Can students make sense of scientific phenomena for themselves?
Although students enjoy experimenting in science and believe they can discover things for themselves, Driver’s observations of students at work in the classroom and laboratory suggested that students’ own discovery approaches were insufficient for developing their understanding of science phenomena. When students make and record observations they are influenced by a number of factors including: • being unclear about what features to focus on, for example, when drawing living cells, or the patterns of iron filings around a bar magnet; • holding preconceptions or expectations, for example, about the random movement of smoke particles in air; and • being unfamiliar with the use of scientific conventions such as lines of force or rays of light. Driver concluded that children do not know what aspects of a situation to pay attention to and what to ignore, for example, they painstakingly drew air bubbles trapped on the microscope slide rather than the features of the cells. When studying the
