"Minds of our own"
I must recommend a couple of videos to any science educators out there. (I just watched the last of them last night.)
A Private Universe was an eye-opening half-hour video that was followed by a short series called Minds of Our Own. (Links go to video on demand from Annenberg Public Media.) Both titles follow a similar format, and pursue similar content. Their subject is the difficulty in getting students to learn science. Both videos make the hypothesis that the major obstacle in science education is not complexity, or abstract reasoning, but pre-existing ideas about the way the world works. Students come into our classrooms with certain notions, and unless we teachers (a) know what those notions are and (b) explicitly confront them, then the students' natural reaction is to stick with their perfectly-reasonable ideas about the way the world works (and reject the scientifically valid ideas about the way the world works).
A Private Universe opens with a scene of Harvard's graduation, and the filmmakers interview the gowned students about the phases of the moon. Full moon, half moon, new moon, half moon again... Why does the moon have phases. Everyone shown indicates they think that it's the shadow of the Earth on the moon that give it its phases. In Minds of Our Own, similarly shocking scenes unfold wherein the graduates of MIT can't use a battery and wire to light a lightbulb, and again where Harvard graduates are tested, this time on the subject of trees. A tiny seed grows into a massive tree: where does all that weight come from? All those interviewed thought the tree's mass came from the soil (as opposed to CO2 in the air). It's really something to see -- some of the brightest students in the country, demonstrating a basic scientific illiteracy.
Subsequent one-on-one interviews with elementary, middle, and high school students probe for deeper understanding of just what these students think is going on. Some of these interviews yield bizarre interpretations of reality so that the student can match their erroneous worldview with their well-developed logic and reasoning. It's quite striking to see the lengths they will stretch their minds to, in order to accomodate their pre-conceived notions. A Harvard education professor (Philip M. Sadler) who is interviewed in the films says "The most important thing we can do as teachers is find out what our students already think when they walk into the classroom" (paraphrase). You can be an extremely skilled intstructor, in other words, but this basic step is essential. If you don't assess your students' understanding before you teach them, you're setting them up for failure. Students must be confronted with their false views and shown why they are false, if they are to open their minds to other possibilities.
One of the most gratifying scenes is when a young man is explaining why pressure increases in a closed piston. At first, he thinks that because the volume is less when the piston is compressed, it must contain less air. But as he's illustrating this notion, and being asked clarifying questions from the interviewer, you can see him realize that the same number of air particles must be in the piston when it is both extended and compressed: they're just closer together when it's compressed!
From the perspective of an educator, the depressing side of this realization is that we have nowhere near the amount of time it would take to have one-on-one conversations with every student to explore their misperceptions and then gently lead them through a line of logical inquiry to correct those ideas. That takes some serious time. Is there a more efficient way to root out these ideas? I'm not sure.
Has anyone else seen these videos? I was very impressed. Now I'm wondering how best to incorporate this new perspective into my own teaching...
Thanks very much to Nicole LaDue (NSF) for sending a DVD of these videos my way.
A Private Universe was an eye-opening half-hour video that was followed by a short series called Minds of Our Own. (Links go to video on demand from Annenberg Public Media.) Both titles follow a similar format, and pursue similar content. Their subject is the difficulty in getting students to learn science. Both videos make the hypothesis that the major obstacle in science education is not complexity, or abstract reasoning, but pre-existing ideas about the way the world works. Students come into our classrooms with certain notions, and unless we teachers (a) know what those notions are and (b) explicitly confront them, then the students' natural reaction is to stick with their perfectly-reasonable ideas about the way the world works (and reject the scientifically valid ideas about the way the world works).
A Private Universe opens with a scene of Harvard's graduation, and the filmmakers interview the gowned students about the phases of the moon. Full moon, half moon, new moon, half moon again... Why does the moon have phases. Everyone shown indicates they think that it's the shadow of the Earth on the moon that give it its phases. In Minds of Our Own, similarly shocking scenes unfold wherein the graduates of MIT can't use a battery and wire to light a lightbulb, and again where Harvard graduates are tested, this time on the subject of trees. A tiny seed grows into a massive tree: where does all that weight come from? All those interviewed thought the tree's mass came from the soil (as opposed to CO2 in the air). It's really something to see -- some of the brightest students in the country, demonstrating a basic scientific illiteracy.
Subsequent one-on-one interviews with elementary, middle, and high school students probe for deeper understanding of just what these students think is going on. Some of these interviews yield bizarre interpretations of reality so that the student can match their erroneous worldview with their well-developed logic and reasoning. It's quite striking to see the lengths they will stretch their minds to, in order to accomodate their pre-conceived notions. A Harvard education professor (Philip M. Sadler) who is interviewed in the films says "The most important thing we can do as teachers is find out what our students already think when they walk into the classroom" (paraphrase). You can be an extremely skilled intstructor, in other words, but this basic step is essential. If you don't assess your students' understanding before you teach them, you're setting them up for failure. Students must be confronted with their false views and shown why they are false, if they are to open their minds to other possibilities.
One of the most gratifying scenes is when a young man is explaining why pressure increases in a closed piston. At first, he thinks that because the volume is less when the piston is compressed, it must contain less air. But as he's illustrating this notion, and being asked clarifying questions from the interviewer, you can see him realize that the same number of air particles must be in the piston when it is both extended and compressed: they're just closer together when it's compressed!
From the perspective of an educator, the depressing side of this realization is that we have nowhere near the amount of time it would take to have one-on-one conversations with every student to explore their misperceptions and then gently lead them through a line of logical inquiry to correct those ideas. That takes some serious time. Is there a more efficient way to root out these ideas? I'm not sure.
Has anyone else seen these videos? I was very impressed. Now I'm wondering how best to incorporate this new perspective into my own teaching...
Thanks very much to Nicole LaDue (NSF) for sending a DVD of these videos my way.
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