Science & Mathematics

There has been a strong belief within the science education community since the 1950s that science education ought to involve students in inquiry processes endemic to scientific practice as opposed to just learning the facts of science. This belief is reflected in the emphasis given to 'science as inquiry' in the National Science Education Standards document (NRC, 1996) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993). In spite of this commitment to inquiry in standards documents, it has been reported that students who have completed both a high school qualification and an undergraduate degree may not have experienced such inquiry-based science. That is, pre-service teachers are unlikely to have experienced either inquiry methods of teaching and learning or the discipline of science as inquiry in their own science education. In this paper the discipline of science as inquiry is the focus and an account is given of how a traditional laboratory exercise for the preparation of tin (IV) oxide was converted to an inquiry-based laboratory exercise through the use of historical material form the 19th century and through a focus on the status of the guiding principles and assumptions behind the determination of chemical composition. [Author abstract]

A general explanatory principle for determining whether fluid will flow or will not flow from a siphon is developed and discussed after a consideration of the explanations provided by textbooks and the writings of Blaise Pascal.

In the 1990’s two movements began to challenge the practice of science education from an historical and philosophical perspective. The International History and Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching Group (IHPST) maintains that not enough attention is being given to the intellectual heritage of many of our concepts in science with the result that, while students might be able to solve some quantitative problems in an algorithmic fashion, they have little understanding of the meaning or significance of the concepts they are using. The International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) focuses its attention on the discipline of chemistry and has challenged practising chemists and chemistry educators to address, amongst other things, such fundamental questions as the meaning of the terms atom, element, law, and theory as they are used in chemistry. Is it possible to seek and accomplish conceptual depth, a desire of both international groups, without compromising conceptual usefulness, or must one be compromised in the pursuit of the other? In this paper this question is addressed in relation to the thermodynamic concepts of energy, heat, and work; the foundational concepts of element and the mole; and quantum mechanical concepts in chemistry. A textbook analysis of the definitions and use of these concepts in a tertiary level general chemistry course is given as is the implications of the study for chemistry education. [From publisher's website]

There is an increasing demand being placed on teachers to use episodes from the history of science in their teaching/learning activities in science classes but there is a dearth of material available to teachers that are suitable for such activities. This paper outlines two models of salt dissolution drawn from late 19th and early 20th century chemistry and some of the arguments advanced for each model at the time that are suitable for the senior chemistry classroom. Its suggests that teachers create a fifteen-minute Interactive Historical Vignette using the content of the solution controversy to teach students how scientific knowledge is formed. Chemistry is thus not just exposition and explanation but can be seen as a dynamic process of knowledge construction so important in helping our students understand something of the nature of science.