A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Toward a New Science of Instruction: Programmatic Investigations in Cognitive Science and Education--August 1993

Thinking Through Experimentation

Concerns of Research: Connections Between Subject Matter and Scientific Discovery

Scientific experimentation offers rich opportunities for looking closely at cognitive processes of learning and instruction. In fact, experimentation mirrors the learning process itself. For example, as students experiment within a science domain, they actively seek and generate evidence, reflect on their theories, evaluate data with respect to those theories, check and monitor changes in their beliefs over time, and sometimes generate new ideas about the way the world works.

Thus, in science, as in any field, the attainment of higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills depends on the learner's ability to forge durable, useful connections between background knowledge and the content of instruction. However, the content of each subject has a characteristic structure determined by its fundamental concepts and principles and the cognitive demands they make on learners. Moreover, in science, it is often possible to view the same phenomenon as illustrative different analytic structures. For example, a student may think about the same electrical circuit as being (1) an example of the technological problem of how to set up the circuit so that two switches in different places can turn a light on or off; (2) an example of Ohm's Law, which specifies the relations among voltage, current, and resistance in the circuit; or (3) a context in which the potential difference across the circuit results in a cumulative motion of charges. Although all three of these analytic "views" are about the same circuit, each view contains different elements and different structural relations among the elements. Thus, as in Chi's research, a major goal of learning research is to understand just how the content of a discipline shapes the thinking of those who study it. Given the different structures that occur both within and across scientific disciplines, are there any generally applicable learning skills, or do the strategies and skills in experimentation and discovery depend entirely on the specific form and content of the topic?

While Chi's work concerns the different kinds of mental representations that apply to different scientific concepts, other work at NRCSL has to do with how the comparative structures of scientific disciplines affect learning, experimentation, and discovery. In order to understand better how instruction can encourage students to become scientific thinkers and problem solvers, this work considers the relations among students conceptual beliefs, the structure of the subject matter, and the students strategies for generating and interpreting evidence during experimentation.
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