Education Commons^™

World View, Metaphysics, And Epistemology, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

It has been argued from world view theory that fundamental beliefs about the world exert a powerful influence on how sense is made of events in the world. However, the nature of that influence has remained enigmatic. Hannah Arendt's distinction between thinking and comprehension, and knowing and apprehension provides a clarification. Thinking is the epistemological path to conceptual comprehension. Knowing is the metaphysical path to apprehension - to the acceptance of a concept as true or valid. Comprehension does not necessitate apprehension. One may reject a fully understood concept. The recent discussion in science education about world view is essentially …

Contextual Constructivism: The Impact Of Culture On The Learning And Teaching Of Science, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

Though rooted in Piagetian research, constructivism1 is an avenue of research pertaining to teaching and learning that departed from the neo-Piagetian2 mainstream twenty years ago and has continued on a distinct path of development. The departure was evident by the late seventies, clearly marked by two publications, Novak (1977) and Driver & Easley (1978). For constructivists, learning is not knowledge written on, or transplanted to, a person's mind as if the mind were a blank slate waiting to be written on or an empty gallery waiting to be filled. Constructivists use the metaphor of construction because it aptly summarizes the …

Science Education And The External Perspective On Science, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

In Kuhnian terms, science education has been a process of inducting students into the reigning paradigms of science. While it may never have been explicit, the goals of science education clearly have been to persuade students that science provides a fairly constant, highly justified, and sufficient understanding of physical phenomena. In 1984, Duschl noted that science education had not kept pace with developments in the history and philosophy of science. Positivism was dethroned years ago and it turns out that factors surrounding discovery are at least as important as the justification of knowledge. Indeed, the entire concept of justification has …

Different Perspectives On The Natural World: Biology Professors And Their Students, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

The science classroom is the location of complex interactions between students, teacher, curriculum, and environment. These interactions can lead to conflict where the various factors pertaining to students, teacher, curriculum, and environment are at odds. Interest in these types of conflicts has led to numerous studies of classroom processes including those concerned with gender, ethnicity, religion, and language (e.g., Fraser, 1989). Worldview is a factor of more recent interest to researchers and is at an early stage of methodological development and nascent investigation (Cobern, 1991c). Pertaining to the classroom, worldview research focuses on the fundamental beliefs held by teachers and …

Chaos And Order, Mystery And Knowledge, The Beautiful And Mundane: College Student Conceptualizations Of Nature, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

What do students believe about the world around them? Hawkins (1983) suggested that young students can have a difficult time understanding heliocentrism because their personal experience is literally geocentric. What this illustrates is that meaningful learning in the science classroom presupposes students who enter with beliefs about the world compatible with science as it is taught in the classroom. The study of student beliefs (or for that matter, teacher beliefs) at fundamental levels is the study of worldview (Cobern, 1991a). The research reported here was an interpretive study of beliefs about nature, a delimitation of worldview, held by women college …

World View Theory And Science Education Research, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

This monograph is timely for the membership of NARST. As science educators probe teaching and learning in an endeavor to make sense of learning in classrooms, there is a need for theoretical frameworks to enable new questions to be posed and a correspondingly fresh set of responses to be obtained. World view is a framework that can be applied to research on teaching and learning science and fits well with the trend towards studies that are interpretive in nature. The number of science education researchers using ethnographic techniques in science education research is increasing steadily and theories and methods that …

Education Research Will Not Profit From Radical Constructivism, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

There are moments when philosophy captures the educator's attention. Such an occasion was the opening night of the 1990 annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. Ernst von Glasersfeld gave a highly stimulating lecture on "radical constructivism." Radical constructivism is an epistemological philosophy that divorces knowing from any notion that reality is the referent of knowledge. Radical constructivists argue that adopting this view, rather than realist views, will help teachers improve science instruction. This, however, would mean a dramatic shift away from critical realism which has deep historical roots in Western thought, and which arguably was …

A Logico-Structural, Worldview Analysis Of The Interrelationship Between Science Interest, Gender, And Concept Of Nature, William W. Cobern, Jane E. Ellington, Daniel M. Schores

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

A few years ago I was speaking with a distinguished professor of science explaining to him my concern for the low level of science interest among school level students. I remarked that in my view a major contributor to this lack of interest was the methodology used to teach science. Students forsake science because their own orientation to the world does not allow them to appreciate science as it is typically taught (Cobern, 1989a). The professor immediately added to my sentence "and believed by the vast majority of qualified practitioners." He went on to say that this dropping away of …

Worldview Theory And Science Education Research: Fundamental Epistemological Structure As A Critical Factor In Science Learning And Attitude Development, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

This research paper war originally presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, San Francisco, March 1989. This research was funded by a grant from the Sid Richardson Endowment at Austin College.

Some of the most interesting work currently being done in science education research is with scientifically misconceived ideas about the causes and mechanisms of natural phenomena, or as it is more simply referred to, misconception research. This type of research can be dated as early as the sixties (see Kuethe, 1963; Boyd, 1966); but it came into its own with the 1983 …

Educational Developmentalism In Nigeria: Education For The Masses Or Just Mass-Education?, William W. Cobern, Mohammad I. Junaid

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

In 1983 there was an impressive amount of education news in the media. The western papers and especially the American ones carried numerous articles on the strengths of educational programmes in various countries. There were often articles about strident, high-pressure schooling in Japan; and one read about the Soviet's extreme emphasis on science and, mathematics education. It was the start of the run-up year to elections in the United States and suddenly there was a deluge of campaign rhetoric about education. Both the Democrats and the Republicans deplored the sorry state of American education vis-à-vis the educational strength of America's …

The Church, Education And Third World Development, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

The Third World is the world of underdeveloped and developing nations. As one insightful African noted the preferred term once was "underdeveloped" but now the more positive "developing" is used (Yoloye, 1980, p.vii). Both of these terms were originally used by Westerners to describe how far up the technological/industrial ladder non-Western nations have climbed. One might argue about the appropriateness of judging other cultures by one's own standard. In doing so one assumes at least tacitly if not overtly that his own culture is the superior one. At best this leads to paternalism towards the people of the culture in …

A Proper Attitude Toward Science, William W. Cobern

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

The attitude of a man determine his speech and actions. That is why it is more important for children to leave school with positives attitudes about learning than with acquired and refined skills and knowledge. A child in school may learn to read but unless he also gains a positive attitude about reading he will not read on his own. So it is with science. Along with the acquisition of the skills and knowledge of science should come a positive attitude about science. Furthermore in the field of science as well as a positive one. This is the subject at …