Not “hands on” but “minds on”: A response to Furtak and Penuel

Furtak and Penuel (Furtak & Penuel, 2019) rightly point to how the simplistic aphorism that science education should be “hands-on” is a gross distortion of what might be productive pedagogy in science education. However, although full of good intentions, I wish to argue that their article adds to the confusion that surrounds the role and value of inquiry-based instruction in the learning of science—confusions which the field would be well-advised to avoid. Scientific experience, as I see it, begins neither with the ‘collection of data’, nor with measurement, neither with experiment nor with observation, but with a world of scientific ideas. That it must begin with a world of ideas is involved in the character of science as a mode of experience…from the beginning the world of scientific experience lies before the scientist in outline; (Oakeshott, 1933) p 182 Oakeshott's point—a point which is fundamental to rebutting the claim that the learning of science necessitates solely a “hands-on” experience—is that science is fundamentally about ideas. And, not any ideas, but a set of unnatural (Wolpert, 1992), uncommon sense ideas (Cromer, 1993) that often appeared to be “crazy” when first proposed. These are ideas which initially beggared belief—from the idea that we live on a sphere which is not flat, to the ideas that the continents were once one, that air has mass, that heavier things do not fall faster, to the idea that you look like your parents because every cell in your body carries a chemically coded message about how to reproduce you. As Stephen Jay Gould (1980) points out, “commonsense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the naive honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor”. That ideas are a key element of science can be seen from Fig. 3.1 (p45) of the Framework for K-12 Science Education – Figure 1 beneath. The three spheres of activity for scientists and engineers This shows that science activity consists of three spaces—an “investigation space” which is concerned with phenomena, “a hypothesis space” in which scientists develop explanations, and “an evaluation space” where they engage in the discursive activity required to evaluate how well the hypotheses fit the data. The evaluation space is necessary as imagining how the world might be is one thing. Getting it right is another. And the history of science is essentially a history of mistakes (Allchin, 2012). Which of these “spaces” is more significant? They are all essential, but it is the having of good ideas that is an a priori requirement. Darwin, Newton, Harvey, Bohr, Crick and Watson, Galileo, Wegner, Rutherford, Einstein, Hawking, Pasteur, Jenner, and more are all testament to the fact that a new model or a new hypothesis is what earns you fame in science. In each case, they took the phenomena and invented/created a new way of seeing it. In short, your name is more likely to be added to science's hall of fame not for an experiment, but rather for developing a new and better idea for explaining a phenomenon. Thus, it is the explanatory theories which these people have built about the world that is the great intellectual achievement of science. An achievement based on seeing the world not as it is but in a way that is fundamentally at odds with perception. Any fool can make an argument that day and night is caused by the Sun moving around the Earth as it patently fits with perception; it takes a genius to recognize that our senses might be deceived and that it is we who are spinning and it is the Sun which is stationary. Thus, the real retort to the argument that science is a “hands-on” experience is “No, sorry. It's mind's on. If you want to understand science, you have to struggle with a lot of difficult and odd ideas. Why do you believe that day and night is caused by a spinning Earth when it blatantly obvious that the Sun moves?” Or “why do you think you live on a sphere when it looks flat. And if it was a sphere, surely all those people on the other side should fall off? And, if you cannot justify the most basic belief we have about the world on which we live, what does that say about your own science education?” A second concern about the article is the suggestion that the teacher should stand back and not present discrepant events drawing instead on students’ ideas and experiences. First of all, students have very limited experiences of the material world as, through no fault of their own, they have been in it for a comparatively short time. Hence their knowledge is often very limited. Second, like all humans they will attempt to use “commonsense” reasoning to develop explanations and “makes sense” of phenomena. And, like the myriad others that have gone before them, they will fail to produce the consensually-agreed scientific explanations as these are not obvious. The fundamental duty of any science teacher then is to introduce the student to the canonical scientific idea which is often strange and stretches the bounds of credulity –from the idea that air has mass to the idea that the speed of light is invariant. For those who believe that the fundamental tenet of a liberal education is “…to learn to see, to experience the world in a way otherwise unknown, and thereby come to have mind in a fuller sense” (Hirst, 1965; p125), the discrepant event is an essential tool. Why? Because the narrative that the science teacher has to tell is that commonsense reasoning has consistently failed to explain what we know about the world. Their responsibility is to introduce students to the unfamiliar, and to the strange and novel ways that science offers of understanding the material world. The discrepant event is a key heuristic for demonstrating the failure of commonsense ways of “making sense”—captured by some of the following imagined rhetorical artefacts. “Do heavier things fall faster? Commonsense tells you yes. Well, look at what happens when I drop this piece of paper and a bunch of keys. It looks like you are right. What if I scrumple the piece of paper and do it again? “You know what is really odd about this lever? With this lever I can lift something which is twice my weight? How can I do that?” “How come that the battery goes flat, when the electric current measured by an ammeter in this simple circuit is the same before and after?” “How come people in Australia, don't fall off the globe?” “How come that when I add 50 ml of alcohol to 50 ml of water, the volume is less than a 100 ml?” “Where does the water on this cold coke can come from? Did it leak out of the can?” “So, you are telling me that heavy things sink and light things float. In that case, what about this grain of sand?” At the heart of all these events is the production of cognitive conflict. The demonstration of the fact that your existing mental schema—the one you brought into the classroom—is inadequate. This is what Piaget defined as the process of accommodation. Science demands accommodation because our cognitive schemas generated from our everyday reasoning just aren't up to the job. Getting it right—that is coming to understand the scientific idea—requires discernment which is achieved by the task of comparison and contrast. This is not to say that we should demean what students bring to the classroom—but what they bring is not sufficient material in the time allowed to begin to construct the understanding that has taken nearly 500 years of sustained intellectual effort to achieve. Nor is it to say that we seek to “remove, or extinguish their previous understandings”. Rather, as Claxton has pointed out, we exist with three theoretical frameworks—gut science (the intuition you use to make immediate judgements), lay science (that sees “cold” as a property of metals and floor tiles), and canonical or school science (Claxton, 1993). The function of a good science education is to develop an understanding of the ideas in this third domain not replace the others. What we do know is that for such cognitive conflict to be productive, the question has to be made meaningful to the student—that is it has to be something which has engaged them (Limón, 2001). Make it meaningful is something which means setting the problem in an everyday context—often using narrative (Ogborn, Kress, Martins, & McGillicuddy, 1996) to tell a story of contrasts. Essentially a story where the teacher says, this is how you see it, let me tell you how I see it. Schwarz and Bransford point to the fact that contrasting cases such as those exemplified above, are essential to generating well-differentiated knowledge about a domain. More important, they can be an extremely important effective and form of instruction generating a “time for telling”(Schwartz & Bransford, 1998)—a strategy which is effective when when used at the appropriate moment. Contrasting students’ ideas with the scientific idea also has another function. Most students will make inappropriate arguments or choices. Error, however, is important as we learn more from our mistakes when accompanied by constructive feedback that we do from getting things right. In short, knowing why something is wrong is an important element of knowing why the right thing is right (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). My third contention with the article is that there is a “similarity between the science instruction for students and what professional scientists do” (p8). To argue this is to fail to recognize that there are also important differences which reflect the fact that there is a fundamental distinction between the goal of science education and the goal of science. The goal of science is to discover new knowledge. The goal of science education, in contrast, is to help students build an understanding of old knowledge, or to put it more accurately, what is the consensually agreed scientific explanation. Students are not contributing to the construction of new knowledge. Rather, they are undertaking a set of activities that, if carefully chosen, will enable them to construct an understanding of “old knowledge.” That means that the “similarity” is limited and what they are asked to do serves a different function. Many of the cognitive exercises the science teacher might ask students to undertake such as a think, pair, share, discussing a concept map, or producing Cornell notes are not part of the repertoire of most scientists’ practice. As pedagogic activities, they are valuable means of achieving some of the goals of science education. Asking students to engage in scientific practice has the goal of providing students with an understanding of the ways and means that scientists use to build scientific knowledge but the similarity is akin to that between a professional pianist's performance of Beethoven's Fifth and the novice's performance of basic scales. Both the playing of scales and the undertaking of science practices are valuable learning activities but that is what they are first and foremost—learning activities. While there is much to commend in Furtak and Penuel's article, as the issue they raise is salient and worthy of consideration, the power of the phrase “hands-on’ is its simplistic, rhetorical appeal. The only way to respond, unfortunately, is with a similarly, simplistic response “No, not hands-on, but minds on”. While what is meant by that will require unpacking, it will be a beginning of an essential rebuttal to this basic public misconception and do more justice to the complex practice that constitutes good science education. The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.