An investigation on the scientific thinking ability of fourth year university students

Abstract

This paper reports on a study which examined the ability of a sample of fourth year university students to think scientifically when presented with a range of chemical phenomena. The main data collection instrument was the clinical interview. Each subject was interviewed in-depth for about one hour on a one-to-one basis. Each interview was taped, transcribed verbatim and then analysed. Five familiar chemical reactions were used as foci for discussion in the interviews. For each reaction, each interviewee was asked, among other things, to make predictions about the overall energy change involved, and to make explanations as to why the change took place, i.e., the driving force for the change. The results show that the majority of the interviewees were using perceptually dominated thinking rather than conceptually dominated thinking; at the same time, they were unable to use science concepts consistently across the five reactions. It can thus be inferred that they were unable to think scientifically. Reasons for the lack of scientific thinking ability are explored and suggestions on alleviation of the problem are offered.In the literature, the term "scientific thinking" or "scientific reasoning" has been used to refer to science process skills, which in turn have also been described as "the scientific method" and/or "critical thinking skills" (Padilla, 1991). These process skills are defined as a set of broadly transferable skills, appropriate to many science disciplines and reflective of the true behaviour of scientists. These include skills such as observing, inferring, measuring, communicating, classifying, predicting, conlrolling variables, experimenting, and formulating explanations and models of the behaviour and attributes of the natural world.Stuessy (1984) argues that scientific thinking is the consistent and logical thought patterns which are used by individuals in formulating and testing hypotheses during the process of scientific inquiry. Kuhn, Amsel and O'Loughlin (1988) further suggest that at the heart of scientific thinking is the skilful coordination of theory and evidence. The discourse on scientific thinking by Hawkins and Pea (1987) highlights the aspect of the ability to "offer explanations in terms of formal concepts that meet communal norms (p. 298)." Driver (1985) in the context of examining pupils' use of alternative conceptions discusses the notion of perceptually dominated thinking which is thinking based on observable features in a problem situation, in contrast to conceptually dominated or scientific thinking.In this paper, the meaning of the term "scientific thinking" is derived from a consideration of the above definitions as well as from a consideration of the nature and aim of science. Here science is viewed as both a product comprising the body of scientific knowledge, and a process of constructing predictive conceptual models (Gilbert, 1991); and the aim of science is viewed as the establishment of generalisations governing the behaviour of the natural world (Chalmers, 1...

El desarrollo del pensamiento científico a través del método de comprensión reflexiva del conocimiento de John Dewey

“…Según trabajos anteriores del problema de estudio, se aborda la investigación acerca del pensamiento científico desde distintas perspectivas. Una investigación sobre la capacidad del pensamiento científico en universitarios realizada por Boo & Toh (1998) concluye que la mayoría utiliza un pensamiento determinado por la percepción antes que un pensamiento determinado por los conceptos; pues los universitarios no pudieron usar los conceptos científicos de manera consistente en las cinco reacciones propuestas, de lo que se infiere que eran incapaces de pensar científicamente. Arteaga (2016) al analizar el desarrollo del pensamiento científico a través del trabajo de grupos interactivos determinó que existe un conjunto de habilidades científicas de orden superior asociadas al pensamiento científico que posibilita la transformación cualitativa de los estudiantes.…”