, 161
206, 207, 209, 210 Shapiro, B., 120, 131
Osborne, R., 35, 46, 52, 73, 81, 82, 86, 89, 123, Shayer, M., 59, 81
124, 139, 170, 195 Shulman, L., 50, 97, 100, 146, 152, 153, 155,
Östman, L., 10, 109, 110, 156, 187, 188 161
Shymansky, J., 99
Pak, S.J., 34, 145 Sierpinska, A., xii, xv, 1
Parker, L.H., 177, 182 Simmons, P., 128
Pearsall, M., 181 Simon, H., 127
Pepper, S.C., 119, 131 Sjøberg, S., 31, 34, 181, 182
Pfundt, H., 71, 74, 77, 137 Slovic, P., 85
Phillips, D., 121, Smith, H.A., 14
Piaget, J., 19, 46, 55, 78, 81, 88, 95, 105–107, Solomon, J., 41, 42, 52, 64, 65, 88, 93, 94, 139,
109, 125, 134, 137, 138 140, 154, 157, 196, 197, 199
Pines, A.L., 52, 92, 107 Song, J., 94, 108, 109, 140
Posner, G., 89, 110, 111, 113 Sorensen, H., 151, 160, 168, 175
Power, C.N., 27 Staberg, E-M., 98, 100, 179
Powers, S.R., 174 Stake, R., 120, 185
Price, R., 40 Stanhope, R., 26
Psillos, D., 10 Staudenmaier, J., 193
Pugh, K., 60 Stork, H., 59, 81, 107, 108, 135, 192
Punch, K., 177, 181 Strauss, S., 44
Pushkin, D.B., 10 Strike, I., 89, 110, 111
Strömdahl, H., 154, 161, 191, 199
Ravetz, J., 58 Suchman, L., 78, 118
Reinhold, P., 49, 50, 90, 98, 154 Sullivan, J.W.M., 58
Rennie, L.J., 177, 181, 182 Sutton, C.R., 83, 92, 201, 202, 210
Riaz, P., 24 Swift, J.N., 12
Riesch, W., 85
Riordan, T., 85 Tamir, P., 50, 62, 72, 73, 83, 106, 130, 131,
Riquarts, K., 146, 154, 160, 161 136, 155, 167
Roberts, D.A., 46, 47, 64, 119, 130, 131, 174, Ten Voorde, H., 24
184, 187, 189, 190 Thayer, V.T., 174
Rosier, M., 125, 131 Their, H., 31, 81
Roth, W-M., 39, 78–80, 108, 118, 128, 141, 201 Thijs, G., 1, 59, 62, 86, 96, 123
Rowe, M.B., 31, 72, 85 Thomas, J., 180
Rowell, P., 186 Thomas, K., 179, 182
Russell, T., 55, 64, 98, 126, 136, 137, 207 Thorley, N.R., 111
Rutherford, J., 13, 14, 29, 36, 48, 87, 168 Tiberghien, A., 26, 46, 73, 147, 161
Ryan, A., 129, 197 Tirosh, D., 83, 91, 109, 191, 199
Tinker, R., 199
Schaeffer, G., 83,92 Tisher, R.P., 27
Schaverien, L., 126 Tizard, B., 126
Schecker, H., 42, 77, 81, 82, 128, 171, 199 Tobin, K.G., 39, 43, 71, 72, 74, 79, 85, 99, 104,
Schmidt, H-J., xi, xii, xv, 62, 96, 123, 156, 164, 113, 131–133, 181, 201
165 Todd, F., 204, 209
242 NAME INDEX

Tornebohm, H., 57 Watson, F., 3, 20, 47, 72, 87, 168

Toulmin, S., 54, 107, 113, 136, 207, 208, 210 Watts, M., 59, 138
Treagust, D., xiii, xiv, 11, 35, 36, 43, 44, 61, Watzlawick, P., 83
63, 88, 89, 123, 140, 157, 164, 165, 178 Weninger, J., 145, 161
Tresman, S., 180 Werrtsch, J., 139, 204
Tufte, E.R., 167 West, L.H.T., 52, 92, 107, 182
Tullberg, A., 154, 191, 199 Westbury, I., 56, 146, 148, 154, 161
Turner, R.K., 85 Westphal, W., 85
Tyler, R., 28 White, J., 190
White, R.T., xi, 45, 51, 61, 62, 69, 94, 97,
Ugron, G., 24 100, 109, 127, 128, 131, 157, 160, 165, 167
Ulerick, S., 133 Whitelegg, E., 58, 59, 63, 70, 167, 179–181
Uljens, M., 147, 161 Whitfield, R., 28
Wilkof, N.J., 56
Van den Berg, E., 42, 123 Willis, S., 178
Varela, F.J., 195, 199 Wilson, B., 71, 75
Verdonk, A., 51 Wilson, N., 27
Vásquez-Levy, D., 148, 161 Wittrock, M., 53, 82, 86, 89,195
Viennot, L., 24, 26 Woltze, W., 49, 90
Viglietta, L., 66, 157 Woods, D., 58
Virtanen, L., 24 Woolgar, S., 58, 77, 78, 118
Von Glaserfeld, A., 55, 85, 139 Woolnough, B., 41, 88, 102
Vygotsky, L., 54, 81, 139, 201, 204 Wong, D., 54, 60
Wubbels, T., 62, 80, 83, 84, 102, 135, 136, 172
Waarlo, J., 42, 62, 83, 172
Wagenschein, M., 57, 157 Yager, R., 46, 64, 65, 89, 196, 197
Walberg, H., 77, 116 Young, M., 183
Wandersee, J., 39, 50, 73, 96, 112, 133, 140,
141, 153, 165, 167 Zangwill, O., 80, 103
Waring, M., 183 Ziman, J., 52, 58
 SUBJECT INDEX
absence of research in curriculum development,
19
active centres, 29, 48,
admiration of achievement, 59
affirmation and confidence, 43, 54
ahead of time, 63, 64
alternative conceptions, 88, 137
alternative conceptions and conceptual change,
137
alternative conceptions and gender, 181
alternative conceptions and progression,
137–140
alternative conceptions and teaching, 125
alternative conceptions and theory, 109
alternative conceptions – seminal publications,
88, 89
alternative methodologies, 77
Archimedes in the Classroom, 64, 191
argument as a discourse in science, 206
asking questions, 93
asking questions about content and pedagogy,
97
asking questions about context, 93
asking questions about curriculum reform, 99
asking questions about developing countries,
99
asking questions about gender and science
education, 98
asking questions about socio-scientific issues,
99
assessing good learning, 129
assessment, 164
assessment by self, 130, 167
assessment and teaching and learning, 129,
167, 168
assessment of interest, 115
Australia – research origins, 26
Australian Science Teachers Journal, 27
Ausubelian theory, 105-107
authority of teacher, 98, 126
being of researcher, xii, 37
bibliographies, 71
Bildung, 147, 148
243
Bildung metaphors, 147, 150
Bildung and science for all, 158
borrowed social theories, 102
borrowed theory, 101, 194, 208
borrowed theory from cognitive science, 105
borrowed theory from cultural studies, 104
borrowed theory from language studies, 209
borrowed theory from psychology, 105
borrowed theory from socio-cultural learning,
139, 204, 208
Britain, research origins, 28
Canadian Journal of Mathematics, Science and
Technology Education, 30
Case Studies in Science Education, 120
case studies of practical knowledge in action,
127
case studies of problem solving, 127
chain of studies, 86, 106, 116, 141, 142
challenges to orthodoxy, 64–66
change of research direction, 85–86
changing paradigms, 127
children’s views about science, 95
citation analysis, xi
classroom discourse, analysis, 195, 201, 203,
207, 208
classroom discourse and construction of
gender, 179
classroom discourse and theoretical orienta-
tions, 208
classroom practitioner to researcher, 134
clinical interviewing, 123
cognitive science, 105
coherence, 69–70
collaborating colleagues, 51, 52, 205, 206
collegial links, 44–46, 51
companion meanings, 192
comparative studies of science achievement,
33, 192, 206, 207, 210
computers and science education, 166, 198,
199
conceptual change, a developing theory, 110
conceptual change and curriculum, 171
conceptual change and progression, 137–140
244 SUBJECT INDEX
conceptual change – seminal publication, 89
constructivist orientation, 88
content, 145
content and pedagogy, 97
content of the curriculum, 187
content-oriented reasoning, 84
context, 64, 93, 94, 97
contextual constructivism, 104
criteria for a research field, 4–8
critique of constructivism, 142, 143
culture of science, 58
cultural theory, 104
curriculum and companion meanings, 187
curriculum and reform, 99
curriculum development, 17, 18
curriculum diffusion, 20
curriculum emphasis, 184
curriculum development to research, 25–29
curriculum tradition, 145, 149, 152, 159
Curriculum v. Didaktik, 146
Curtis Digests, 12
Darwinian machine, 80
deeper understanding of science, 56
developing countries, 99–101, 125
development of borrowed theory, 110
didactique, 147
Didaktik, 145–148
Didaktik analysis, 149
Didaktik v. Curriculum, 146, 148
Didaktik tradition, 149, 152
diffusion of curriculum materials, 20, 21
discourse analysis, 199
division within NARST dreamers, 16
doctoral programs, 24
dreams about science education research,
14–17, 138
edited books, 73, 91
educo-political complexity, 185
emergence of self, 41
enactivism, 194
enculturation, 58, 59
ethnographic methods, 118–121
external significance, 61
European Conference of Research in Chemical
Education (ECRICE), 33
European Journal of Science Education, 30
European Science Education Research
Association (ESERA), 33
field of research, 1, 3, 9
France, research origins, 26
Germany, research origins, 25
Girls and Science and Technology (GASAT),
32
gender and quantitative studies, 177, 178
gender and science education, 98, 176, 180
gender bias, 176
gender construction in classroom, 179
gender differences, 181
gender equality, 176
gender neutral, 179
gender participation, 182
gender – seminal publication, 90
generative learning theory, 89
Group Internationale sur Reserchede
l’Enseignmentde la Physique (GIREP), 31
grand theorizing, 107
growth through writing, 40
handbooks, 72, 83, 91, 99, 100
Harvard Project Physics, 86, 87, 168–170
Higher Education Learning in Physics (HELP),
169
historical studies – seminal publication, 88
history and philosophy of science (HPS),
56–58, 96
HPS, alternative conceptions and pedagogy, 96
ideas or questions for research, 82
identity of science education research, 2
identity as a field of research, 199
implications for research, 152
importance of context, 93
important findings, 67
important problem, 66
improvement of practice, 9
Inarticulate Science, 67
individual initiative, 34
influences from content, 157
influences on curriculum development, 20
inner research, 37, 38
information processing theory, 105
innovations in methodology, 129
institution of science, 185
Institut für Pädogogik Naturwissenschaften an
der Universität Kiel (IPN), 25, 146
internal significance, 63
International Association for the Evaluation
of Educational Achievement (IEA), 33, 117
 SUBJECT INDEX
International Council of Scientific Unions
(ICSU), 31
International Journal of Science Education
(IJSE), 30
International Organisation for Science and
Technology Education (IOSTE), 31
international fora for research exchange, 31
interpersonal diagnosis of personality, 80, 102
interpretive teaching, 203
interview example of data, xiv
interviews, xiv
intra-research criteria, 4
intuition, 83, 109
intuitive rules, 109, 192
IT and science education, 198
IT simulation of science, 42, 64, 166, 198
Journal of Korean Association for Research
in Science Education, 30
Journal of Research in Science Teaching
(JRST), 13, 14, 16, 30
Journal of Science Education in Japan, 30
Journées Internationales sur la Communication,
l’Education et la Culture Scientifiques et
Techniques, 26
key persons in field, 52
laboratory studies, 136
language and science education, 200
language in science classroom, 201, 202, 204
l’Association Didactique Innovation Reserche
en Education Scientifique (DIRES), 26, 33
linking conceptions with pedagogy, 95
logico-structural model, 80
longitudinal reviews, xi
major influences, xiv, 38, 47
mathematics education research, 1
mentor, 44, 50, 82
messenger role, 186
meta-cognition, 140
methodological paradigms, 127, 128
methodologies combining alternative concep-
tions with teaching, 125, 126
methodologies for alternative conceptions,
122–125
methodologies from science, 114
methodologies from humanities, 121, 122
methodology, 114
methodology of phenomenography, 206
245
methods for new policies, 130
models of research, 48, 81–83
moral and political education, 187
multiple publishing, 75
multiple referencing, 92
National Association for Research in Science
teaching (NARST), 11, 13
National Science Foundation, 18
need for coherence, 69
Norway, 34
New Zealand, 35
Nuffield Foundation, 18
O1. Implications for practice, 8, 9, 162
OECD, 206, 207, 210
open experimenting, 154
other influences on curriculum development,
20
outer research, 37
pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), 146,
155, 156
persistence with a theory, 53, 135, 136
personal constructivism, 55, 85
personal exchanges of influence, 47
personal influences of others’ work, 47
personal progression, 132–134
personal thread, 40
personal turning point, 40
persons of influence, 47, 48
philosophy of education, 54
Piagetian theory, 81, 107
Piagetian constructivism, 88
PISA science test, 206, 207
PLON, 87, 170, 171
policy, 130, 164, 172, 174
political nature of school science, 183, 187,
190
political vacuum, 183
practical knowledge in action, 127
pre-theory, 108
problem solving, 127
process of enculturation, 58
progression, 132
progression of research on alternative concep-
tions, 138–140
progressive research on conceptual change,
141–142
progression in teacher education research, 136,
137
246 SUBJECT INDEX
Project to Enhance Effective Learning (PEEL),
165, 166
publications of influence on researcher as
person, 53
qualitative methodologies, 118
quality indicators of research, xii
quantitative methodologies, 116, 177, 178
question of identity, 1, 2
R1. Scientific knowledge, 5, 159
R2. Asking Questions, 6, 93, 100
R3.Conceptual and theoretical developments,
6, 100
R4. Research methodologies, 7, 114
R5 Progression, 7, 132, 143
R6. Model publications, 8, 48, 82
R7. Seminal publications, 8, 48, 87–90
reality checks for curriculum, 68
redefining science content, 154, 155
refining group methods, 123
refining the clinical interview, 123
relationship of mathematics education with
science education, 191
relationship of technology with science, 194
research area as a field of research, xvi
research bases (for curriculum), 19
research beginnings, 22
research on language, 204
research to practice, 162–164
research to practice in teacher education, 172,
173
researcher as person, xi, xii, 37, 53
retrospective satisfaction, 42
risk in research, 128
S1. Academic recognition, 4, 35
S2. Research journals, 4, 30, 35
S3. Professional associations, 4, 30, 35
S4. Research conferences, 4, 31, 35
S5. Research centres, 4, 29, 35
S6. Research training, 4, 29, 35
Scholarly journals, 30
School Science Review, 28
science curriculum development and research,
19
science curriculum development and influ-
ences, 20
science curriculum reform, 99
science education, technology and IT, 190
science education policy, 174
science education research, 11
science education as a research field, xi, xvi, 1,
9
Science for All, 158, 159, 188
Science for the People, 183
science simulation, 64, 198
science teachers plus, 21
science-technology relations, 110
Science-Technology-Society, 99, 110, 129,
196–198
scientific discourse, 203
scientific intuition, 206
scientific literacy, 189, 190, 204, 205
scientific intuition, 206
self discovery, 38, 39
self-initated reviews, 39, 61, 62, 69, 71
self-assessment, 130
self significance, 38
seminal publications, 8, 48, 87–90
sense of culture of science, 58
shared research, 205
significance of research, xvi, 61
significance for curriculum reality, 68
significance for researcher, 38
significant publications, xiv
situated cognition, 80
social construction, 110, 141
Social Issues in Science, 189
social theories, 102, 139
socio-scientific issues, 99
South Africa, 34, 35
spatial abilities and gender, 65, 118, 178
special needs, 180
stages of research, 76, 132–134
status of science subjects, 186
structural criteria, 4, 35
student self-assessment, 130, 167
student sensitive instrument, 129
Studies in Science Education, 30
suggestion of new direction, 95
summaries of research, 70–74
supervisor, 48–50
support for research, 30
talk in classroom, 208
teacher education, 98, 110, 136, 164, 171, 172
teaching, learning and assessment, 164, 166
teaching as communication, 55, 203, 204
technological literacy, 195
Technology and Culture, 193
technology and science, 110, 194
 SUBJECT INDEX
technology and science education, 193
technology and science education – seminal
paper, 90
technology as a subject, 198
technology education, 195
technology, philosophy of, 192
Technology’s Challenge to Science Education,
193
Thailand, 29
The Core Curriculum (Norway), 151, 171
theoretical framework, 79
theoretical orientation, 208
theory for conceptual change, 110–112
theory for teacher education, 110
theory for practice, 112
theory in research, 101
theory of content, 109
theory of learning, 55
theory of conceptions, 109
theory of content, 109
247
thesis of influence, 90, 91, 138
towards theory, 108
transmissive teaching, 204
transformation, 147
trends in science education research, xi
types of influential publications, 90
understanding of science, 56
UNESCO, 31
validation for criteria, 8
Victorian curriculum, 151
Views on Science-Technology-Society
(VOSTS), 129
VOSTS instrument, 197, 198
Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Naturwissen-
schaften, 25
Zür Didaktik der Physik und Chemie, 25
 Science & Technology Education Library
Series editor: William W. Cobern, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, U.S.A.

Publications
11. W.-M. Roth: Authentic School Science. Knowing and Learning in Open-Inquiry
Science Laboratories. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3088-9; Pb: 0-7923-3307-1
12. L.H. Parker, L.J. Rennie and B.J. Fraser (eds.): Gender, Science and Mathematics.
Shortening the Shadow. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3535-X; Pb: 0-7923-3582-1
13. W.-M. Roth: Designing Communities. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4703-X; Pb: 0-7923-4704-8
14. W.W. Cobern (ed.): Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Science Education. An
International Dialogue. 1998. ISBN 0-7923-4987-3; Pb: 0-7923-4988-1
15. W.F. McComas (ed.): The Nature of Science in Science Education. Rationales and
Strategies. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5080-4
16. J. Gess-Newsome and N.C. Lederman (eds.): Examining Pedagogical Content
Knowledge. The Construct and its Implications for Science Education. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5903-8
17. J. Wallace and W. Louden: Teacher’s Learning. Stories of Science Education.
2000 ISBN 0-7923-6259-X; Pb: 0-7923-6260-8
18. D. Shorrocks-Taylor and E.W. Jenkins (eds.): Learning from Others. International
Comparisons in Education. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6343-4
19. W.W. Cobern: Everyday Thoughts about Nature. A Worldview Investigation of
Important Concepts Studients Use to Make Sense of Nature with Specific
Attention to Science. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6344-2; Pb: 0-7923-6345-0
10. S.K. Abell (ed.): Science Teacher Education. An International Perspective. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6455-4
11. K.M. Fisher, J.H. Wandersee and D.E. Moody: Mapping Biology Knowledge.
2000 ISBN 0-7923-6575-5
12. B. Bell and B. Cowie: Formative Assessment and Science Education. 2001
ISBN 0-7923-6768-5; Pb: 0-7923-6769-3
13. D.R. Lavoie and W.-M. Roth (eds.): Models of Science Teacher Preparation.
Theory into Practice. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7129-1
14. S.M. Stocklmayer, M.M. Gore and C. Bryant (eds.): Science Communication in
Theory and Practice. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0130-4; Pb: 1-4020-0131-2
15. V.J. Mayer (ed.): Global Science Literacy. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0514-8
16. D. Psillos and H. Niedderer (eds.): Teaching and Learning in the Science
Laboratory. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-1018-4
17. J.K. Gilbert, O. De Jong, R. Justi, D.F. Treagust and J.H. Van Driel (eds.):
Chemical Education: Towards Research-based Practice. 2003
ISBN 1-4020-1112-1
18. A.E. Lawson: The Neurological Basis of Learning, Development and Discovery.
Implications for Science and Mathematics Instruction. 2003
ISBN 1-4020-1180-6

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS – DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON