Abstract
This paper aims at supporting the claim that some forms of hyper-simplification, by making physics seem easy, are at risk of dangerously distorting the content as well as the process of learning physics. The paper presents examples of dangerous simplifications in the teaching of quantum physics. Then, examples of productive forms of complexity are discussed, both as criteria for designing teaching proposals, and for realizing appropriate learning environments, namely properly complex territories. Empirical results, from a teaching/learning experiment on quantum physics at upper secondary school (grade 13), are reported. These results show examples of students’ reactions to travelling through a complex territory, and allow us to argue that unavoidable difficulty in learning quantum physics can be transformed into cultural challenges within reach of secondary school students.
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Notes
Many examples of Italian textbooks could be mentioned. In their recent editions, the argumentative apparatus became progressively lighter in order to leave room to tables and pictures. The tables usually contain students’ facilitations like exemplar solutions of exercises or lists of “inverse formulas” of a physical law.
Sjøberg, for example, in a very interesting report writes: “The implicit image of science conveyed by these curricula is that it is mainly a massive body of authoritative and unquestionable knowledge. Most curricula and textbooks are overloaded with facts and information at the expense of concentration on a few ‘big ideas’ and key principles. […] There is often repetition, with the same concepts and laws presented year after year. Such curricula and textbooks often lead to rote learning without any deeper understanding so that, unsurprisingly, many pupils become bored and develop a lasting aversion to science. Moreover, this textbook science is often criticized for its lack of relevance and deeper meaning for the learners and their daily life. The content is frequently presented without being related to social and human needs, either present or past, and the historical context of discoveries is reduced to biographical anecdotes. Moreover, the implicit philosophy of textbook science is considered by most scholars to be a simplistic and outdated form of empiricism.” (Sjøberg 2002).
This paper has evolved from a joint work on the role of complexity in learning through an AERA symposium (Levrini et al. 2006). In the symposium, the importance of embracing complexity was emphasized by presenting a set of examples taken from different research programs that refer to different scientific domains and demonstrate how epistemological complexity plays out in students’ learning and sense making. The current paper focuses on one of these examples, learning modern physics. Another example, concerning learning harmonic motion, is developed in Parnafes (2010).
The notion of properly complex territory was formulated in the joint work that followed the symposium “Why complexity is important for learning”, presented at the AERA Conference in San Francisco, 2006 (Levrini et al. 2006).
The following quotations are taken from Tarozzi (2005).
We are here supposing that the productive character of those pictures is intrinsically related to the epistemological and metacognitive competence of students to recognise the role and the meaning of modelling in physics. Indeed, even during the study of classical physics, these pictures can become empty hypersimplifications if students “read” them literally.
The use of debates or “dialogues” about quantum physics issues is a topic already explored within the field of physics education research. In particular its role has been investigated in: i) promoting conceptual understanding (see, for example, Pospiech 2003, and also Hadzidaki 2006), and/or ii) fostering students’ awareness of the relevance of philosophical interpretations in enhancing scientific “progress” (see, for example, Garritz 2012). According to the specific goal of our study, the role of debates is explicitly stressed in relation to their power of implementing multi-perspectiveness and multi-dimensionality.
Examples of readings are taken from the Italian editions of the following papers and/or books: Bohr, N. (1949). Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics, in Schilpp P. A. (ed.) (1949). Albert Einstein. Philosopher-Scientist. Evanston, Ill: Library of Living Philosophers; Heisenberg, W. (1927). Über den anschulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik, Z. Phys. 43 (3–4), 172–198, doi:10.1007/BF01397280; Heisenberg, W. (1971). Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, Harper & Row; Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers; Heisenberg, W., Born, M., Schrodinger, E. & Auger, P. (1961). On Modern Physics, New York: Clarkson N. Potter; Schrodinger, E. (1950). What is an elementary particle? Endeavour, 9, 109-116.
The “disturbance” interpretation is still proposed as the main interpretation of uncertainty in secondary physics textbooks.
The teaching of quantum physics at upper secondary school touches the well-known problem of coordinating the physics and math curriculum. Physics and math are, in some cases, taught, in Italy, by two different teachers. In this particular context, the math teacher, in agreement with the physics teacher, developed the topic of linear algebra, just before the students started the quantum physics proposal. The study of linear algebra is not out of reach of students who are attending a “Liceo Scientifico” and who are required to study mathematical analysis. In spite of that, such a topic is not officially foreseen in the math curriculum. The official curriculum for secondary school in Italy provides however general indications about the contents and the timetable. The teachers are asked to take the responsibility for detailed programming and the approach to follow. In our experiment, such freedom played a crucial role, because of the productive collaboration between the two teachers.
Teachers have a certain degree of freedom to plan the order of the topics as well as the time devoted to each of them, according to their educational goals. For examples, most of the teachers prefer to devote more time to classical physics and to teach both special relativity and quantum physics during the second semester of grade 13.
The capital letters are in the original answer to the final questionnaire. They are not added.
Michele refers to the science fiction movie directed by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story. The movie is set in the year 2054, where a special police department called "pre-crime" apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge, provided by three psychics (the “pre-cogs”) able to foresee deterministically into the future.
A positive outcome that gave us some indications about the quality of students’ understanding arrived, by chance, the year after the teaching/learning experiment on quantum physics: 5 students from these classes matriculated in Engineering and all of them addressed the examination of the General Physics Course at the Degree Course in Engineering in the first semester of the first academic year. Such an exam is very selective. In that case, only 30 students passed the written task out of over 100 students who tried, and only 11 students passed the oral task (and definitively passed the examination) out of the 30 admitted. Among the 11 students who passed the examination there were all the 5 students coming out from “our” classes who matriculated in Engineering. This result does not prove, of course, that the intervention was the only, or even the main, reason for the students’ success. Nevertheless, it was, for us, a surprising, promising and insightful piece of evidence that provides some indications that something important happened in these classes: not only were the students shown to have acquired intellectual autonomy in discussing about physics but also to have an outstanding potential for developing technical and formal abilities. Our hypothesis is that the success is somehow related to the students’ habit of dealing with the complexity of the disciplinary knowledge since it provided students with the opportunity not only to learn physics and about physics, but also to learn, through physics, both to manage consciously one’s own potentialities and to think.
The materials designed on Special Relativity have been used both in classes of secondary school students (Levrini and diSessa 2008) and in contexts of teacher education (De Ambrosis and Levrini 2010). In both the cases the emphasis on multiple perspectives and dimensions revealed to be productive for learning.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Jeanne Bamberger, Andrea A. diSessa, David Hammer, Orit Parnafes for the stimulating discussions on the role of complexity in learning which stemmed from the AERA symposium (2006), as well as for the precious suggestions they gave us for writing the first version of the paper. We are moreover grateful to Barbara Pecori, Christian Morellini and, in a special way, Nella Grimellini Tomasini for their crucial role in the study, as well as to Eugenio Bertozzi, Marta Gagliardi, Mariana Levin, Carlo Tarsitani, Giulia Tasquier and Gianni Zanarini for their helpful comments on previous drafts of the paper. Thanks also to the reviewers for Science & Education who helped refine and clarify arguments and to Jennifer Donovan who patiently copyedited the manuscript.
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Levrini, O., Fantini, P. Encountering Productive Forms of Complexity in Learning Modern Physics. Sci & Educ 22, 1895–1910 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9587-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9587-4