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7.4 Expert Knowledge vs. Novice Knowledge

According to Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, and Michelle DiPietro et al., authors of How Learning Works, experts such as practicing scientists use their

background knowledge and experience to “create and maintain, often unconsciously, a complex network that connects the important facts, concepts, procedures, and other elements” within a domain.¹⁵ These networks are often deep, meaningful, and based on abstract principles.¹⁶ Non-experts (e.g. students), on the other hand, only have a handful of superficial ways in which they can organize their knowledge. A study cited by

Ambrose, Bridges, and DiPietro et al. describes how practicing physicists organized different physics problems according to which ‘laws of nature’ informed each problem, while physics students organized the same problems into basic categories such as ramp

15. Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K.

Norman, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass, 2010), 43.

16. Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman, How Learning Works, 43.

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problem or pulley problem.¹⁷ Once again, the notion of purpose cannot be overlooked.

The physicist’s mind naturally identifies complex patterns and relationships because that is how physicists have traditionally solved problems in their field for hundreds of years.

Students, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with expending the least amount of cognitive effort necessary to answer questions correctly, which usually entails sacrificing rigorous thinking for the sake of expediency and convenience.

The authors of How Learning Works continue their comparison of expert and novice organizational structures by suggesting that even though novices (e.g. students) are far from attaining an expert level of expertise (e.g. scientists’ knowledge), “there are instructional approaches that can help students organize their knowledge meaningfully around deep, rather than superficial, features of the domain.”¹⁸ In other words, there are ways to improve novice thinking so that it resembles expert thinking. Or to put it bluntly, there are ways to make students think like scientists. And this is where I disagree with Ambrose, Bridges, and DiPietro et al. and the scores of others in science education who believe that low student interest in science and low science assessment scores can be fixed by treating students like amateur scientists. In his research on the topic, Derek Hodson remarks that “Research fails to yield clear and consistent conclusions about the success of these [laboratory science] courses in sharpening children’s understanding of the nature of science and increasing their abilities to employ the processes of science.”¹⁹ Even worse, these science classes focusing on problem solving and critical thinking have

17. Ibid., 54.

18. Ibid., 58.

19. Derek Hodson, “Towards a Philosophically More Valid Science Curriculum” Science Education 72, no. 1 (1988): 19.

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had the deleterious effect of conflating scientific and non-scientific student models.

Quoting Hodson, “If there is any transfer [of models] it would seem, if anything, to be in the opposite direction, with children applying their everyday thinking skills to laboratory problems.”²⁰ The point of turning the science classroom into a mini laboratory is to give students a space to act and think like amateur scientists, but this transformation cannot occur if students are applying their non-scientific models to solve scientific problems.

Henry Bauer also objects to teaching expert-level science thinking to students because he believes that the science classroom turned laboratory cannot possibly be a site where genuine science education takes place. According to Bauer, the experiments that students learn about and perform in science class are only examples of “successful science,” when in reality “history teaches that the science being done at any given time will largely be discarded, even in the short space of a few years, as unsuccessful.”²¹ In an 1890 interview in Harper's Monthly Magazine, Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”²² When students learn about Thomas Edison and his invention of the light bulb, they are only going to be exposed to the theories and experiments that worked and not the 2998 theories that he discarded. Bauer’s point is that theory and experimental failure are as much a part of science as any successful theory and experiment. In fact, any honest

20. Hodson, “Towards a Philosophically More Valid Science Curriculum,” 20.

21. Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 11.

22. Thomas Edison, “Thomas A. Edison Paper,” Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, accessed on July 17, 2017, http://edison.rutgers.edu/newsletter9.html.

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scientist and historian of science will readily admit that science has seen far more failures than successes. By only exposing students to science’s achievements, students will get the misguided notion that the scientific method, the principal organizational structure of classroom science experiments around the world, ensures success when history has demonstrated otherwise. When Edison's friend and associate Walter S. Mallory was asked about Edison’s experiments on the alkaline battery, Mallory vividly recalled Edison remarking, ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won't work!’²³ Bauer is adamant that science students must no longer be indoctrinated with the myth of the scientific method; rather it should be presented to them as an unattainable ideal that does not mirror what goes on in actual science laboratories.²⁴