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Full-Text Articles in Education
Science Education And The External Perspective On Science, William W. Cobern
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
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
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 …