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A Research-Informed Instructional Unit to Teach the Nature of Science to Pre-Service Science Teachers

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Abstract

In this paper we discuss the foundations and process of design of a research-informed instructional unit aimed for pre-service science teacher education. The unit covers some key ideas on the nature of science (around methodology, theory change, scientific inference and explanation, values, gender issues) anchoring them in a well-known episode from the history of science—the ‘discovery’ of radium by the Curies. Such episode is mainly examined as reconstructed in the 1997 French commercial film ‘Les Palmes de Monsieur Schutz’. Pre-service science teachers are required to solve three tasks, individually and in small groups; those tasks are respectively centred around: (1) the distinction between ‘discovering’ and ‘inventing’; (2) scientific modelling via abduction; and (3) the extended hagiographic treatment of the figure of Madame Curie. Plenary debates around the tasks aim at acquainting pre-service science teachers with some powerful concepts of twentieth century philosophy of science.

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Notes

  1. See for instance the work of Duschl (1990), Matthews (1994), McComas (1998), Flick et al. (2004), Izquierdo-Aymerich et al. (2004), Adúriz-Bravo (2005b), Lederman (2006), Seroglou (2006), Develaki (2007), Koponen (2007), and Zemplén (2009).

  2. See for instance: Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the ‘national science education standards’ of the US National Academy of Sciences; the initiatives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; the project La main à la pâte from the French Académie des Sciences; UNESCO-OREALC’s programme of scientific education for Latin America and the Caribbean; or the Argentine project of primary scientific literacy (PAC) from the Ministry of Education.

  3. Adúriz-Bravo (2001a, 2004, 2006, 2007a, b), Adúriz-Bravo and Izquierdo-Aymerich (2001), Adúriz-Bravo et al. (2001), Adúriz-Bravo et al. (2001, 2002).

  4. The names of the seven strands are: correspondence/rationality, representation/languages, intervention/method, context/values, evolution/judgement, demarcation/structure, and normativity/recursion (see Adúriz-Bravo 2004).

  5. See Monk and Osborne (1997), Irwin (2000), Stinner et al. (2003).

  6. The text of the unit has been published in Spanish (Adúriz-Bravo 2005a), Catalan (Adúriz-Bravo 2001b), and Greek (Seroglou and Adúriz-Bravo 2007a).

  7. See Izquierdo-Aymerich (2000), Koponen and Mäntylä (2006), Koponen (2007), Mäntylä and Koponen (2007).

  8. See Solsona (1997), Seroglou and Adúriz-Bravo (2007a), Seroglou and Adúriz-Bravo (2007b), Scandroli (2008).

  9. While the expression ‘nature of science’ is utilised with different denotations within the community of didactics of science (cf., McComas 1998; Adúriz-Bravo 2008), the use of the acronym ‘NOS’ is undoubtedly widespread when talking about a curriculum component, i.e., content to be taught in the classroom.

  10. See Izquierdo-Aymerich and Adúriz-Bravo (2003), Develaki (2007), Koponen (2007).

  11. See Adúriz-Bravo (2001a, 2004, 2006, 2007a, b), Adúriz-Bravo and Izquierdo-Aymerich (2001), Adúriz-Bravo et al. (2001), Adúriz-Bravo et al. (2001, 2002).

  12. Information in English on the film is available at the following web-pages: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119855/, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/154828/Les-Palmes-de-Monsieur-Schutz/overview, http://filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Les_Palmes_de_M_Schutz_1997_rev.html, http://www.allmovie.com/work/palmes-de-monsieur-schulz-154828. See also http://www.premiere.fr/film/Les-palmes-de-monsieur-schutz, and http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Palmes_de_M._Schutz_(film,_1997) (both in French).

  13. For instance: the first radioactive metal discovered by the Curies in the film is radium instead of polonium; the French chemist Gustave Bémont (1857–1937), co-author of the paper on radium presented to the Académie des Sciences (Curie et al. 1898), is depicted in the film as an entrepreneur who wants to profit from technical patents; the actual Director of the École when Maria arrives, but not when she discovers radium, was the Alsatian chemist Paul Schützenberger (1829–1897).

  14. For instance the work by scholars such as Michael Matthews, William McComas, and Mercè Izquierdo-Aymerich.

  15. As most of our pre-service science teachers have taken a compulsory one-semester course on the philosophy of science, this previous lesson is devoted to comment on the philosophical concepts that they are supposed to be familiar with. Nevertheless, it is usually the case that our students declaratively ‘know’ this meta-content but are not able to apply it to historical events, or fail to see the connection with educational issues.

  16. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of our manuscript for their suggestion to include this discussion and their analysis of possible difficulties in the implementation of research-based designs.

  17. Pre-service science teachers’ quotations come from observation notes taken on the dialogues occurring during the classes, and from their own written productions. All of them have been translated from Spanish by the authors of this paper.

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Acknowledgments

The unit ‘The discoveries of radium’ is a result of a research project financed by the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBACyT X401).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grupo de Epistemología, Historia y Didáctica de las Ciencias Naturales (GEHyD), Centro de Formación e Investigación en Enseñanza de las Ciencias (CeFIEC), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN), Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), CeFIEC, 2º Piso, Pabellón 2, Ciudad Universitaria, Avenida Intendente Güiraldes 2160, (C1428EGA), Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Agustín Adúriz-Bravo

  2. Departament de Didàctica de la Matemàtica i de les Ciències Experimentals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain

    Agustín Adúriz-Bravo & Mercè Izquierdo-Aymerich

  3. Centre d’Història de les Ciències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain

    Mercè Izquierdo-Aymerich

Authors
  1. Agustín Adúriz-Bravo
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  2. Mercè Izquierdo-Aymerich
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Correspondence to Agustín Adúriz-Bravo.

Additional information

A preliminary, much shorter, version of this paper was published (Adúriz-Bravo and Izquierdo-Aymierich 2004) in the CD-ROM proceedings of the 7th IHPST Conference, held in Canada in 2003.

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Adúriz-Bravo, A., Izquierdo-Aymerich, M. A Research-Informed Instructional Unit to Teach the Nature of Science to Pre-Service Science Teachers. Sci & Educ 18, 1177–1192 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-009-9189-3

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