The Need to Emphasize Epistemology in Teaching and Research

1. The Need to Emphasize Epistemology in Teaching and Research How do post secondary students interact with activities so that they can gradually take greater responsibility for their learning, while at the same time succeeding at constructing a deeper understanding of course content ?

2. Paul Hewitt, the author of the best selling Conceptual Physics has written on this subject: “the professor and the students view solving of problems in a very different way. The professor classifies the problems in terms of physics concepts, while the students classify them by situations.” April Interview: Interviewer: okay, now I'm just going to ask you to compare for each course, first of all I'll start with the math 202/203, would you say you're doing better, worse, or about the same in the math course as you are in Dr. Kalman's course AT: Physics it's more like a combination of problem solving and understanding the material.… For physics the problem solving … first of all you have to understand the concept and everything, for mathematics it's more like templates

3. Problem solving skills also requires knowledge of concepts. Until midway through high school, students can be successful at courses by memorizing templates for every situation encountered on an examination. That is apply different templates to different knowledge subsets. Some students can dismiss the conceptual basis of the problems, because their epistemology is formula driven and they accept calculated answers as a goal in itself. Students lack the ability to apply principles garnered from a problem to an apparently different problem.

4. Students hold views different from or alternative to those that they will be taught in their courses Some students view physics as weakly connected pieces of information to be separately learned in contrast to the web of interconnections perceived by their instructors (Hammer, 1989, 1994). • Roth, & Lucas(1997) point out that "meaningful learning in scientific classrooms appears to require that students' worldviews are commensurable with that of the science they experience in and through the reenacted curriculum. " • Helping students to do this involves initiating a growth process which can easily span the entire course.

5. For students to change their epistemology students need to critically examine their view of the world. • Epistemological change in a university gateway course requires the student to reach the highest level of Bloom's taxonomy- • Evaluation: the ability to judge the value of material in the light of a specific purpose using a given criteria. "Students are required to make value judgments, to rate ideas or objects, and to accept or reject materials based on standards." • At this most complex level the key skill is the ability to make judgments. (Jacobs, & Chase, 1992)

6. A study by Huffman and Heller (1995) of 750 university students in a calculus-based introductory physics course shows that most students' personal (alternative) scientific conceptions "are best characterized as loosely organized, ill-defined bits and pieces of knowledge that are dependent upon the specific circumstances in question." Developing a Scientific mindset thus may not simply be a conceptual change from personal scientific concepts to scientifically accepted concepts. It may also be a change in attitude from a view that study in science is a matter of solving problems using an independent set of tools, classified according to problem type, to a view that a science subject consists of a web of interconnected concepts.

7. development of critical thinking is a process. We are uncomfortable with processes - we want conclusions. The need for critical thinking is probably the reason why there has been some difficulties in applying conceptual change models to instruction with younger students. ( Gunstone, Robin Gray and Searle (1992)). Even if students successfully change their mode of solving problems, they are likely to maintain their method of acquiring knowledge by compartmentalization unless they develop adequate critical thinking skills.

8. If we as educators emphasized the need to change students epistemologies more in our teaching, than there may not only be more success in the understanding of the subject by our students, but also be dividends in the future in more directed research by future graduate students. As to future research, I decided to put to the test what a dedication to a clear epistemology would mean to research in my other field as chair of an international series of conferences in high energy physics. I produced a paper showing that with the advent of the Standard Model in the late 1970’s the guiding epistemology became and still is Atomism.

9. A strict adherence to that epistemology requires that quarks cannot be fundamental particles. (Kalman, 2004, 2005). The essential notion of Atomism was set out in 1750 by Rudjer Boscovich: atoms contain smaller parts, which in turn contain still smaller parts, and so on down to the fundamental building blocks of matter. These fundamental particles are indivisible bits of matter that are ungenerated and indestructible. The properties of quarks would fit the description of fundamental particles within a renewed bootstrap model (at the quark level), but are square pegs for fundamental particles as set out by Atomism. Quarks are not indestructible; some can decay into other quarks! (Other reasons why quarks should be considered composite particles are found in the book Preons by D'Souza and Kalman, 1992.)

10. Epistemological change is at the root of major shifts in science. Feyerabend (1993) has pointed out that evaluation of a theoretical framework doesn’t occur until there is an alternative (principle of counter induction.) A scientist who is interested in maximal empirical content, and who wants to understand as many aspects of his theory as possible, will adopt a pluralistic methodology, he will compare theories with other theories rather than with ‘experience ‘, ‘data’, or ‘facts’” An example of a discovery that arises in this way is Galileo’s discovery of inertia.

11. Feyerabend notes that Galileo in his early works had been a follower of Ptolemy.He argued against the motion of the earth; “… objects which one lets fall from high places to the ground such as a stone from the top of a tower would not fall towards the foot of the tower; for during the time which the stone coming rectilinearly towards the ground spends in the air, the earth escaping it, and moving towards the east would receive it in a part far removed from the foot of the tower in exactly the same manner in which a stone that is dropped from the mast of a rapidly moving ship will not fall towards its foot, but move towards the stern” (Galileo (1953). Only later did he take the Copernican point of view and assume that the stone dropped from the mast would fall toward its foot.

12. Feyerabend’s conclusion is that Galileo only arrives at the modern theory of inertia by a critical examination of the tower experiment in the light of two alternative frameworks; that of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. Feyerabend summarizes. The idea that examining alternatives will enhance critical thinking skills and help to produce conceptual change is put to the test by work such as that of Eliason (1996). His work involves “confronting students with two very plausible ideas that they would normally accept uncritically, and then showing that the two ideas are apparently not compatible with each other”.

13. The obvious experimental data favoured Ptolemy rather than Copernicus. Galileo had to have experimental backing for his hypothesis. Bodies had to have the property of inertia. Once the body is dropped from the high tower, it had to continue moving with the same rotational speed as the rotating Earth This property, inertia of the body had to be general. Thus a body moving on an infinite perfectly smooth plane must move forever at the same speed

14. This hypothesis had consequences, which Galileo could test. To Galileo once you have a working theory, all possible developments based on the theory must be correct. Galileo reasoned that objects rolling down an inclined plane behave exactly like a freely falling body, but with the effect of gravity greatly reduced. If the plane is tilted up, the ball while rolling uphill, will go more and more slowly. If it is tilted down, the ball will go faster and faster. If the plane is perfect and horizontal, the ball will neither slow down nor speed up but continue forever.

15. Since Galileo’s hypothesis did not arise from experimental data, it did not fit Bacon’s idea of science. The invention of inertia requires an examination of what would be needed to have the Earth to rotate around its axis and a ball fall straight down beside the high tower. Such a notion requires a high order of critical thinking. Hardly the abilities found in most students entering an introductory course. Galileo’s further use of the abstraction of an infinitely smooth plane is inconceivable to the 50% of students who are still at Piaget’s concrete operational stage.

16. Richard Manson: Hesse shares with Kuhn and Feyerabend a use of examples from the history of science to undermine empiricist and deductivist theories of scientific development and method. The starting-point for her own critique of empiricism has been the thesis of the underdetermination of (scientific) theories by (observational) data. Mary Hesse Hesse builds on the modern theory of hermeneutics developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer based upon notions put forth by his teacher Heidegger. Gadamer argued that it is through language that the world is opened up for us. Our prejudices, whatever aspects of our cultural horizon that we take for granted, are brought into the open in the encounter with the past.

17. In science this could be analogous to students encounters with scientific texts while bringing with them their own conceptions of the world. Gadamer refers to this movement of understanding as the fusion of horizons. As we come, through the work of interpretation, to understand what at first appears alien, we participate in the production of a richer, more encompassing context of meaning. The resulting interaction of text and reader is Gadamer's version of the hermeneutic circle. Jürgen Habermas emphasized that the hermeneutic circle view, must involve critical judgment and reflection.

18. The interplay between the parts and the whole of a text is the way in which our reading adds to the complexity and depth of its meaning. What is immediately striking to readers versed in recent literature in philosophy of science is that almost every point Habermas made about the human sciences has recently been made about the natural sciences.

19. The work of Wittgenstein, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others has in various ways made it apparent that the descriptive language of observables is ‘theory-laden’, that is to say, in every empirical assertion that can be used as a starting-point of scientific investigation and theory, we employ concepts that interpret the data in terms of some general view of the world. It follows, so it is held, that the logic of science is necessarily circular: data are interpreted and sometimes corrected by coherence with theory, and, at least in less extreme versions of the account, theory is also somehow constrained by empirical data. (Hesse, 1980, pp. 171, 172)

20. “Scientific theory is a reading of the ‘book of nature,’requiring circular reinterpretations between theory and observationand also theory and theory, and also requiring ‘dialogue’ about the meaning of theoretical language within the scientific community” (Hesse 1986,181).

21. Students who are having difficulty in physics courses because they can't solve complex quantitative physics problems can write themselves into the solution. because they effectively dialogue about the problem with themselves.

22. Reflective Writing First I have the book definitely, I start reading it slowly because if I read it fast I'll have to go over it again and again…after reading the sections I underline what's most important and then whatever's just in my head I just put it in First it's to prepare yourself before coming to class…(you're, you're just, you're forced obviously to open the book and know what the teacher is going to say…and talk about in class)Next you start thinking of a lot of things at the same time: what you read; Then when I close the book I start thinking; I argue about this, agree with this, disagree with this, and just write,… write, write, write,…

24. Problem Analysis and Goal Setting Mental Representation of Assignment Discourse Knowledge Content Knowledge Rhetorical Problem Space Freewrite on the section Construct canons of argument Identify which concepts are clear and which are not Examine meaning of concepts Content Problem Space Read a new section Identify concepts(may include highlighting summarizing or underlining) Relate to previous sections (establish a roadmap) Problem Translation Problem Translation Knowledge Telling Process Identify questions that need to be answered in class

25. The hermeneutical circle described by Hesse is exactly that employed by a student using reflective writing to understand text. The interplay back and forth between the rhetorical space and the content problem space shown in the diagram is precisely the hermeneutical circle described by Hesse. The examination by Maxwell of the state of Electricity and magnetism in his day and his discovery of an inconsistency between the treatment of the electric and magnetic fields is likewise a hermeneutical circle between theory and theory.

26. Contact Me! Email Calvin.Kalman@Concordia.ca Phone(514)848-2424 xt 3284 Fax(514)848-2828 Write: Department of Physics Concordia University Montreal, QC H3G 1M8 Canada homepage- http://Physics.Concordia.ca/Facultypages/Kalman.html Thanks!!