Hot off the press - and mediated, it must be said, by the none-too-reliable New Scientist (it always reads well until you try an article about your own specialism) - is the claim by Dutch researchers that shy children are keener on science and the tenuous corollary that shy children should be harded towards science. Their exuberant classmates, meanwhile, would be concentrating on history, languages and resilient materials ...
There are so many flaws in this argument that it's hard to know where to start. The children in the survey were 15, so whatever innate enthusiasm and aptitude they had for science (and at five I'll bet that was "lots" on both counts) was tempered by a decade of science teaching. Since much secondary science teaching in the UK - and I'll guess in Holland as well - consists of boring rote learning of facts, it's hardly a surprise, is it, that only the quiet, meticulous kids would make it through to fifteen with their enthusiasm intact.
One example of why this matters - doctors. That's the knee-tapping sort, not the laboratory coat wearing version. Medical schools by and large select on two grounds: (1) excellence, as measured by performance in school science exams and (2) people-like-us-ness, measured by being in a medical family, rugby position, middle class extracurricular activities, unpaid volunteering and all the other ways of keeping out the common oiks.
But I digress. If medical schools select students who are successful in school science, and success in school science is restricted to the introverts, what would you end up with? Why, a medical profession stuffed full of excellent scientists (well, people good at learning scientific facts, which is not quite the same thing) but who are useless at communication with humans.
Sound familiar? Well, the mother of a friend of mine is in hospital recovering from a fairly major operation. The consultant was by all accounts excellent and full of compassion (he hugged her as they took her into theatre, why I think is utterly charming) ... but what about the three doctors who came to her bedside, read her notes and talked about her for twenty minutes without having the courtesy even to say "Good morning", let alone explain who they were or what they were concerned about. Did they have the slightest idea what effect that might have on an elderly lady in a high dependency ward? Did they care?
Science and scientific understanding are far, far, far too important to reserve for the quiet kids. Don't give up on the extroverts, schools - teach them better.
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Friday, 22 October 2010
Wrong Questions and Right Answers
We were driving along the side of Loch Ken today when The Boy suddenly asked "What makes the earth go around the sun?" Although there's a perfectly good answer to the "around the sun" bit, there really isn't - or at least, not at four-year-old-level - to the first half. It's a good example of a Wrong Question, or rather of a questions which reveals an underlying false assumption. In this case, that assumption was that something must be making the earth move.
Ever since Newton (and for a long time before him too, if you asked the right people) we've known that "moving" is actually as natural a state as "not moving". It doesn't take any external force, agency or power supply to keep things moving in a straight line. Changing direction requires force but no power and only a change of speed requires some energy transfer.
Scientific enquiry is very largely the art of asking the right questions, and learning to recognize preconceptions in our questioning is a fundamental scientific skill. It's a hard one, too, because it requires us to ask questions about ourselves, our motives and our beliefs ... and that doesn't always come easily when we often think that science is a dispassionate, objective process.
I think that's one of the keys to Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Most of us spent our entire careers diligently preparing, testing, answering and refining questions within a framework of belief about the universe which we may and need only dimly comprehend.
I remember years ago watching a documentary about the discovery of High Tc superconductivity. After Bednorz and Müller made it clear that High Tc ceramic superconductors were theoretically possible, research groups around the world raced to produce the first specimen, spurred on by the prospects of a paper in Nature and a Nobel Prize. One group produced what may well have been the first sample, but didn't test it because it was green, and the boss knew that superconductors have to be shiny metallic. Whoops. Bednorz and Müller got the Nobel (saving a lot of squabbling, and they deserved it) but there went the Nature citation and the line in the history books.
Back to The Boy's question, though, and it struck me that he made precisely the same error made by Intelligent Designers (those who are sincere and not just lying about their Creationist beliefs - isn't there a commandment against that? He knows the earth moves, and assumes that something must be making it move. They see the world change and assume that something must be making it change. It's not like that. The evolutionary process is as natural, unstoppable and ungoverned as the movement of the earth.
At the Bang! roadshows this summer, one of the most common questions in our final Q&A sessions was "When did you first become interested in science?" That's a Wrong Question too, because it assumes that scientific interest starts. Watch a baby. Watch a toddler. From birth, or at least from the first ability to manipulate the world around them, they do experiments. What happens if I smile at that human being? What happens if I cry? What happens if I pour water over that book? How many bricks can I stack up? How far can I lean over without falling? How fast can I run?
They do them repeatedly, refining the experiment as results come in. They follow side tracks. They build up models of the universe and when contradictory information comes in they demolish these models and start again.
Everyone is interested in science, at first. Let's ask why so many people lose that interest. That's a Really Good Question.
Ever since Newton (and for a long time before him too, if you asked the right people) we've known that "moving" is actually as natural a state as "not moving". It doesn't take any external force, agency or power supply to keep things moving in a straight line. Changing direction requires force but no power and only a change of speed requires some energy transfer.
Scientific enquiry is very largely the art of asking the right questions, and learning to recognize preconceptions in our questioning is a fundamental scientific skill. It's a hard one, too, because it requires us to ask questions about ourselves, our motives and our beliefs ... and that doesn't always come easily when we often think that science is a dispassionate, objective process.
I think that's one of the keys to Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Most of us spent our entire careers diligently preparing, testing, answering and refining questions within a framework of belief about the universe which we may and need only dimly comprehend.
I remember years ago watching a documentary about the discovery of High Tc superconductivity. After Bednorz and Müller made it clear that High Tc ceramic superconductors were theoretically possible, research groups around the world raced to produce the first specimen, spurred on by the prospects of a paper in Nature and a Nobel Prize. One group produced what may well have been the first sample, but didn't test it because it was green, and the boss knew that superconductors have to be shiny metallic. Whoops. Bednorz and Müller got the Nobel (saving a lot of squabbling, and they deserved it) but there went the Nature citation and the line in the history books.
Back to The Boy's question, though, and it struck me that he made precisely the same error made by Intelligent Designers (those who are sincere and not just lying about their Creationist beliefs - isn't there a commandment against that? He knows the earth moves, and assumes that something must be making it move. They see the world change and assume that something must be making it change. It's not like that. The evolutionary process is as natural, unstoppable and ungoverned as the movement of the earth.
At the Bang! roadshows this summer, one of the most common questions in our final Q&A sessions was "When did you first become interested in science?" That's a Wrong Question too, because it assumes that scientific interest starts. Watch a baby. Watch a toddler. From birth, or at least from the first ability to manipulate the world around them, they do experiments. What happens if I smile at that human being? What happens if I cry? What happens if I pour water over that book? How many bricks can I stack up? How far can I lean over without falling? How fast can I run?
They do them repeatedly, refining the experiment as results come in. They follow side tracks. They build up models of the universe and when contradictory information comes in they demolish these models and start again.
Everyone is interested in science, at first. Let's ask why so many people lose that interest. That's a Really Good Question.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Whoosh!
Well, what a day that turned out to be. I was originally told not to expect too many - end of the last day, people keen to get home - and as we drove to Wigtown through torrential rain I was wondering if anyone would turn up - and if a part outdoors session was such a good idea.
I arrived to the rather disconcerting news that the session was fully booked at fifty children plus their parents, and to the very good news of steadily improving weather. By 4pm we had brilliant sunshine, blue skies and even something that might have been called "warmth". In Scotland? In October?
After a great introduction (thanks, young Oscar) we got straight down to business. How nice it was to see almost every child's hand go up when I asked "Do you like science? - but how sadly predictable that all but a very few hands went straight down when I asked "Do you like science lessons at school?" What are we doing to children? How on earth, why on earth, do we start with all that enthusiasm, passion and natural curiosity and produce a school subject which the overwhelming majority of children say they Just Don't Like? Does anybody think this is a good idea.
Back to the session. Time for our first experiment, and soon a host of film containers were rocketing up to the tent roof, propelled by Alka-Seltzer tablets and however much water the young scientists though was a good idea.
That said, we talked more about what science is (a way of doing things) and what it isn't (stuff - take note, schools) and moved on to the days big experiment, with water rockets. Groups of three took their choice of plastic bottle and had half an hour to convert it into a really impressive, astronautical looking missile. Add a tail unit, fins, water (how much water? that's the science!) and a bike pump and half an hour later the garden was in a state of pandemonium. Ten launching kits were in near constant use, giving a launch roughly ever six seconds or so.
It was really great to see how much science was being done. The children were constantly experimenting with the amount of water and with their rocket designs, going for the most spectacular flights. Who says science has to be dull?
Many thanks to Daphne Chang, all the Wigtown festival staff and, of course, to the young - and not so young - rocketeers.
I arrived to the rather disconcerting news that the session was fully booked at fifty children plus their parents, and to the very good news of steadily improving weather. By 4pm we had brilliant sunshine, blue skies and even something that might have been called "warmth". In Scotland? In October?
After a great introduction (thanks, young Oscar) we got straight down to business. How nice it was to see almost every child's hand go up when I asked "Do you like science? - but how sadly predictable that all but a very few hands went straight down when I asked "Do you like science lessons at school?" What are we doing to children? How on earth, why on earth, do we start with all that enthusiasm, passion and natural curiosity and produce a school subject which the overwhelming majority of children say they Just Don't Like? Does anybody think this is a good idea.
Back to the session. Time for our first experiment, and soon a host of film containers were rocketing up to the tent roof, propelled by Alka-Seltzer tablets and however much water the young scientists though was a good idea.
That said, we talked more about what science is (a way of doing things) and what it isn't (stuff - take note, schools) and moved on to the days big experiment, with water rockets. Groups of three took their choice of plastic bottle and had half an hour to convert it into a really impressive, astronautical looking missile. Add a tail unit, fins, water (how much water? that's the science!) and a bike pump and half an hour later the garden was in a state of pandemonium. Ten launching kits were in near constant use, giving a launch roughly ever six seconds or so.
It was really great to see how much science was being done. The children were constantly experimenting with the amount of water and with their rocket designs, going for the most spectacular flights. Who says science has to be dull?
Many thanks to Daphne Chang, all the Wigtown festival staff and, of course, to the young - and not so young - rocketeers.
Wigtown Book Festival
I'm off to Wigtown tomorrow ... erm, later today ... to close the Children's Book Festival. By being the last act, I hasten to add, and not because the experiments with bicycle pumps, lemonade bottles and several gallons of water are likely to go horribly wrong. Report and pictures to follow - watch this space.
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