Rethinking the Role and Status of Observation in Science Education

Abstract

The publication of the first English translation of Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959 marked the end of a long period of stability in the philosophy of science and the beginning of a period of rapid development and change, marked by the work of Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan, Putnam, and others. The late 1950s also marked the end of a long period of stability in the school science curriculum and the onset of the rapid curriculum developments of the 1960s and 1970s (the Nuffield and Schools Council courses in the U.K., PSSC Physics, Harvard Project Physics, BSCS, CBA, CHEM Study and others in the United States, and ASEP in Australia). Unfortunately, developments in the philosophy of science did not inform and guide developments in the science curriculum. Despite the growing number of books and articles dealing with the curricular implications of issues in the philosophy of science, science teachers and science curriculum developers remain surprisingly ill-informed about fundamental thinking concerning the nature of science and its methodology. As the ASE reports, "most science teachers, who are themselves products of a science education that places a high premium on scientific knowledge and pays lip service to the history and philosophy of science, share with many practicing scientists a scant understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge itself."¹ Elkana² goes so far as to claim that science teachers' understanding trails developments in the philosophy of science by some twenty to thirty years. The view that scientists are also ignorant of the nature of science was expressed some years ago by Medawar: Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be, and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shiftyeyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shiftyeyed, because he is considering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare. If taunted he would probably mumble something about Induction.