| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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hands-on activities. Ideally, students investigate scientific phenomena by using their own questions, background knowledge and experiences to construct new meaning. This pedagogy is designed to create deeper and more meaningful understandings than the superficial understandings of topics in science from reading textbooks (Dalton & Morocco, 1997; Kinchin, 1995). Yager asked in “The Major Crisis in Science Education” (1984), “Are we fooling ourselves that real learning occurs as a result of vocabulary mastery and/or the memorization of information presented via the textbook or teacher lecture?” (p. 190).
According to the NRC (2000), inquiry-based instruction, based upon John Dewey's work in the 1920s, was the central theme in the Progressive education reform. Supovitz, Mayers, & Kahle (2000) cited historian Larry Cuban (1984) as saying that the new curricula in the 1920s “seldom appeared in more than one-fourth of the classrooms in any district that systematically tried to install these various elements” (p. 135). Resistance to change in teaching methodology caused few reformers of the Progressive education movement to have much of an impact on the way science was taught in the classroom.
The second reform movement in the 1950s and 1960s focused on the central idea that science in the classroom should reflect and emulate the nature of scientific inquiry.
Science had been taught in much the same way for over a century when Sputnik was launched into space by the Soviet Union in the 1957 (Yager, 1984). The Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R. helped bring the space race to the forefront of American politics. People began to question science education practices in the United States, since the U.S. seemingly lagged behind the Soviets in terms of exploits in space (NRC, 2000). Education was targeted as the way to create future scientists in the United States who could surpass the