The story of the photoelectric effect: an intervention study on the use of history and argumentative writing in physics teaching

Background One way of teaching the Nature of Science (NOS) is through historical examples. However, students often find history boring, and it is challenging for physics teachers to engage students.Purpose This paper reports an intervention study where the photoelectric effect is used as a historical case to integrate lessons on NOS with a creative writing task for upper secondary physics students. Students write chronicles imagined to be dated in 1922, where they support either Einstein’s or Lennard’s interpretation of experiments with photoelectric effect. The purpose is to investigate how this approach works in the classroom and to see how argumentative aspects of NOS are included.Sample The sample is a physics class with 13 students in a Norwegian upper-secondary school.Design and methods The intervention is based on a framework of characteristics of NOS. Data are the chronicles authored by the students and interviews.Analysis Analysis is done deductively by interpretive content analysis based on the framework of NOS characteristics.Results Students covered many aspects of NOS in their written work and in their reflections on the photoelectric effect. This includes the use of models, scientific knowledge as tentative, science as a human activity, controversies in science and interaction between theory and observation. However, students did not show a deep understanding of what a scientific model is and tended to think about models in terms of hypotheses, as simply guesses of experimental outcomes.Conclusion We conclude that the creative writing task placed in a historical context is a constructive approach to NOS in school physics. It includes the argumentative nature of scientific work, in ways that are often missing in students’ experimental reports. However, it requires that the teacher is well familiar with the chosen case, and therefore, we recommend that cases are developed for teachers to use.