Cognitive Science and Science Education

" The quality of science education, like mathematics education, is a pervasive concern in educational improvement efforts. The cognitive orientation to the teaching of subject matter provides the context for Carey" s discussion of science education. This orientation begins with the idea that to understand something, one must integrate it with already existing knowledge schemata. The paradox of science education is that its goal is to impart new schemata to replace the student's extant ideas, which differ from the scientific theories being taught. The resolution of this paradox sets the stage for current research in science education. Carey reviews studies that illustrate the extent of the mismatch between the student's schemata and the expert's schemata. She draws out their implications for instruction and for cognitive theories of learning. Several characterizations of the differences between naive and scientific explanations are contrasted: the view from .the cognitive science literature on the novice-expert shift, from the history of science on theory change, and from science educators, as well as from the works of Piaget. -The Editors Many articles in this issue call for a minirevolution in education; indeed, they show that it is already under way, especially in the teaching of reading and writing (see Beck & Carpenter, this issue, pp. 1098-1105; Hayes & Flower, this issue, pp. 1106-1113). The key word in this revolution is understanding. The goal of reading is gaining understanding from texts; teaching reading, then, involves teaching techniques for gaining understanding and monitoring one's current understanding. This may hardly seem the stuff of revolution, but against the backdrop of concern with how to teach the mechanics of decoding texts (a still important goal in the early grades), the addition of this new emphasis and the demonstration that the techniques work even for young and poor readers are indeed revolutionary (e.g., see Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Part of this shift of emphasis is due to the cognitive revolution within psychology, which provides a general account of what it is to understand a text. To understand some new piece of information is to relate it to a mentally represented schema, to integrate it with already existing knowledge. This may also seem self-evident, but a simple demonstration from over a decade ago might show the force of this idea. Try to make sense of the following text (from Bransford & Johnson, 1973): If the balloons popped the sound wouldn't be able to carry since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face to face contact, the least number of things could go wrong. (pp. 392-393). If understanding of this passage eludes you, turn the page and look at Figure 1, a context that provides a key. Bransford and Johnson (1973) showed that subjects who were denied access to the context rated the text as fairly incomprehensible and, when asked to recall the text, remembered very little of it. Apparently, the figure allows access to a known schema (the serenade), which, in turn, provides a framework for comprehension. Simple demonstrations such as these set the stage for analyses of the schemata people have for understanding the world and for techniques that ensure that many different types of connections are made between what is being read and what is already known. What does all this have to do with science education? Surely, understanding should also be at the core of the science curriculum. Our scientific heritage has provided us with deep and counterintuitive understanding of the physical, biological, and social worlds, and we want to teach at least some aspects of that understanding to youngsters. We also want them to grasp the nature of the scientific process, especially how it yields scientific understanding of the natural world. The immediate lessons of the research on reading are clear. Students reading a science text or listening to a science teacher must gain understanding by relating what they are reading (hearing) to what they know, and this requires active, constructive work. This is the cognitive rationale (as opposed to the motivational rationale) for making science lessons relevant to students' concerns. But the serenade example is fundamentally misleading as applied to the problem of gaining understanding of a science text. In the case of science learning, students do not already have the schemata, such as the schema of the serenade, available to form the basis of their understanding. We have arrived at a paradox: To understand text or spoken language, one must relate it to schemata for understanding the world. But the goal of science teaching is imparting new schemata for understanding, schemata not yet in the student's repertoire. So how is the student to understand the texts and lessons that impart the new information? This paradox is real, and failure to grasp October 1986 9 American Psychologist Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/86/$00.75 Vol. 41, No. 10, 1123-113