Communication during Science Classes - Science Direct

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The school's task is to transform common misconceptions about the world into correct ideas. .... class in a primary school or during a biology class in a middle school? Teacher: Let us try to tell the .... Middlesex: Heinemann. Chrzanowski, M. M. ...
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ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 174 (2015) 496 – 502

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Communication during science classes Marcin M. Chrzanowskia,*, Agnieszka Cieszyńskab, Barbara Ostrowskaa a Educational Research Institute, ul. Górczewska 8, 01-180, Warsaw, Poland Laboratory of Biology and Nature Didactics, Institute of Environmental Biology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. Umultowska 89, 61-614 Poznań, Poland

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Abstract Constructivists claim that we get to know the world through of knowledge we possess. Students do not come to the class as carte blanche. Their knowledge may be correct or erroneous. The school’s task is to transform common misconceptions about the world into correct ideas. The teachers should use open dialogue and students’ preconceptions to connect new information with the information already internalized. The article shows students’ misconception regarding biological knowledge and a model dialogue in class. Additionally, authors propose a standardized didactic tool: a task which may be helpful in diagnosing the problem. © 2015 byby Elsevier Ltd.Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license © 2014 The TheAuthors. Authors.Published Published Elsevier (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Sakarya University. Peer-review under responsibility of the Sakarya University

Keywords: communication, misconceptions, vernacular misconceptions, dialog, science, items;

1. Communication models Cognitive psychology focuses on creative problem solving by man. It examines such phenomena as attention, memory, imagination and thinking. One of the central problems of this area of science is answering the question regarding perception of the world by man: do we get to know the external world directly or with the use of representations created by us? Cognitive and emotional processes allow people to order reality properly – to enter into relations with one another and into social relations. These relations rely on dialogue, including internal discourse we constantly hold with ourselves, and exchange of messages with others (Nęcka, Orzechowski, &

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +48 22 24 17 112, +48 22 24 17 121. E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-0428 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Peer-review under responsibility of the Sakarya University doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.01.694

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Szymbura, 2013, Maruszewski, 2011). Therefore, in the process of education, provision of opportunities for frequent dialogue with other people, with oneself, as well as with books and media is very important. Dialogues should serve communication. The core of such dialogues is systematisation of personal experiences as well as organizing them into more ordered categories. In its simplest form, communication consists in transfering a message (communication) among interlocutors in the broad sense. During classes, the information flow is as follows: Teacher ė Communication ė Student, and Student ė Communication ė Teacher. Obviously, the presented form of communication may be extended, taking into account such elements as the situational context, number of interlocutors, communication channels, noise and discipline level in the class (Barnes, 1992). For the act of communication to be effective it is important, on the one hand, that the recipient should understand the communication in a manner that was intended by the sender and, on the other hand, that the sender should formulate it in a way that allows the recipient to understand it as intended. Additionally, for complete communication a treating the recipient as a subject is very important. Both sides should aim for efficient communication – the teacher and the student. What is more, communication in school should not be unilateral, but rather multilateral with participation of many interlocutors. Barnes says that teachers have become so used to thinking about the language in the categories of communication that many of them forget that it also performs important subjective functions. Namely, the language is our main means to organize our experience consciously and to think about it. A situation when spoken language in class is limited to the teacher’s utterance and to students’ responses to questions and the written language is no more than rewriting of fragments of textbooks leads to rejection of an important function of language as a tool for transforming one’s own experience (Barnes, 1992). For learning consists in identification and interpretation of things that we experience and translating the incoming information into comprehensible language so that it may be permanently entered into our knowledge structures. One may find numerous models portraying the communication process in the literature. All of them take into account the presence of a sender and a recipient, sometimes in compound, bilateral relations. A vast majority of them assumes content flow from the sender to the recipient. Some models underline the necessity of decoding and interpretation of information by the recipient, which seems to be particularly important in teaching science. For example, the Osgood-Schramm circular model shows a connection between the sender and recipient of a communication, and it indicates what takes place in the participants of the process: encoding, decoding and interpretation of information (Schramm, 1974). Encoding is transforming thoughts into a communication, a selection of words, gestures and circumstances. The communication reaches the recipient where it is decoded and interpreted. Constructivists say that we learn through the knowledge we possess (Piaget, 1964). This knowledge influences the manner in which the recipient reads the communication, what they consider important in it and how they interpret it. What we already know instills the things that we learn with sense (Bruner, 1978). Our perception is mediated by our experiences, thus learning is of active character. Therefore, it is not the sender but rather the recipient who fills the communication with sense. How the communication is read depends on the approach, pool of terms, efficiency of thinking and many other features. In the case of science, the number of “foreign terms” which the student has to internalize, even during a single class, is enormous and exceeds the number of the new terms taken into account in foreign languages textbooks (Grooves, 2010). Due to the fact that school should be the place where the students get to know and internalize a set of terms for describing the world – both at school and in every-day life – it seems essential to investigate the problem of using terms that are new to the students. Efficient communication has unique significance for educational practice. Verbal communication, that is based on semantic knowledge, may be examined in terms of three aspects: semantic, syntactic and organizational. First of all, meanings of terms and idioms should be identical for the teacher and the students; therefore, sharing of concepts is indispensable among them (semantic aspect). In order to avoid distortions in the meaning of a communication, construction of an utterance should be proper and grammatically correct (syntactic aspect). Additionally, it is very important that the teacher’s words inspire the students and questions and instructions are formulated in a manner conducive to efficient work in class (organizational aspect).

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2. Communication in class Kwieciński’s studies indicate that up to 80% of words uttered in a class may come from the teacher. Additionally, Kwieciński states that for every other student of a rural primary school literary language (including the language of textbooks) is incomprehensible. They treat it as a foreign language and are not able to master it (Kwieciński, 1995). It seems that teachers, feeling greatly responsible for their work, tend to monopolize communication in class (Barnes, 1992). When they ask questions, they are usually brief, purpose-oriented and hardly spontaneous. Therefore, it seems that a class is dominated by teacher’s language. It is true: teachers are obliged to use terms correctly and consequently to make students acquainted with them. However, it is not always the case that the teacher’s language is fully understandable to the students. What is more, even in a situation when both teachers and students use the same terms, there is no certainty that they are, in fact, talking about the same phenomenon and understand the problem in the same way. The school situation and the grading system related to school is connected to the fact that student’s responses are incited and, often fragmentary. It is difficult to combine them into a whole. Hence, on may infer that the student only answers for the teacher’s sake while others do not listen, and so it is difficult to call communication in class a dialogue (Basińska & Pitrala, 2010). 3. Students’ Misconceptions Imperfect communication between the teacher and students, related, inter alia, to the absence of linguistic and symbolic community and, above all, resulting from the use scientific terms that seem artificial to the students may contribute to emergence or strengthening of the so-called misconceptions in students. We deal with a misconception in a situation when a person accepts erroneous premises and builds the image of reality surrounding him or her on this basis. According to Page, nobody is entirely free from erroneous assumptions and naïve ideas (Page, 2012). Both students and teachers have them; everybody has them – a young person and an adult, irrespective of their scientific background. Sources of misconceptions may be divided into two major categories: experiential ones and the ones that derive from instruction (Skelly, 1993). Sources of misconceptions may therefore be looked for not only in linguistic misunderstandings which have their beginning in the manner of teaching of science (and other subjects). They may result from an attempt at understanding the world with limited knowledge on the basis of interhuman relations, prejudices or religious beliefs. In 1997 the Committee on Undergraduate Science Education established a categorization encompassing five major types of misconceptions: conceptual misunderstandings, nonscientific beliefs, factual misconceptions, preconceived notions and vernacular misconceptions (Moore et al., 1997). Vernacular misconceptions stem from language confusion (Page, 2012). Chrzanowski et al. distinguished four types of vernacular misconceptions (Chrzanowski, Grajkowski, Żuchowski, Buczek, Walicki, & Ostrowska, 2014). One of the methods of diagnosing, clarifying and correcting students’ misconceptions is a discourse between a teacher and his students. 4. How to talk to students? Complete understanding between a teacher and a student seems possible only when communication in the class relies on three aspects mentioned above: semantic, syntactic and organizational. As for clarifying misconceptions, the semantic aspect seems critical. Many teachers have worked out methods which may improve the quality of communication with students.. They result from teachers’ conviction that it is worth talking. Let us look at a situation when the student’s response is not entirely correct. It is possible to tell such a student: “All right, you have not learnt about it; read about it once again from your textbook” or say: “Wrong” or “No, this is not right.” One may also draw from such (partially) incorrect answer issues presented correctly and make of them a basis for continuation of the talk and asking questions, addressed not only to a specific student, but to the entire class. As an example we can take a lesson covering biological terms which seem to be self-explanatory, while using them without clear understanding may actually lead to misconceptions. Students as well as many adults share a misconception that an autotroph is an organism that can feed itself. According to them, such an organism collects,

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but does not produce food, whereas a heterotroph is an organism that is not able to feed itself (Chrzanowski, Grajkowski, Żuchowski, Buczek, Walicki, & Ostrowska, 2014). What could be a probable dialogue during a science class in a primary school or during a biology class in a middle school? Teacher: Let us try to tell the difference between an autotroph and a heterotroph. Please tell me, what is an autotroph? Student 1: An autotroph is an organism that feeds itself. Teacher: You used – correctly – the phrase “an organism that feeds itself.” You have already encountered this term during classes. Can anybody explain what it means that an organism “feeds itself”? Student 2: This is an organism that gets food for itself. Teacher: So how does it work? Could you specify what it means? Student 2: For example, when I go to the fridge and make some sandwiches and nobody helps me with it, so I feed myself. Teacher: Right, so according to you, what would be a heterotroph? Student 3: For example my cat, which I have to feed. Teacher: You are right, your cat is a heterotroph. But is it because it is you who give it a bowl of food? Do you know any other examples of autotrophs and heterotrophs? Student 4: For example, a tree is an autotroph, because we do not have to feed it, unlike a cat. Teacher: Excellent. This is a very good example of an autotroph. Where does the tree get food from? Student 2: My father watered the trees in a garden with a special fertilizer. Teacher: Hmmm, this is a good clue... but what about trees in a forest? Let’s go back to people. Everything that people eat has to be grown, bought or produced. But let us look at the definition of an autotroph in a dictionary of biology… Subsequently, the teacher explains the difference between autotrophy and heterotrophy and clarifies that in biological language the meaning of these words is different from that in colloquial language. At the end of the class the teacher may test the understanding of the terms by students and find out whether or not students understand the difference between heterotrophy and autotrophy. This is important because, according to studies, some of the students often stick to their misconceptions (Thompson & Logue, 2006, Ross, Tronson, & Ritchie, 2005, Demircioğlu, Ayas, & Demircioğlu, 2005, Kam-Wah 1995). 5. Problem diagnosis One of the forms of diagnosing the degree of understanding of the problem described above is the use of a text task. An example of such task, see Fig. 1. In order to do the task correctly, the student has only to understand the meaning of the terms “autotroph” and “heterotroph” and to know the groups in which plants and fungi are included. The difficulty in the task is the species selection – on the illustration presented two of them (moss and tinder fungus) grow on a tree trunk, whereas others (birch and scaber stalk) grow directly from the ground. Students who did not fully understand the division of organisms into autotrophs and heterotrophs may have been influenced by this differentiation. It is possible to extend or modify the task, depending on students’ knowledge about fungi by, for example., introducing organisms that occur in the students’ neighborhood.

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Fig. 1. Text item to diagnose the degree of understanding of the problem featured in section 4.

6. Conclusions The above-presented task is only a clue and one of the examples showing how to work with students in diagnosing and uprooting their misconceptions. In this process it is possible to discern several stages. The first of them consists in determining the assumptions behind misconceptions; the second is an attempt at understanding and explaining why these assumptions are incorrect, whereas the third one should aim at build a version of the world compatible with commonly accepted scientific theories. It is also important to check the students’ concepts when they leave the class. Referring to a simplified image of the world, both by students and teachers, is natural and necessary at early educational stages. However, it is worth bearing in mind that simplifications should not distort the vision of reality. Even though misconceptions – and in particular experiential misconceptions – are very difficult to eradicate, they may be subject transformed into concepts corresponding to scientific theories. This takes place in the course of a process known as conceptual change (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982). The presented approach is one of many methods of fighting against students’ misconceptions. Another efficient method is the use of refutation texts (Tippet, 2010). Students do not come to the class as carte blanche (Piaget, 1964). They have their own vision of the world and they try to explain and understand the world in their own way. Such initial comprehension may be erroneous (misconceptions) or correct (preconceptions, conceptions). In the course of instruction misconceptions should be subjected to rectification and replacement by conceptions compatible with scientific knowledge. On the other hand, correct preconceptions should be skillfully handled so that they do not become misconceptions. In the teaching process it is worth paying attention to open and inspiring dialogue between the student and the teacher,

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a dialogue that ought not always to be followed by grading. The aim of this activity is to examine the scale of the problem along with finding a method of working with students that is relevant to a problem in question. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Wojciech Grajkowski, Ph.D. from Educational Research Institute for the support and Szymon Żuchowski for the language consultation. This project is co-funded by European Union within European Social Fund.

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