Learning science and its difficulties

Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories

The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change

The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as scientists?

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Cognitive resistance

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Resistance to the theory of evolution

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Resistance to scientific knowledge in astronomy

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Resistance to scientific knowledge in physics

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McCloskey 1983

Resistance to scientific knowledge in physics

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Resistance to scientific knowledge in biology

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Resistance to scientific knowledge in biology

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Resistance to scientific knowledge as implied in superstition and pseudo-scientific claims

Feynman, 1974 During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy

ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency… Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas – which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked – or very little of it did.  But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world. (Feynman, 1974)

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The “head start” theory

Intuitions/naïve beliefs, core knowledge/skills

For forming an early understanding of the natural world and ot others’ minds partly inherited

the product of natural selection, or exaptations, spandrels…

partly acquired through early observation, imitation predisposition for observation and a sensitivity to

certain stimuli is required

(Bloom & Weisberg, 2007)

The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.

The last several decades of developmental psychology has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off as  "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich understanding of both the physical world (a "naïve physics") and the social world (a "naïve psychology"). Babies know that objects are solid, that they persist over time even when they are out of sight, that they fall to the ground if unsuorted, and that they do not move unless acted upon. They also understand that people move autonomously in response to social and physical events, that they act and react in accord with their goals, and that they respond with appropriate emotions to different situations

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(Bloom & Weisberg, 2007)

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. But these intuitions also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. As Susan Carey once put it, the problem with teaching science to children is "not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach. (Bloom & Weisberg 2007)

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Learning science and its difficulties

Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories

The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change

The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as scientists?

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Conceptual change

(late 1970s) educational research on science education (Clement, McCloskey)

(mid-60s) anti-positivistic view of science gains philosophy (Kuhn, Feyerabend)

(80s-90s) cognitive approach to scientific thinking and change, informed by developmental psychology (Piaget + Spelke, Baillargeon, Carey …)

Give rise to the notions of “misconception” and “conceptual change”

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Uncontroversial: Students arrive to instruction with prior ideas Prior ideas constrain successive learning

Controversial: In what consists the change? What changes? How does change occurs?

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Main ingredients of the « rational » approach to conceptual change

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misconceptions are blocking or filtering good ones, are coherent and organized in theory-like structures

transformation (radical, non-cumulative, change of perspective in which one concept is given out for another, incommensurability between conceptual systems)

conflict between old and new views, and of the experience of conflict as the necessary and sufficient condition for fueling the transformation.

2 main influences : Thomas Kuhn Jean Piaget

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Radical view of what changes = theories (e.g. Susan Carey, Alison Gopnik) that

contain concepts ontologies have to change too (e.g. Magdalene Chi)

because resistant mistakes derive from miscategorizations not just wrong concepts

Less radical view = frameworks (e.g. Stella Vosniadou)

Theories are structured Frameworks are less structured, internal quasi-coherent

explanatory systems, presuppositions

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Soft view of what changes Knowledge in pieces or facets or p-prims (John Minstrell, Andrea

DiSessa) P-prims are many, loosely structured, sometimes highly contextual Children are not scientists

Soft view of the nature of change Reasons for difficulty might be the same in the absence of

previous intuitions: collecting and ordinating pieces is always difficult

Soft view of how to produce change Some facets are consistent with science and can anchor

instruction (John Minstrell) Use both conflict and analogy to produce good explanations (John

Clement) Not necessarily a rational process of transformation, but

accumulation and coordination (Andrea Di Sessa)

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Other questions: Are children really intuitively wrong?

Or is it an artifact of how their beliefs are evaluated ? (e.g. Michael Siegal)

Isn’t it possible that at least certain misconceptions are induced by instruction? (e.g. pathetic fallacy)

Do children (and adults) really change their mind? There’s evidence that instruction masks previous

beliefs rather thn transforming them (e.g. Andrew Shtulman, Kevin Dunbar)

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Learning science and its difficulties

Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories

The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change

The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as scientists?

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The basic idea is that children develop their everyday knowledge of the world using the same cognitive devices that adults use in science. In particular, children develop abstract, coherent, systems of entities and rules, particularly causal entities and rules.That is, they develop theories. ..Children actively experiment with and explore the world, testing the predictions of the theory and gathering relevant evidence…Eventually, however, when many predictions of the theory are falsified, the child begins to seek alternative theories (Gopnik 2003)

Babies as scientists

So-so scientists

Pinker 1997 p. 303

Natural selection, however, did not shape us to earn good grades in science class or to publish in refereed journals. It shaped us to master the local environment, and that led to discrepancies between how we naturally think and what is demanded in the academy.

...

Good science is pedantic, expensive, and subversive. It was an unlikely selection pressure within illiterate foraging bands like our ancestors', and we should expect people's native “scientific” abilities to differ from the original article.

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Unnatural nature of science

Robert McCauley 2000 (Wolpert 1994; Boyer, 1994) Among the huge range of activities scientists undertake, two deserve

particular attention when considering the unnaturalness of science: (1)  scientists develop explanatory theories that challenge

received views about empirical matters and (2)  their critical assessment of those theories highly values evidence born of empirical tests.

What distinguishes science is, first, the relative sophistication and systematicity it brings both to the generation of empirical evidence and to the assessment of that evidence's import for explanatory theories and, second, the pivotal roles that social and cultural arrangements--as opposed to our ordinary cognitive predilections--play in those processes.

The requisite skills neither automatically come to human beings nor automatically become habits of the human mind. This is one of the reasons why science must be taught and why so many have such difficulty both learning it and learning how to do it.

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R. Dawkins (about mystery in physics)

Isn't it possible that our evolved brains because we evolved in what I call "middle world", where we never have to cope either with the very small or the cosmologically very large, we may never actually have an intuitive feel for what is going on in quantum mechanics, we can still test the predictions, do the mathematics and do the physics to actually test the predictions because anybody can read the diagrams

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Forbidden intuitions

Homo scientificus

We do science: it is a fact

Our cognitive apparatus must be somehow prepared for science Research on cognitive precursors of science in the

evolutionary (phylogeny) and developmental (ontogeny) past

But is not pre-wired for professional science Research on tools that make science viable

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Naturalization of scientific thinking

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Precursors of scientific thinking in phylogenesis

Natural (cognitive) enemies of scientific thinking and knowledge in phylogeny

Natural (cognitive) enemies of scientific thinking and knowledge in ontogeny

Precursors of scientific thinking in ontogeny

Cognitive skills and dispositions displayed by scientists

Cognitive skills and dispositions required for science

Mithen McCauley Gopnik Simon Quine

Liebenberg Boyer Chi Spelke Holyoak DiSessa

Carruthers Atran Carey Carey Dunbar

Povinelli Tooby & Cosmides

Bloom Bloom

Pinker

The natural-cultural hypothesis

A mixed origin of science Nature: core knowledge, curiosity, causal reasoning,

sensitivity to regularities, … = capacities that reveal themselves very easily in the

ontogenetic development and probably go far in our evolutionary past

Culture: social cooperation and tools for augmenting cognitive capacities (e.g. writing for transmission, spatial external representations) = capacities that have a natural basis and make our

culture special

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D. Dennett

But what we can see is that what scientists have constructed over the centuries is the  tools, mind tools, thinking tools, mathematical tools which enable us to some degree to overcome the limitations of our evolved brains, our stone-age, if you like, brains;

and overcoming those limitations is not always direct sometimes you have to give up something  you get, you just may never be able as you to think intuitively about this, but you can know, even if you can't think it intuitively, there  is this laborious process you can make progress  and you can have the seed of a certain authority to the progress that you can test that and it can carry you from A to B in the same way you know if you are quadriplegic an artificial device can carry you from A to B, you can't walk from A to B but you get from A to B.

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