Cooperative
Learning, Constructivism, Conceptual Change,
Women's
Ways of Knowing, and Female-Friendly Science:
Are
These Constructs Incongruous With Each Other?
by
Patsy Ann Giese, Ph. D.
Department of Secondary Education/Foundations of Education
Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Slippery Rock, PA 16057-1326, USA
ABSTRACT
Methods of teaching recommended in science education and women's studies literature will be compared and contrasted. In meeting any one set of recommendations, it is possible that parts or all of other sets may be met simultaneously. It is also possible that some recommendations from different sets are mutually exclusive. Examples will be given from a course for undergraduate students who are preparing to be elementary school teachers. The majority of that population in the United States is female. The curriculum materials for this college course are published by the American Association of Physics Teachers under the title Powerful Ideas in Physical Science.
BODY
In this paper, I will describe a course that I currently teach at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, relating my own methods to published literature about education. As teachers, we receive advice from many directions. We must analyze what we hear or read, determining its applicability to our work with students. Next, we must synthesize all of the ideas that seem pertinent. It seems to me similar to first choosing strands and then braiding them together.
The course about which I am writing is called Physics 103: Investigating Matter and Energy. I chose this course title because it describes concisely what is done in this course. Students taking this course earn three semester hours of credit by coming to two-hour class sessions for a total of twenty-nine sessions scheduled over fifteen weeks. Twenty-four students are registered in each section of this course. They work much of the time in six groups comprised of four people sitting at one large laboratory table. Students in this course are freshman through seniors, with more students near the start of their college experience than near the end. Grades are earned based on the quality of journals, examinations, and portfolios.
I use a laboratory manual made by selecting activity sheets that I wrote with eleven others (Dominique P. Casavant, Robert Beck Clark, Dewey I. Dykstra, Dorothy L. Gabel, Fred M. Goldberg, Sandra H. Harpole, John W. Layman, Van E. Neie, Robert H. Poel, Wayne Sukow, and Leon Ukens). This project was funded by the National Science Foundation under a grant titled Physical Science Instruction of Preservice Elementary Teachers (PSI-PET) with to develop a model course in which students would experience the kind of science instruction that they would later be expected to give in elementary schools. The curriculum materials for this course are published by the American Association of Physics Teachers under the title Powerful Ideas in Physical Science.
This course has a content goal to help students come to understand and apply conceptual models to explain a wide variety of observable phenomena. In addition, this course has a metacognitive goal to help students become more aware of and take more responsibility for their own thinking at the same time they increase their understanding and appreciation of other people's thinking (AAPT, 1995). One of my students in 1993 phrased this a bit differently in her portfolio completed at the end of the semester.
I began this class somewhat fearful of the subject of science, but the course followed an easy-to-understand pattern of hands-on experiments....I have gained so much more knowledge by working with a group. Involving other people's opinions initiates a thinking process that must take into consideration the various was of perceiving an experiment. The goal of this class was to gain some knowledge about light, electricity, and heat, but the purpose of this class was to develop a thinking process. Both have been achieved. I learned that, by making mistakes in predicting wrong results, I could gain satisfaction by working through the experiment. Emphasis of finding that initially there are no right or wrong answers promotes a comfort in making those predictions. In most classes, wrong answers are an embarrassment. We have been taught to accept wrong answers as part of our learning experience. Wrong answers lead to the need to discover right answers; thus resulting in the need to follow the steps necessary to obtain that right answer. More times than not, have my predictions been wrong. Yet, I never felt stupid.
Constructivism was the explicit epistemological basis for this for this project from its inception. Ernst von Glasersfeld's ideas influenced our work, and he (1993, p. 24) refers to them as "postepistemological" because his radical constructivism posits a different relationship between knowledge and the external world than does traditional epistemology. The basic principles of radical constructivism are the following:
1. Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication, but it is actively built up by the cognising subject.
2. The function of cognition is adaptive and serves the subject's organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of an objective ontological reality. (von Glasersfeld, 1988, p. 83)
The pedogogical principles the PSI-PET Development Group agreed upon from our mental constructions of constructivism were the following:
1. Prior to instruction, students have beliefs about the physical world, about the roles of students and teachers, and about the nature of science. All of these beliefs influence what students learn.
2. Dissatisfaction with existing ideas causes students to recognize their need to organize their conceptions, make new connections, and build new conceptions.
3. The learner must recognize the status of his or her current conceptions before evaluating their utility and choosing to reconstruct these conceptions (AAPT, 1995).
With these principles as a basis, student pages as well as instructor notes were written. The four units in these materials are Light and Color, Electricity, Heat and the Conservation of Energy, and Nature of Matter. Each unit is composed of six or seven Investigations, and each Investigation includes several classroom activities. Suggestions for homework and other assessment were written, also.
As the initial writing and field testing progressed, the following filter questions were applied to classroom dynamics wherever the written materials were used:
1. Are you providing students with opportunities to examine their prior knowledge?
2. Do you have mechanisms to monitor students' ideas and beliefs throughout the learning process?
3. Are you providing opportunities for students inventing and considering alternate beliefs about how the world works?
4. Are you giving students opportunities to make connections between the new ideas and their previous ideas and experiences?
5. Are you insuring that all ideas of students are being treated as valuable by themselves, their peers, and yourself? (AAPT, 1995, p. 10)
A typical PSI-PET class session begins with students predicting what will happen when a particular equipment setup is used. On the student pages, there is room to draw or write about an activity's prediction under a section labeled What's Your Idea? Students are told to give their reasons for making their predictions, also.
Then the class members clarify their ideas by expressing their own and by discovering alternatives. Students keep notes about this process in a section labeled What are the Group's Ideas? The instructor's penetrating questions are needed to guide this discussion, particularly to ensure that words with multiple meanings are used unambiguously. Often the consensus of small groups is reported to the whole class.
Then students test their predictions through hands-on work or demonstrations. Their results are recorded in the third section, which is called Making Observations. Thinking is focused on discrepancies between predictions and observations, and further experiments may be devised for testing the usefulness of modifications of initial ideas. The instructor must question discerningly, listen astutely, and explain judiciously. In addition, the instructor must encourage students to use these same behaviors in discussions with each other. Neither vague notions nor parroted word combinations can be accepted as evidence of learning.
A Making Sense section is the final section for most activities. Students are expected to come to conclusions about the phenomena studied. New conceptions should be represented in as many forms as possible, for example, in words, symbols, numbers, graphs, diagrams, and pictures. At this point, the instructor may give some information about conventions and concepts developed by scientists. The instructor must decide, in each instance, whether it is better to give direction or to let a student struggle through a difficulty.
Room is left on the activity pages for students to add notes after they make their first responses. This may be done as they perform later activities or as they study outside of class. Occasionally, students are asked to reflect back over several activities in a section called What Can We Say So Far?
Theories about conceptual change have been built on the constructivist principles. Conceptual change can be subdivided into differentiation in which new concepts emerge from more general concepts, class extension in which existing concepts become cases of another subsuming concept, and re-conceptualization in which nature of and relationship between concepts changes significantly (Dykstra, Boyle and Monarch, 1992). After dissatisfaction with existing conceptions, requirements for conceptual change are that the new conception be intelligible, plausible, and fruitful (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982). The status of a conception is increased as more of these three conditions are met (Hewson, 1996). An essential part of conceptual change is eliciting students' views. The What's Your Idea? and What are the Group's Ideas? sections of the PSI-PET student pages are a constant reminder to not skip over this stage as done in so many traditional classrooms. The other sections fulfill the other requirements for conceptual change by giving students opportunities to increase their comprehension of new conceptions, come to believe the new conceptions, and be able to apply the new conception in various situations.
Recommended assessment measures for the PSI-PET project are questions, written explanations , journals, concept maps, interviews, and portfolios. The following are some of the principles for assessment stated in the PSI-PET course manual (AAPT, 1995). Performance assessment measures (which elicit from students the behaviors targeted in curriculum goals) should be used more than objective tests (which elicit from students the behavior of choosing the correct response to multiple choice, true-false, and matching questions). To reduce rewards for memorization and routine skills and to increase rewards for critical thinking and complex problem solving, students should have access to books, calculators, and other sources of information during test taking and other assessment activities. Some locus of control should rest with the student being assessed. Some assessment measures that allow for multiple correct responses or products should be used so students do not acquire the misconception that science questions, debates, and controversies always have one right answer. Not all assessment should be done on an individual basis; instead some assessment should be done for cooperative learning groups of students.
A constructivist view does not lead to a simple, uncontested set of rules for pedagogical practice. General agreement is that students need interaction with the physical world and with their peers to stimulate meaning-making. The teacher monitors students' understandings, requests from them evidence and justification, provides constraints for their thinking, and gives them opportunities to represent their knowledge. The teacher's role also includes introducing, when necessary, new ways of thinking about phenomena and working with symbols. Then the teacher guides and supports students as they make sense of these ideas and tools for themselves. Thus, the personal, interpersonal, and public components of constructivism are not separate bases from which to teach science (Driver, 1995; Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer, & Scott, 1994; Rubin, 1995; Tobin & Tippins, 1993).
As with constructivist approaches to teaching, cooperative learning techniques can be thought of as having both personal and interpersonal components. The cognitive developmental perspective emphasizes that during cooperative efforts participants engage in discussion in which cognitive conflict is resolved and inadequate reasoning is modified. The social interdependence perspective has the assumption that the way social interdependence is structured determines how individuals interact. This, in turn, determines what is accomplished by the group (Johnson & Johnson, 1994). Intrinsic motivation is generated by interpersonal factors and joint aspirations.
Cooperative learning groups can be distinguished from traditional learning groups by the following characteristics: positive interdependence, individual accountability, heterogeneous abilities and characteristics of group members, shared leadership, shared responsibility for each other's learning, both task to be accomplished and maintenance of productive group relations emphasized, social skills directly taught by the teacher, group functioning observed by the teacher with occasional intervention, and effectiveness processed by groups (Johnson, Johnson, Holubec, & Roy, 1984).
The PSI-PET materials require the use of groups, but these may vary in the extent they are contain the characteristics listed in the preceding paragraph. Most of these characteristics depend, not on the written materials, but on the classroom procedures implemented by the instructor. Cooperative skills will be developed and practiced by students during PSI-PET activities no matter where the groups are on the continuum for cooperative to traditional. These skills include summarizing out loud, seeking elaboration, criticizing ideas (not people), asking for justification, and integrating ideas (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1987). These same skills are required of students to establish instruction based on constructivist learning theory (Fosnot, 1996) and a classroom climate in which teaching for conceptual change may occur (Hewson, 1996).
One characteristic of the population served by the PSI-PET course leads to further considerations in choosing teaching methodology. At least at this time in the United States, most of the students who are preparing to be elementary school teachers are female. Female-Friendly Science is the title of a book by Sue Rosser (1990), who used understandings developed from women's studies to recommend ways to attract female students to the study and practice of science. This book was never discussed by the nine men and three women in the PSI-PET Development Group.
One of the first things examined by Rosser is the use of classroom behaviors that show preference for or give advantage to males. Certainly, it is compatible with the aims and methods of the PSI-PET course to avoid common biased actions like calling on females less often, waiting a shorter time for answers from females, probing the thinking of males to a greater degree, interrupting females more often, nodding one's head in agreement more frequently in response to comments by males, and using less direct eye contact with females. In the PSI-PET course manual (AAPT, 1995), the fifth filter question (insuring that all ideas of students are treated as valuable) implies that instructor's behaviors will be fair to everyone.
The middle of this book by Rosser (1990) contains her recommendations for teaching science by inclusionary methods. These recommendations were made by generalizing from the work of prominent women scientists. For the observation stage she recommends the following:
1. Expand the kinds of observations beyond those traditionally carried out in scientific research.
2. Increase the numbers of observations and remain longer in the observational stage of the scientific method. (pp. 58-59)
Consistent with constructivist epistemology (Duit, 1995, von Glasersfeld, 1995), Rosser maintained that students' expectations affect their observations. What is a salient factor to one person may be, to another person, not worth noticing. The PSI-PET curriculum materials do foster the habit of evaluating all factors suggested by students in a classroom. The fifth filter question is relevant again. This course encourages more observation than most science courses, which is particularly helpful for students whose previous in-class and out-of-class experiences did not include much hands-on exploration and experimentation with natural phenomena.
For the observation stage, Rosser continued with the following recommendations:
3. Incorporate and validate personal experiences women are likely to have had as part of the class discussion or laboratory exercise.
4. Undertake fewer experiments likely to have applications of direct benefit to the military and propose more experiments to explore problems of social concern.
5. Consider problems that have not been considered worthy of scientific investigation because of the field with which the problem has been traditionally associated. (pp. 59-62)
Rosser's third and fifth recommendations above are met by PSI-PET activities like finding the densities of soft drink can/beverage systems and their component parts. Portfolios also have this result. For example, for a PSI-PET course I taught in 1995, one older-than-average female student reported in her portfolio about teaching physical science concepts to her own children. Their drawings were included as evidence of their learning. One of her classmates, an young single male, wrote about his experiences being a fire-fighter. A student from 1996 chose collecting carbon dioxide gas from a soft drink can as a hands-on activity to describe in her portfolio. She related that recent experience to learning in a high school Chemistry class with the following comments:
I learned a great deal of Chemistry. I can use a formula and read the periodic table. But there in one thing that I was never taught to do in Chemistry; think critically. I was never taught to apply what I was learning to things that are actually going on around me. Therefore, as I produced this document and saw the relationship between concept and real life, I became very motivated to pass on this ability of critical thinking to my students.
The fourth PSI-PET filter question (about giving opportunities to make connections to previous ideas and experiences) is important here.
Rosser ended her discussion of the observation stage with the following recommendations:
6. Formulate hypotheses focusing on gender as a crucial part of the question asked.
7. Undertake the investigation of problems of more holistic, global scope than the more reduced and limited scale problems traditionally considered. (pp. 62-63)
No military examples are included in the PSI-PET materials, but neither are any problems of social concern or hypotheses focusing on gender mentioned in recommendations four and six. The fact that PSI-PET activities within an Investigation are designed to help students construct concepts over several class sessions increases the scope of some problems solved. Certainly there exist traditional curricula in which all problems are of a more limited scope as well as other innovative curricula in which more problems are of a holistic, global scope.
Rosser (1990) made the following five recommendations related to methods used in science classes.
1. Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in data gathering.
2. Use methods from a variety of fields or interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.
3. Include females as experimental subjects in experiment designs.
4. Use more interactive methods, thereby shortening the distance between observer and the object being studied
5. Decrease laboratory exercises in introductory courses in which students must kill animals or render treatment that may be perceived as particularly harsh. (pp. 63-66)
The PSI-PET course has students construct both qualitative and quantitative data. Rosser's phrase "data gathering" in the first recommendation in this set comes from an objectivist position rather and from a constructivist position (Tobin & Tippins, 1993). Rosser's sense of "interactive" as used in the fourth recommendation includes lessening the importance of a scientist's objectivity. Once more, she seems to be moving toward a constructivist position without actually reaching one. There is only one unit of the PSI-PET materials that could be considered interdisciplinary as suggested in the second recommendation, and that is the Nature of Matter unit. It was designed to include concepts taught traditionally in chemistry and in physics classes. The third and fifth of these recommendations seem irrelevant to any physical science course.
Also given were these recommendations for forming conclusions and theories:
1. Use precise, gender neutral language in describing data and presenting theories.
2. Be open to critiques of conclusions and theories drawn from observations differing from those drawn by the traditional male scientist from the same observations.
3. Encourage uncovering of other biases such as those of race, class, sexual preference, and religious affiliation which may permeate theories and conclusions drawn from experimental observation.
4. Encourage development of theories and hypotheses that are relational, interdependent, and multicausal rather than hierarchical, reductionistic, and dualistic. (Rosser, 1990, pp. 66-69)
The first recommendation just listed is met by the PSI-PET materials. However, the concern about bias that is mentioned in the next two recommendations is not specifically dealt with during a course built around the PSI-PET model. Phenomena with multiple causes from related factors have been traditionally seen as too complex for introductory classes, yet these are the type of phenomena encountered everyday. Students in the PSI-PET course do get opportunities to discuss the relative effects of various causes. Students find that much of their data is fits along a continuum rather than fitting into dichotomous categories.
For the practice of female-friendly science, these are the recommendations:
1. Use less competitive models to practice science.
2. Discuss the role of scientist as only one facet which must be smoothly integrated with other aspects of student' lives.
3. Put increased effort into strategies such as teaching and communicating with nonscientists to break down barriers between science and the lay person.
4. Discuss the practical uses to which scientific discoveries are put to help students see science in its social context. (Rosser, 1990, pp. 69-72)
Obviously, Rosser's first recommendation is consistent with the use of cooperative learning teaching methods. The use of shared inquiry and criterion-referenced assessment, as recommended in the PSI-PET course manual (AAPT, 1995), decrease competition. The second recommendation refers to courses for science majors more than for nonmajors. A conscious effort was made to eliminate from the PSI-PET student pages scientific terminology that often produces confusion and anxiety. Sometimes more common language is used at the beginning of a unit and is replaced by the usual scientific term part way through the unit, for example, "obstacleness" is replaced by "electrical resistance." Students are encouraged to apply what they learn to practical situations such as seeing an image formed by reflection of light from a mirror.
In a later chapter of this book, Rosser (1990) dealt with the topic of textbook evaluation. As one would expect, the first aspect mentioned is gender-neutral language and illustrations. The PSI-PET material is gender-neutral, mostly because it uses almost no illustrations of people and almost no pronouns. More unusual for use in evaluation of textbooks is the list of four skill groups and seven motivating elements included in Rosser's book. The PSI-PET materials include numerous opportunities for students to build the logical, spatial, numerical, and investigative skills listed as beneficial for females. The motivating elements in this list were chosen as those that will likely encourage females to continue their study of science. All of these elements occur in the PSI-PET materials. Use of manipulatives is part of the vast majority of PSI-PET activities. Building on students' experiences is another strength of PSI-PET. Female-relevant content is in some PSI-PET activities. Hypothesizing regarding outcome prior to doing an activity is occurs in nearly every PSI-PET activity. Students' presenting evidence is continual when the PSI-PET materials are used. More than one acceptable answer to a question and more than one approach to solving a problem are also expected from many PSI-PET activities. Both of these criteria are important aspects of teaching from a constructivist perspective, also (Lewin, 1995). Overall, using these female-friendly criteria for textbook evaluation, the PSI-PET materials receive a high rating.
In both teaching based on the principles of female-friendly science (Rosser, 1990) and of constructivism (Tobin & Tippins, 1993), women's ways of knowing have value. In the book with that title, Mary Field Belenky and her associates (1986) gave the results of a study of both advantaged and disadvantaged women, from teenagers through mature women more than sixty years old. These authors identified five epistemological categories: silence, received knowledge, subjective knowledge, procedural knowledge, and constructed knowledge. In the first stage, women see themselves as mindless and voiceless ruled by external authorities. Women in the received knowledge stage believe correct answers exist somewhere for every question, and the task is to find the authorities who know these answers. Learning consists of working hard to memorize as many correct answers as possible. Much of their thinking is dualistic. Subjective knowledge is personal and intuitive. Women in the procedural knowledge stage are learning and applying objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge. In the final stage, women have progressed until they value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing, view all knowledge as based on the contexts in which it was developed, and see themselves as creators of new knowledge. Belenky and her associates were careful to only make conclusions warranted by their data from interviewing women. However, I agree with the male physics professor in the PSI-PET Development Group who remarked that these are not just "women's ways of knowing," but can be generalized to "people's ways of knowing."
In the experiences of women in the silence stage, words have been used only to separate, punish, and diminish people, not to connect, reward, or empower them. In the book by Belenky and her associates (p. 25), this phenomena is succinctly described: "Words arise out of wrath, and they provoke wrath." These woman are too afraid most of the time to either think or talk. They accept extreme sex-role stereotypes based on the powerlessness they have experienced.
Language--even literacy--alone does not lead automatically to reflective, abstract thought. In order for reflection to occur, the oral and written forms of language must pass back and forth between persons who both speak and listen or read and write--sharing, expanding, and, reflecting on each other's experiences. Such interchanges lead to ways of knowing that enable individuals to enter into the social and intellectual life of their community. Without them, individuals remain isolated from others; and without tools for representing their experiences, people also remain isolated from the self. (Belenky et al, 1986, pp. 25-26)
This emphasis on the indispensable nature of language for development of understanding is shared by educators working from a constructivist perspective (Driver, 1995, von Glasersfeld, 1995).
Women in this stage can only think about the present (but neither the past nor the future), about the actual (but neither the imaginary nor the metaphorical), about the concrete (but neither the deduced not the induced), about the specific (but neither the generalized nor the contextualized), and about behaviors (but neither values nor motives). The most poignant aspect of these women is that they find it impossible to describe themselves. One responded to the question "How would you describe yourself to yourself?" with, "I don't know.... No one has told me yet what they thought of me" (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 31). In response to this question, none of these women provided physical characteristics such as height or hair color. It seems they could not picture themselves at all. The few who gave some description spoke only of their movements to and from buildings and other geographical spaces.
Fortunately, not all women are at the silence stage. Women in the next stage, that of received knowledge, either "get" an idea or not. They lack a notion of understanding taking place over time from the exercise of reason. They collect facts, but they do not develop opinions. Here is what one of these women said in an interview:
There are absolutes in math and sciences. You feel that you can accomplish something by--by getting something down pat. Work in other courses seems to accomplish nothing, just seems so worthless. It doesn't really matter whether you are right or wrong, 'cause there really isn't right or wrong. (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 42)
Students like this make a copy of material taught, first in their notes and then in their heads. No transformation of the material occurs. They willingly reproduce the material on demand, but they feel irritated and confused if they are asked to apply the material or produce their own ideas.
With the onset of subjective knowing, respect of scientists and mathematicians as the ultimate authorities changes into distrust and resentment of them. This type of student feels alienated from science and mathematics as they are traditionally taught. Here are some comments from women in Belenky's study (1986, pp 71-73):
What's missing in science is a whole sort of human element. It doesn't seem to be infused with any morality. It doesn't even seem to be a world about people anymore.
I'm having a hard time with the premise that truth is scientific knowledge, because for me it isn't that at all. For me, truth is internal knowledge. I don't think we need scientific methods to ascertain what's right at all. I think we need internal exploration and knowledge of self to know what's right and what is true.
I think women have been cowed by science. We've been told, "That's unlogical, that's unscientific. Anything you can't prove is not worth talking about." They're saying if you can't prove your sensations, you don't got 'em. Our society is trying to suppress the senses in favor of what goes on from the eyes up. That's so destructive.
Scientists seem to lack a whole feeling of things, that other perception of nonmaterial, non-concrete things.....A lot of books in psychology, especially in medicine, seem to have a whole separate vocabulary than normal thinking. Reading books when I can't understand them makes me not want to read them. I've talked to other women and they find it hard, too.
If I read something, and it agrees with my senses, then I believe it, I know it. If it doesn't, I'll say, "Well, you may be right but I can't corroborate that." For me, proof is usually a sensory one. If you say, "Water falls," yeah, I believe it because I've seen it happen. If you call it gravity, then I say, "Oh is that what you call it?' One doesn't have to be told in words. That's the point. That's the thing that's very hard for word people to believe-- that there are other ways of telling.
According to Belenky and her associates (1986, p. 71), "The passionate rejection of science and scientists, while not true of all subjective knowers, was very common."
Some women never move beyond these first stages of knowing. Others, with enough support and challenge, do learn to accept objective knowledge, engage in reflection, use reason, and analyze logically. Sometimes, the impetus for change is a struggle to defend their own subjectivist views in order not to return to the received knowledge stage that they occupied earlier in their development.
Teachers can help or hinder this transition. One of the woman interviewed in the Belenky project recalled thirty years earlier withdrawing from a college science class. In the first class session, after getting widely inaccurate predictions from students about the number of dried beans in a jar, the professor told them that they should never trust the evidence of their own senses. The woman interviewed did not see this as a chance to embark on a voyage of discovery with new modes of knowing. "I remember feeling small and scared, and I did the only thing I could do. I dropped the course that afternoon, and I haven't gone near science since" (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 191). This student did not find the lesson humbling as the professor intended, she found it humiliating. The professor had incorrectly assumed that arrogance was the students' natural attitude. For many women and other under-represented groups of people, this is seldom the case. Belenky and her associates (1986, p. 193) concluded, "Like most of the women in our sample she lacked confidence in herself as a thinker; and the kind of learning the science teacher demanded was not only painful, but crippling."
The procedural knowledge stage is the next one that follows the subjective knowledge stage. In the procedural knowledge stage, as in the earlier received knowledge stage, a sense of authority is acquired through identification with the power of another group and its institutions, disciplines, and methods of knowing. Subjective knowledge is often pushed aside as women progress through the procedural knowledge stage.
In the final stage of knowing, women learn to speak in a unique and authentic voice. They usually begin in an effort to reclaim their selves by integrating knowledge important to them personally with knowledge acquired from others directly or by using others' methods of learning. They weave together rational and emotive thought. When subjective and objective knowledge are integrated, women have reached the stage of constructed knowledge. As one interviewee said, "You let the inside out and the outside in" (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 135). When this happens, views of science and mathematics change again, as shown by the following quotations from other women interviewed by Belenky and her associates (1986, p. 138):
Science is a moral art, dictated by the human heart and human mind. It was subjective and is subjective. Science is a creative evaluation of facts.
In science you don't really want to say that something's true. You realize that you're dealing with a model. Our models are always simpler than the real world. The real world is more complex than anything we can create. We're simplifying everything so that we can work with it, but the thing is really more complex. When you try to describe things, you're leaving the truth because you're oversimplifying.
Posing questions and problems are a prominent method of inquiry in this stage. A hypothesis may or may not be formulated prior to data collection. These women no longer dutifully try to come up with answers posed by others. In the interviews for the Belenky study, they often said "You're asking the wrong question" or "Your question is out of context" (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 139).
Belenky and her associates (1986, p. 193) made the following conclusion after interviewing 135 women:
A woman, like any other human being, does need to know that the mind makes mistakes; but our interviews have convinced us that every woman, regardless of age, social class, ethnicity, and academic achievement, needs to know that she is capable of intelligent thought, and she needs to know it right away. Perhaps men learn this lesson before going to college, or perhaps they can wait until they have proved themselves to hear it; we do not know. We do know that many of the women we interviewed had not yet learned it.
Von Glasersfeld (1995, p. 181), writing about radical constructivism, made a related statement:
The motivation to master new problems is most likely to spring from having enjoyed the satisfaction of finding solutions to problems in the past. It is the excitement of glimpsing a possibility, working it out, and arriving at a result that passes whatever tests one can apply to it oneself. This is quite different from being praised because one's result are considered right by someone else. The insight why a result is right, understanding the logic in the way it was produced, gives the student a feeling of ability and competence that is far more empowering than any external reinforcement. This self-generated empowerment almost certainly engenders the desire for extension, the desire to experience it in a new context, and to enlarge the range of experiences that one can deal with satisfactorily. If students do not think their own way through problems and acquire the confidence that they can solve them, they can hardly be expected to be motivated to tackle more. In my view, this consideration implies a fundamental ethical imperative: teachers should never fail to manifest the belief that students are capable of thinking.
When a teacher presents only impeccable arguments, proofs, or solutions, it is especially difficult for a female student to believe that she can match that. Students need opportunities to hear what others are thinking who, at that moment, are not successfully convincing someone else, proving a point, or solving a problem. A teacher should be willing to be that groping thinker challenged beyond his or her easily formulated answers. Students "need models of thinking as a human, imperfect, and attainable activity" (Belenky et al, 1986, p. 217).
The problem of teachers hiding their thinking and delivering disembodied truth is "especially acute" with respect to science, according to Belenky and her associates (1986, p. 215). They wrote that one of the "most shocking statements" in their hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews was a student's comment that "science is not a creation of the human mind" (Belenky et al, 1986, pp. 215-216). This statement contrasts sharply with the following comment made by one of my 1995 students in her journal after performing one of the PSI-PET calorimetry experiments:
During this experiment, I understood more about heat and how to figure out things just by thinking about it. Now I know I do have some physics in my head.
Unlike many traditional science courses, the PSI-PET course does not reward rote learning. Neither does the PSI-PET course reinforce the silence or received knowledge stages. Instead, students are encouraged to move to higher stages as they construct models that predict and explain natural occurrences.
Consistent with my other constructivist beliefs about knowing, I do not believe there is one right basis for making decisions about instruction. Instead I have drawn conclusions that help me adapt to the environment in which I teach. I have found that many recommendations for teaching methods in science education and women's studies literature may be met simultaneously. Some recommendations from one perspective are not of concern from another perspective. Some of the recommendations are not relevant to the course that I teach for undergraduate students who are preparing to be elementary school teachers. I do not think that any recommendations from different perspectives considered in this paper are mutually exclusive if one steers away from narrow interpretations of words and from exaggeration of different emphases. The constructs considered in this paper--cooperative learning, constructivism, conceptual change, women's ways of knowing, and female-friendly science--are not incongruous with each other.
Each of us who teaches needs to take useful ideas and work them together into a coherent whole. Perhaps seeing how I have fashioned my pedagogical braid will help you in the continual task of making and redoing your own
REFERENCES
American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). (1995). Powerful ideas in physical science: A model course. College Park, MD: Author.
Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M, Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Driver, R. (1995). Constructivist approaches in science teaching. In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in Education (pp. 385-400). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing scientific knowledge in the classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5-12.
Duit, R. (1995). The constructivist view: A Fashionable and fruitful paradigm for science education research and practice. In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in Education (pp. 271-285). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dykstra, D. I., Boyle, C. F., & Monarch, I. A. (1992). Studying conceptual change in learning physics. Science Education, 76(6), 615-652.
Fosnot, C. T. (1996). Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (pp. 8-33). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Hewson, P. W. (1996). Teaching for conceptual change. In D. F. Treagust, R. Duit, & B. J. Fraser (Eds.), Improving Teaching and Learning in Science and Mathematics (pp. 131-140). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1994). Learning together and alone: Cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Holubec, E. J. (1987). Structuring cooperative learning: Lesson plans for teachers. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.
Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., Holubec, E. J., & Roy, P. (1984). Circles of learning: Cooperation in the classroom. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Lewin, P. (1995). The social already inhabits the epistemic: A discussion of Driver; Wood, Cobb, & Yackel; and von Glasersfeld. In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 423-432). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 271-285.
Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211-227.
Rosser, S. V. (1990). Female-friendly science. New York: Pergamon Press.
Rubin, D. (1995). Constructivism, sexual harassment, and presupposition: A (very) loose response to Duit, Saxe, and Spivey. In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 355-366). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tobin, K., & Tippins. D. (1993). Constructivism as a referent for teaching and learning. In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science education (pp. 3-21). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning. London: Falmer Press.
von Glasersfeld, E. (1993). Questions and answers about radical constructivism. In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science education (pp. 23-38). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
von Glasersfeld, E. (1988). The reluctance to change a way of thinking. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 83-90