Constructivism and Non - Western Science Education Research

In this paper, I argue that science education research and curriculum development efforts in Non-western countries can benefit by adopting a constructivist view of science and science learning. The past efforts at transferring curricula from the West, and local development projects that result in curricula only marginally different from Western curricula, stem from an acultural view of science. These efforts also ground science learning in concepts of logical thinking rather than understanding. The resulting level of science learning, however, has not met expectations. Constructivism offers a very different view of science and science learning. It assumes that logical thinking is an inherently human quality regardless of culture, and instead focuses attention on the processes of interpretation that lead to understanding. Constructivism leads one to expect that students in different cultures will have somewhat different perspectives on science. Science education research should inform curriculum projects that incorporate this point, thus making science curricula authentically sensitive to culture and authentically scientific. Japanese elementary science education based on the Japanese traditional love of nature is a good example. Introduction Educators have long viewed science as either a culture in its own right or as transcending culture. More recently many educators have come to see science as one of several aspects of culture. In this view it is appropriate to speak of Western science since the West is the historic home of modern science, modern in the sense of a hypothetical-deductive, experimental approach to science. 1 It follows that science education is an aspect of culture and thus it is appropriate to speak of Western science education (Ogawa, 1986; Cobern, 1991). "There is," wrote Wilson in 1981, "a growing awareness that, for science education to be effective, it must take much more explicit account of the cultural context of the society which provides its setting, and whose needs it exists to serve" (p. 29). With respect to Non-western cultures, this suggests that a simple transfer of Western educational practices to other cultures including ethnic minority cultures within the West will not due. Indeed, Lewin (1990, p. 1) noted that today "far more children study science in developing countries than earlier but the evidence suggests that the great majority do not master more than a small proportion of the goals set for them."