Sam Tsai 蔡坤憲

Science education: Where do we start? The Learning In Science Project (LISP) conducted in New Zealand in 1980s was based on two central questions (Osborne, 1982): 1. What views do children hold about how and why things behave as they do and what meanings do children have for words in science? 2. What learning experiences do children really have in science classrooms and how do these experiences influence the children’s views and meanings? To attempt answers to these questions, Osborne suggested the needs to make decisions about: 1. what meaning and views we would investigate? and 2. how we would undertake such investigation? Answer 1: For what? 1. Things that cause other things to happed 2. Things that sometimes change into other things 3. Things that live and die Answer 2: How? 1. Structure interview: Interview-About-Instance. 2. Classroom observation (informal). Reference: Osborne, R. (1982). Science education: Where do we s...

DiSessa (1980) outlines the conventional way of how students learn the Newton’s law of motion and questions whether teaching novices this way is pedagogically justified. [Quotation] There is a rather striking asymmetry in Newton’s Laws. The first two laws have an incredibly rich and varied network of techniques, equations, important special cases, heuristic advice, etc., relating to them. The spine of the network consists in (1) selecting the physical system(s) of interest, (2) identifying all forces acting on it (them), (3) using F=ma to solve. Branching away, one could organize a great deal of what is taught in elementary mechanics by how it contributes to this general form of analysis. Free-body diagrams contribute prominently on the left-hand side of the equation. The art of selecting a system is a subproblem of free-body analysis. Kinematics provides standardized special cases like uniform acceleration and uniform circular motion as grist for the F=ma machine on the r...

P. 32: ... ... teachers need to be more precise in their language and demand more precise language from their studentsthan has previously been the case. For example, both textbook and teachers (including the three of us) have in the past frequently used expression such as " overcoming inertia " (thereby teaching or reinforcing the notion that inertia is a force ) and " forces produce motion " (thereby reinforcing the notion that constant speed results from the application of of a force ). Gunstone, R. F., Champagne, A. B., & Klopfer, L. E. (1981). Instruction for understanding: A case study. The Australian Science Teachers Journal , 27(3), 27-32.