Sojin Kim SED 600 04/25/07 Panel #5: Problem Solving Problem solving is not the most important goal in secondary science education. Effective science curriculum incorporates investigation and experiment, inquiry-based learning, and the nature of science to adequately equip the young minds to become independent analytical thinkers. California Content Standards for 8th grade Physical Science states: “Scientific progress is made by asking meaningful questions and conducting careful investigations.” This is achieved through guided planning and conducting scientific experiments and testing the hypothesis. The teachers need to explicitly instruct the basic skills needed to practice the nature of science. Without a highly qualified instructor specifically trained in the area of laboratory skills, the student growth in this standard is limited. According to the National Center for Education Statistics published in 2006, only the 4th graders have made a progress on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science exam. The eighth graders remained stagnant, while the 12th graders actually declined. This downward trend is a serious concern for our future in the global competition. H. Wenglinsky and S. Silverstein recently conducted a study in the Columbia University Summer Research Program for Secondary School Science Teachers, and they concluded: “Of the many steps needed to improve science education, none is more important than improving teacher training. Professional development that focuses on improving teachers’ laboratory skills and stimulating them to implement more hands-on, constructivist practices in their classroomsand laboratories can significantly improve student achievement in science” (p. 28). Investigation and experiment provides hands-on opportunities for the students to construct understanding of the content. Another focus of science education should be inquiry. “The vehicle that advances science is scientific inquiry, which involves both in-depth understandings of scientific knowledge and rigorous applications of scientific thinking processes” (Lee & Sogner, 2003, p.923). Students need to master not only the facts, but also the appropriate skills to analyze the given facts. Inquiry develops the critical analysis skills through asking questions. Lave and Wenger define learning as: “becoming able to be involved in new activities, to perform new tasks and functions, to master new understandings. Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning, these systems of relations arise out of and are reproduced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons” (1991, p.53). Problem solving alone cannot satisfactorily meet all the learning goals of science education. Inquiry is a component to the overall learning process, and it complements the problem-solving process. Understanding the nature of science must precede practicing problem solving. However, a lot of secondary science students lack this piece of the science education because their instructors themselves often do not have a clear understanding of the nature of science. Classrooms still rely heavily on the textbooks and the cookie-cutter pacing guide. Effectiveness is lost in suchtraditional methods. Educators in Taiwan investigated the relationship between the views of science and problem-solving strategy (Lin, Chiu, Chou, 2004). They examined the student performance on the problem-solving tasks and compared the performance of the two different groups—empiricist-aligned view and post-positivist-oriented view. In preparation for the test, the students with an empiricist-aligned view simply memorized factual information, and they scored fairly high on the questions that did not require much knowledge integration. The students with a post-positivist-oriented view focused on integrated understanding. There was no significant difference in the scores of the two groups on such questions. However, on other test questions addressing the high-level conceptual understanding, the students with a post-positivist-oriented view scored higher than the students with an empiricist-aligned view. These results suggest students’ understanding about the nature of science plays a significant role in problem solving. No one isolated instructional strategy supercedes the rest. While problem solving could be one of the learning goals, it is not the most important. Investigation and experiment provides the hands-on opportunity to practice the nature of science through inquiry, complementing the problem solving. Before carelessly concluding any one method as the most important or the best, educators need to remember that there is always more than one way to do, learn, and teach science. As much as the content is diverse, so are the students in their population and needs.References Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Lee, H. & Sogner, N. (2003). Making authentic science accessible to students. International Journal of Science Education, 25(8), 923-948 Liu, H., Chiu, H., & Chou, C. Student understanding of the nature of science and their problem-solving strategies. International Journal of Science Education, 26(1), 101-112. Wenglinsky, H. & Silverstein, S. (2007). Science training. Educational Leadership, December 2006/January 2007, 24-29.