The processes represented in Fig. 4.10 apply whenever one person interprets another’s behaviour in order to understand their ideas, whether the person expressing the idea or the person attempting to understand it are students, teachers, researchers or simply two people having an everyday conversation in the workplace or shopping or at some leisure event.
However, in the case of researchers, there is likely to be at least one further step, as the researcher’s purpose is not just to develop a personal understanding of the informant’s ideas but also to develop public knowledge . (This in itself is a problematic notion, as will be explored in Chap. 10 .) The researcher will therefore seek to report fi ndings, potentially including accounts of informants’ ideas. At a minimum, then, the research process will include:
• The informant expressing an idea by representing it in some form in the public space where the researcher can perceive the representation
• The researcher attempting to develop a personal understanding of what the idea being expressed was;
• and attempting to represent the researcher’s own idea (of the informant’s idea) – most commonly in the form of inscriptions in a research report submitted to a journal (Fig. 4.13 )
If published, the ‘public knowledge’ is then represented in a paper, and of course readers then interpret, and develop their own ideas of, what is represented. We might say that readers form their own subjective understandings of the representation of the researcher’s understanding of the original informant’s idea, as mediated by the informant’s public representation of that idea!
Sometimes research reports may include ‘data’ which more closely relates to the informant’s original representation, for example, transcription of speech or handwriting, or a scanned copy of a diagram. Such data can sometimes offer close
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facsimiles of the original representation although not of the informant’s original idea, of course, allowing the reader to form their own alternative interpretation of the representation. However, conventions of, and constraints on, journals, and the practicalities of reading other people’s research, mean that most published research reports at best present a few selected samples of the raw data upon which the researcher based their interpretations.
This process is represented in Fig. 4.14 , and of course the chain becomes further extended if the original reader of the research is a teacher educator who reports the research to teachers in training, or a researcher who reports the research as part a literature review for another study or an author who discusses the research in a research review or a textbook.
Modelling Student Ideas
In this Chapter it has been argued that although we can reasonably assume that other people have ideas, much like us, we can never have direct access to anyone’s ideas
Fig. 4.13 Research reporting a learner’s ideas offers accounts of second-hand interpretations of those ideas
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but our own. It has been argued that although we can express our ideas by representing them in a public space in the external world in various forms, the representation is intrinsically very different from the idea itself and so cannot be assumed to be a perfect refl ection of it. The ideas are correlates of electrical activity in the brain that can be refl ected in various actions in the external world due to the body’s ‘motor interface’. There will be some skill involved in representing the idea through motor activity, including in speech production or writing.
Furthermore, the representation itself needs to be perceived by the person trying to understand the idea, and this involves the representation acting as a stimulus which is converted to electrical signals by the observer’s ‘sensory interface’, then processed in the brain to be presented to consciousness as perceptions. Those perceptions may not directly lead the observer to a candidate hypothesis for what the original idea might have been, and so further conscious analysis, refl ection and interpretation may be required. The process of communicating ideas is always an indirect one. This has been stressed in such detail because in our everyday lives we take such communication for granted much of the time.
Arguably, human beings have evolved to communicate well enough for most everyday purposes, and in normal interactions it makes sense to largely take the processes of communication for granted rather than to analyse them in the manner undertaken in this chapter. Misunderstandings occur, but generally we feel we are able to understand what others try to tell us or at least are usually aware when we do not understand.
Fig. 4.14 A reader of a research report forms an idea of the learner’s original idea based on a series of re-representations
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An argument made in this book however is that whilst research may draw upon our everyday communicative skills, it should be a technical activity where we do not take everyday processes for granted. Everyday transactions would likely be unreasonably retarded by analysing them in technical terms, as has been attempted in this chapter. In effect, in everyday life, we commonly admit the occasional fl awed interpretation as the cost of quick and easy communication ‘of ideas’.
Research, however, seeks to make knowledge claims that are robust and well evidenced, and a more deliberate consideration of the nature of the data and its interpretation is called for. The analysis offered here then provides an important background for thinking about the research process, as discussed in Parts III and IV of the book.
4 The Learner’s Ideas
K.S. Taber, Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing 79 Representations of Concepts, Conceptual Structure and Conceptual Change to Inform Teaching and Research, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7648-7_5,
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Memory is clearly a key component of learning – there would be no learning without some form of memory. Much research in science education that looks to explore students’ knowledge and understanding is in effect probing aspects of the learner’s memory. However, ‘memory’ is part of the mental register of lifeworld terms (see Chap. 2 ) that are generally used unproblematically in everyday communication because of the ‘theory of mind’ that we all acquire through normal development (see Chap. 2 ). That is, a person’s everyday experience supports a view that I remember things and so must store those memories somewhere, and in everyday discourse I assume other people have similar subjective experiences of remembering as I do. As will be suggested in this chapter, research into memory suggests that our everyday ways of talking and thinking about memory may be inadequate for research purposes.
Whilst there have been few studies in science education which are explicitly framed as exploring memory as opposed to say conceptions, or thinking, nonetheless memory is clearly a taken-for-granted feature of a great many studies. A good deal of the research into aspects of students’ ideas and thinking assumes that what is being probed is supported by some kind of stable knowledge base ‘stored’ in memory. Part III of this volume will consider the nature of a student’s knowledge. It is useful, as preparation for that, to establish some notions about the nature of memory.
Memory ‘Contents’
A number of terms are commonly used when discussing the types of memories people may have. The term declarative memory is as an overarching term for ‘consciously accessible memories of fact-based information’ (Walker & Stickgold, 2004 , p. 121), whereas non-declarative memory includes both procedural memory (e.g. remember- ing ‘how’ to ride a bicycle or tie shoe laces) and so-called implicit learning that takes place without conscious awareness. (Learning is considered in Part IV of the book.)