Exploring New Zealand year 11 students' understanding of Nature of Science concepts

<p>Nature of Science (NOS) is a core part of science education. Extensive effort has gone into establishing educationally appropriate NOS tenets, teaching practices and assessments tools. However, while previous research has identified the importance of prior knowledge in science education, there is limited research that investigates students’ prior knowledge and beliefs about NOS. This information is critical in identifying what teachers need to target in order develop informed NOS beliefs amongst students. In this study the NOS beliefs of year 11 secondary school students in New Zealand were explored using a mixed methods approach. Factor analysis of the students’ (N=502) NOS questionnaire responses revealed that students’ conceptions of NOS differed from the constructs identified in the NOS literature. Coding of the purposively selected sample of student interviews (n=22) revealed a naïve realist model of science was common. This model along with the alternative constructs provided insights into students’ NOS conceptions. The findings were used to develop a model that could help teachers’ better identify explicit and implicit teaching practices to help students develop more appropriate NOS models.</p>

Exploring New Zealand year 11 students' understanding of Nature of Science concepts

<p>Nature of Science (NOS) is a core part of science education. Extensive effort has gone into establishing educationally appropriate NOS tenets, teaching practices and assessments tools. However, while previous research has identified the importance of prior knowledge in science education, there is limited research that investigates students’ prior knowledge and beliefs about NOS. This information is critical in identifying what teachers need to target in order develop informed NOS beliefs amongst students. In this study the NOS beliefs of year 11 secondary school students in New Zealand were explored using a mixed methods approach. Factor analysis of the students’ (N=502) NOS questionnaire responses revealed that students’ conceptions of NOS differed from the constructs identified in the NOS literature. Coding of the purposively selected sample of student interviews (n=22) revealed a naïve realist model of science was common. This model along with the alternative constructs provided insights into students’ NOS conceptions. The findings were used to develop a model that could help teachers’ better identify explicit and implicit teaching practices to help students develop more appropriate NOS models.</p>

Karakteritega suhestumine, netimisogüünia ja representatsioonide materiaalsus

The present multidisciplinary theoretical article develops its focal line of argument gradually. At first, feminist and narrative theory are consulted; after that, some treatments in the philosophy of mind are discussed. The latter’s correlative relationship with the recent “materialist turn” in philosophy affords to propose a tentative alternative to the current and universally accepted approaches to the (fictional) character much indebted to philosophical idealism. This latter observation also determines the broad – some might argue seemingly overtly complicated – theoretical reach of the article. However, its timely point of departure – the online misogynistic abuse in fan discussions directed at Breaking Bad’s Skyler White and the actress Anna Gunn –, enables to cast the issue of character engagement in necessarily broad terms, disciplinarily speaking. Be it in the context of different scientific disciplines or as the crucial vertebra connecting them, whilst also suggesting far-reaching philosophical implications. This kind of engagement, and especially its expression in online discourse, provides an impetus to inquire about the peculiarities of the human mind and the operation of human thought. Therefore, the present article zooms in on the conventionally understood binary relationship between “fiction” and “reality”, sketching appropriate terminology (continuance, narrative person, realitization) and theoretical framework (inspired, in part, by the Soviet school of philosophical Activity Theory) to help explain the human proclivity to treat characters in naïve realist terms, i.e., as real people. The central research question is as follows: what kind of ramifications can be detected for the conceptualization of character (and narrative) engagement from a particular kind of value-laden reception (like the forms of digital misogyny that emerged in the context of Breaking Bad’s reception)?

Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception

Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by extremely polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute (for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called ‘high-level’ properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses). The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the fore, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception. They cover a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception.

Daubert’s Naïve Realist Challenge to Husserl

Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy.

Inference, Indian theories of

The use of argument in rational inquiry in India reaches almost as far back in time as its oldest extant literature. Even in very early texts, one finds the deliberate use of modus tollens, for example, to refute positions thought to be false. In light of such practice, it is not surprising to discover that Indian thinkers came to identify certain forms of reasoning and to study them systematically. The study of inference in India is, as Karl Potter (1977) has emphasized, not the study of valid reasoning as reflected in linguistic or paralinguistic forms, but the study of the circumstances in which knowledge of some facts permits knowledge of another fact, and of when acceptance by one person of some state of affairs as a fact requires that that person accept another as a fact. Still, the form of inference which came to be systematically investigated in India can be given schematically (see below). At the core of the study of inference in India is the use of a naïve realist ontology. The world consists of individual substances or things (dravya), universals (sāmānya), and relations between them. The fundamental relation is the one of occurrence (vṛtti). The relata of this relation are known as substratum (dharmin) and superstratum (dharma) respectively. The relation has two forms: contact (saṃyoga) and inherence (samavāya). So, for example, one individual substance, say a pot, may occur on another, say the ground, by the relation of contact. In this case, the pot is the superstratum and the ground is the substratum. Or a universal, say brownness, may occur in an individual substance, say a pot, by the relation of inherence. Here, brownness, the superstratum, inheres in the pot, the substratum. The converse of the relation of occurrence is the relation of possession. Another important relation is the relation that one superstratum bears to another. This relation, known as pervasion (vyāpti), can be defined in terms of the occurrence relation. One superstratum pervades another just in case wherever the second occurs the first occurs. The converse of the pervasion relation is the concomitance relation. As a result of these relations, the world embodies a structure: if one superstratum H is concomitant with another superstratum S, and if a particular substratum p possesses the former superstratum, then it possesses the second. This structure is captured in this inferential schema: Pakṣa (thesis): p has S.Hetu (ground): p has H.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has H has S. Here are two paradigmatic cases of such an inference: Pakṣa (thesis): p has fire.Hetu (ground): p has smoke.Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has smoke has fire. Pakṣa (thesis): p is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).Hetu (ground): p is an oak (that is, has oak-ness).Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever is an oak (that is, has oak-ness) is a tree (that is, has tree-ness).