Students' views about science theory and practice

This month we feature the work of another influential educational thinker - Rosalind Driver (1941-1997).Rosalind Driver is widely acknowledged, by teachers and other educational practitioners in England and abroad, for her contribution to our understanding of how children's ideas about science influence their learning. She began with the perspective that children construct their own ideas about the behaviour of the natural world, as a result of their observations of things happening and the ways that people talk about them. Many children, therefore, think about the process of seeing as involving something going from the eye ('giving a look') rather than light being reflected from an object into the eye. This perspective is consistent with a constructivist view of learning.  Driver's early work was completed in the early 1970s, when Piagetian views were influential. Such views suggested that children find science learning difficult because it requires formal abstract reasoning. Driver, however, showed that children are capable of abstract reasoning in some contexts - while they found 'simpler' forms of reasoning extremely difficult in contexts that are counter-intuitive (after all, the world really does look flat...!). Driver pointed out that the interpretation of scientific phenomena by scientists occurs within a framework of ideas and beliefs held by the participants - and that children's ideas are also shaped by the experiences and ideas that they encounter in everyday life. Driver argued that if children were to develop an understanding of the concepts of science as accepted by the scientific community, they needed to be offered more than just practical experiences. They needed teachers' guidance to help them develop new ways of thinking about their experiences. This often involved children making an intellectual leap by abandoning personal 'alternative frameworks' which, up until then, had worked well for them. During discussions designed to help children make this leap, teachers prompt them to make their thinking explicit, and support them in engaging with new ideas.  This Research for Teachers summary explores the key themes of the 2008 reprinted edition of Driver's 1983 work, 'The Pupil as Scientist?' We have selected this book as the focus of this summary because it documents and explores all her main ideas and findings. All page references in the summary refer to this work. In particular, the summary looks at Driver's propositions that: the alternative frameworks (the ideas that students have already formulated, sometimes described as alternative conceptions) that students bring with them to science lessons may be at odds with the theories the teacher may wish to develop; students' alternative frameworks affect their observations and the sense they make of them; and teachers can help their students develop the concepts and ideas of science agreed on and accepted by the scientific community.  Driver continued to develop and refine her work through a series of studies. For example, she increasingly acknowledged the importance of Vygotsky's ideas of learning in which children create their ideas in the social context of discussion with their peers. This and other developments were drawn together and summarised by her colleague John Leach in 'Rosalind Driver (1941-1997): A tribute to her contribution to research in science education'. It's not just important, historically, that Driver's work helped change practice, but this Research for Teachers summary offers teachers access to some of the thinking behind current teaching and learning approaches in science. The findings from Driver's work and the ideas she proposed about children's thinking in science should help teachers of science at all levels reflect on their own practice and plan future teaching.