Hi

On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Dewey Dykstra, Jr. wrote:
> >Dewey
> >please explain how the teaching of science can produce this state of
> >affairs.

> >"Dewey Dykstra, Jr." wrote:
> >> >Now! If we live in a world where we
> >> >have very little idea "what's going on",
> >> >but must depend on *scientists* to tell us, how does this differ
> >> >from the role in past of The Roman Catholic Church?

> >> I agree with Brad McCormick's assessment of the situation and it's
> >> implications.  I would argue that this "state of affairs" is socially
> >> constructed in schools as a consequence of the way we teach; the way we
> >> teach science, in particular.

Do you mean that you agree there is no difference between (a)
believing that science's pronouncements are true and (b)
believing that the Roman Catholic Church's pronouncements are
true?  I can think of numerous reasons why scientific statements
are more credible than Roman Catholic (or religious, in
general) statements, thus justifying confidence in the former
(even blind confidence) over confidence in the latter.

> It's fairly simple.  For the last 20 years a large amount of work has been
> done studying students' conceptions of phenomena that we attempt to teach
> in science.  The basic result is that students' conceptions in general do
> not change in any significant way.  A very small percentage eventually do
> change but not until they are well into the process of being majors in
> science and even then it is almost never attributable to direct instruction.

That schools have less of an effect on students than we would
like is probably not surprising.  Parents and other social
institutions (e.g., churches) have a considerable head-start and
get young people when they are far more malleable.  It probably
also doesn't help that, in many cases, the ones doing the
teaching themselves are not that committed to nor knowledgeable
about science.

> A bibliography containing more than 5000 entries assembled from works as
> early as 1978 is available electronically.  This bibliography documents
> these findings.

Do you have the address?

> At the same time most people, at least in the U.S.A., seem to conclude,
> from experiences in science classes that they are increasingly less
> enthusiastic about, that only certain special, smart people can really
> understand this stuff and that they do not count among that number.  I have
> for some years taught a course for non-science majors most of whom start by
> apologizing for the fact that they are not good at science.*
>
> Doesn't this result in Brad's decision being an inevitable outcome?

Not that I can see, if by decision you mean the equating of
belief in science and belief in religious pronouncements.

> PS:*We in the US also learn from our language classes in high school that
> we are not good at learning languages.  Yet, we can express this in
> "perfect" English most of which we learned from scratch (no previous
> language and no language in which we could be instructed at the time).

But in this case we are immersed in an environment in which
English is used constantly by others, generally in a reasonably
fluent matter (I hesitate at the "perfect" even in
quotes!).  I suspect that children of scientists tend to be
fluent at science as well, or at least much more so than the
children of non-scientists.  Perhaps we should take the most
scientific thinking people and put them in preschools and junior
grade levels?

Best wishes
Jim

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James M. Clark                          (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology                (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg                  4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba  R3B 2E9             [log in to unmask]
CANADA                                  http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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