Uni Fakultäten Fk. V Physik Didaktik und Geschichte der Physik  

Abstracts

Douglas Allchin

What's Not in Boyle's Law: Conceiving and Teaching a "Lawless" Science

Boyle's law is not universal and invariant, as implied by the term 'law'. It does not hold at high pressures, low temperatures, or low volumes. It is based on constant temperature and a balanced electric field. It varies for different gases. Boyle's "law" depends on context. So, too, for many other laws basic to introductory science education, such as Ohm's law, Galileo's law of the pendulum, or Mendel's law of independent assortment. The behavior of gases and other phenomena described by these "laws" are not lawlike at all. When science educators teach simple laws as fundamental to natural order, they thus mislead students. An approach to science as seeking laws interprets nature narrowly, based on a view of society as ordered by universal rules, or laws. It inappropriately inscribes human conceptions of machines and power into nature. But what would nature or science look like without laws? Nature seems complex, with only patches of regularity. Causality may be framed instead in terms of state-systems. Alternatively, scientists may, and often do, focus on experiments as concrete models. Boyle's J-tube offers a basis for analogy, foregoing any reduction to a law. Thinking in terms of models also highlights the role of scope and context in scientific reasoning. Science educators may thus begin replacing the flawed concept of laws with understanding of models and model-based reasoning. An ideal science education program will thus be rooted in working with apparatus and teaching concrete experiment-based reasoning.

Jeff Babb (presenting) and James Currie,

The Brachistochrone and Related Curves: Implications for Teaching the Histories of Calculus and Physics

In 1696 Johann Bernoulli obtained the brachistochrone, the curve of quickest descent, and posed it as a problem to the mathematicians of Europe. This paper examines the fascinating history of the brachistochrone and explores its relation to Snell’s law of refraction, Fermat’s principle of least time and the calculus of variations. Computerized and experimental demonstrations of the brachistochrone are discussed and the related problems of determining the isochrone, tautochrone and cycloid are also considered.

Fabio Bevilacqua

Universita di Pavia, Italy

Einstein's life and theories told to the public: reflections and results after the Einstein year

Elizabeth Cavicchi

Mirrors, Swinging Weights, Light Bulbs…: Simple experiments and history help a class become a scientific community

Nine “honors” undergraduates at a public university found unexpected surprises when asked by their teacher to look in a mirror at an angle, swing weights on a fishing line, and light a bulb with a battery. Euclid, Galileo, Volta, and others long ago explored these ‘simple’ experiments seriously, and the students – exposed to historical accounts and apparatus, and encouraged to observe carefully – began to see why. Old queries were repeated with modern instruments: focusing mirrors to ignite their school newspaper; timing a pendulum with a cell phone, dissecting an “Energy Saver” bulb, beaming lasers into jello, and congealing ice cream with liquid nitrogen! Respect deepened for historical predecessors, and for each other’s ‘fierce’ inventions and thoughtful conjectures. When encouraged to develop a shared understanding of both history and phenomena, the students recast themselves as thoughtful and reflective explorers of the physical world. They became a community of “scientists” and gained firsthand insight into how shared knowledge is created.

Michael Eckert

Learning by seeing? Historic images of flow phenomena, and what they were intended to illustrate.

Visualization is a powerful tool for science teaching: Magnetic field lines are visualized by iron filings in the vicinity of permanent magnets; optical interference is illustrated by superposing water waves; elementary particles are pictured by their traces in bubble chamber images. But the relation between image and concept is not always as obvious as the visual impression suggests. Images do not speak by themselves but need interpretation based on shared beliefs. Context matters. I will illustrate the relationship between visualization and scientific knowledge with historic images of flow phenomena, from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings to modern computational fluid dynamics.

Zofia Golab-Meyer

Physics as exact and experimental science -- some consequences for teaching methods

Abstract: Physics is not an easy subject for understanding, so in consequence is not easy for teaching in school. The origin of many difficulties lies on the abstract, mathematical language in which all physics notion laws are formulated. This language is often beyond developmental level of high school students. Examples of easier and more difficult subjects for students are demonstrated and discussed.
The role of observations and experiments are crucial in doing physics.
However, the experiments, on the level of construction of physical laws play different role in phenomenological laws, and different in so called great theories (as Newton Laws, Gravity, Electromagnetism).

Peter Heering

Entertainment from the Past for the Teaching of Tomorrow: Using Experiments from the Enlightenment for Teacher Training

One aspect of scientific understanding is the notion of science as a cultural activity. In this respect, enabling students to redo historical experiments plays a central role as their unlikeness to modern experiments is obvious. However, this is not only a question of materials and procedures, but also of a changing notion of how scientific knowledge is to be constructed and what purpose science has to serve. Thus, being confronted with historical standards and notions can enable students to realise their own beliefs of how science is to be done.
Particularly experiments from the eighteenth century enlightenment seem to be very useful in this respect. One central aspect of these experiments is the importance of politeness, thus the understanding of scientific practice is a more collective one. This emphasis is particularly useful for teaching situations as the experiments were in particular designed in order to be performed by (or in front of) a group of lay persons. Moreover, entertainment goes hand in hand with natural philosophy, thus these experiments have a strong motivating potential that also works nowadays.
In my presentation I am going to discuss experiences made in demonstrating such experiments to an audience. In doing so, I intend to show the educational potential of experiments that were developed in a style of experimentation in which politeness was a crucial aspect.

Peter Heering, Daniel Osewold,

Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany

Arthur Stinner,

University of Manitoba, Canada

Stephen Klassen

University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada

'Project e'

In the teaching of modern physics to high school and university classes, Robert Millikan must be considered one of the most relevant experimentalists of the 20th century. The experiments that established the numerical value of the charge of the electron is a central topic in physics classes. However, the historical context and the difficulties associated with these experiments are seldom made explicit to the students. Students frequently encounter these difficulties in producing adequate data without understanding where these problems come from. In order to make the experiences associated with the replication of these fundamental experiments more authentic, as well as to establish new approaches to implement historical aspects in science education, the Oldenburg and Winnipeg groups are going to carry out a three year research project. We will describe the development and testing of this project that will contain educational as well as historical materials.

Stephen Klassen

The Pedagogical Renewal of the Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment

The Millikan oil-drop experiment has been characterized both as one of the “most beautiful” physics experiments of all time and, certainly, as one of the most frustrating of all the exercises in the undergraduate physics laboratory. The manner in which the Millikan experiment is portrayed in physics textbooks and in laboratory instructions is investigated both from the pedagogical and history-of-science perspective. Observations are related to Niaz’ (2000) analysis of the Millikan-Ehrenhaft controversy and Hodson’s (1993) categorization scheme for laboratory exercises. Based on recent work utilizing history of science and the story form, proposed improvements are outlined.

Panagiotis Kokkotas

Teaching Physics to in-service primary school teachers in the context of the History of Science: the case of the fall of bodies

Our paper concerns the presentation of an in-service primary school teachers training program which is based on the potential role that History of Science has for promoting the learning of physics. The training program is based on socioconstructivist and sociocultural learning principles with the intention: to help teachers to appropriate basic knowledge about the topic of the fall of bodies, to make explicit through the exploitation of authentic historical science events on the above topic (Aristotle’s, Galileo’s and Newton’s interpretations on the fall of bodies) the contemporary views about the NOS. This could be done through a variety of teaching and learning strategies (e.g. debates - argumentation, group work, simulations) that exploit authentic historical science events in the topic of the fall of bodies.

László Kovács

Károly Simonyi , teacher of the Technical University, Budapest

Károly Simonyi achieved the first artificial nuclear disintegration with the help of accelerated particles in Hungary at the Sopron University in 22-23 dec.1951. The accelerator was a Van de Graff generator made by his team. One can see it as an exhibition item at the Eötvös University Science Faculty Budapest.
Simonyi was a founder and one of the leaders of the Central Physical Research Institute in Budapest in 1952.
Simonyi was a professor at the Technical University Budapest. He was an excellent teacher, was familiar with the students’ knowledge, gave very good lectures and wrote useful schoolbooks for students in the field of theoretical and practical electricity and electronics. We will give some examples from his definitions and explanations. We will also discuss his theories on education.
He was a very accomplished man and dealt with the history of physics in a special artistic way. He wrote a number of books, one of them became very famous, namely “The Cultural History of Physics", which was translated and published in Germany. During our lecture we will show some parts of this book.

Pierre Lauginie

Weighing the Earth, weighing the Worlds

From Cavendish to modern undergraduate-level demonstrations

To weigh Earth: why and how? A problem posed by geologists during the XVIIIth century: getting a first information about our Earth’s deep interior from its mean density; then turning to an astronomical problem related to the gravitational constant G and planets perturbations from the XIXth century: Earth as a mass standard to weigh the whole solar system. Cavendish’s report of his first accurate determination of the Earth’s density in 1798 is considered as the first modern scientific paper: Cavendish’s scientific style and its innovations will be carefully examined. Miniaturized pedagogical variants of the original torsion balance — as said “a scale to weigh the Worlds” — are nowadays in use in universities, a very typical example of our experimental approach of the History of Science: accepting simplifying opportunities brought by modern techniques and materials, while retaining the essentials of the original concepts. Meanwhile, improved versions of the gravitational torsion balance have been in use through the XIXth and XXth centuries as a research tool (G determinations, gravimetry), and again at the very beginning of the XXIst one, recently yielding a one order of magnitude leap in G-accuracy. A remarkable precision tool over two centuries!

Shu-Chiu Liu

Alternative perspectives and conceptual change: integrating pre-scientific knowledge into teaching-learning sequences in school science

The present work is concerned about the integration of pre-scientific knowledge into teaching-learning sequences in school science with a specified theoretical basis from a conceptual change perspective. The central point of this theoretical basis is, to enhance students’ understanding of the intended scientific knowledge alternative ideas and perspectives should be provided and serve as “bridging” representations while students are faced with a new set of ideas which often conflicts their personal view. One of the most powerful representations of this kind is, as argued based on empirical evidence, particular pre-scientific knowledge which has similar conceptual grounds to students’. Empirical evidence discussed in the paper originates from studies on students’ concepts regarding two scientific topics: “models of the universe” and “the nature of heat”. A theoretical framework and instructional approaches of integrating pre-scientific knowledge into teaching-learning sequences aiming to foster students’ conceptual change are thus derived from these investigative results.

Ralph Mason

Michael R. Matthews

Examining the Enlightenment: The Permanent Contribution of Science Education to Culture

I wish to argue for the following nine theses:

1. Education, in the Liberal Tradition, is concerned with the betterment of individuals, society and culture. The ‘Betterment’ thesis.
2. Science education can make distinct contributions to cultural betterment. The ‘Cultural’ thesis.
3. One important cultural contribution of science education is developing, by appropriate introduction of history of science a sense of belonging to, and participating in, a scientific tradition of thought that has successfully striven for an understanding of nature and for the improvement of society. The ‘Tradition’ thesis.
4. All science programmes should ensure that students have some exposure to the milieu, personalities and accomplishments of the creators of the seventeenth century European Scientific Revolution. The ‘Origins’ thesis.
5. The originators of the 17th century scientific revolution in Europe expected that their new methodology in natural philosophy (physical science) would be applicable to other areas of human inquiry and debate. The ‘Extension’ thesis.
6. The social, religious, cultural and political circumstances of the scientific revolution were appalling. The ‘Background’ thesis.
7. The Enlightenment thinkers of the late 17th and 18th centuries consciously tried to extend the methodology of the new science to investigations, problems and disputes in religion, politics, economics, ethics and other areas. The ‘Enlightenment’ thesis.
8. Despite a certain amount of heterogeneity among contributors to the Enlightenment, one can tease out at least ten common tenets of Enlightenment ideology. The ‘Core’ thesis.
9. Science students should be suitably introduced to the aspirations, achievements and failures of the Enlightenment. The ‘Examination’ thesis.

Barbara McMillian

Teaching about Light in Grade 4: What Happened to the Illuminating Stories from the History of Science and Technology?

During the late winter and early spring (13 February - 24 March), I had the opportunity to pilot a study focused on teacher candidates and the teaching of science during the practical, school-based component of an After-degree, Bachelor of Education program. The study was to determine whether the planning, teaching, and assessment methods presented in the course, Early Years Curriculum and Instruction in Science & Health 1, have a chance of being implemented by Early Years teacher candidates in their 6-week practical experience. A Grade 4 curriculum was developed that (1) encouraged students to begin to think more scientifically about light, (2) included stories of light investigations of Archimedes and Newton, and the technological innovations of Gutenberg, van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, among others, and (3) helped students attain the government mandated outcomes for the Grade 4 science cluster, "Light". A Year 1 candidate in a Grade 4 placement agreed to teach the lessons. We soon recognized that the 10% of a teaching day suggested by Manitoba Education for science teaching and learning is inadequate for implementing the essential phases of a good science lesson (engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation (with closure). With young and inquisitive children, the lessons seldom progressed beyond a short discussion of what was observed and/or measured during exploration (first-hand investigations or laboratory-like work). Moreover, if time was made available for thinking and writing, the most important components of the engagement and explanation phases were invariably eliminated. The classroom teacher was very aware of the time constraints and the children's enthusiasm for science, but seldom offered to shorten the time set aside in the 6-day cycle for other subjects, projects, and activities.

Don Metz

William Wales and the 1769 Transit of Venus: Puzzle Solving and the Determination of the Astronomical Unit

According to Thomas Kuhn, a significant part of “normal science” is the fact gathering, empirical work which is intended to illustrate an existing paradigm. Some of this effort focuses on the determination of physical constants such as the astronomical unit (AU). For Kuhn, normal science is also what prepares students for membership in a particular scientific community and is embodied in some form in our science textbooks. However, neither Kuhn nor the textbook says much about the individuals who practiced normal science, especially those who had been relegated to the “hack” duties of long and arduous measurement and calculation.
In this paper, to provide a context for students of astronomy, I will outline the story of William Wales, an obscure British astronomer. Wales, toiling in the shadow of Halley (of Halley's comet fame), Mason and Dixon (of Mason and Dixon line fame) and the infamous Captain Cook endured a brutal winter in northern Canada for a brief glimpse of the 1769 transit of Venus. In the end, Wales supplied one small puzzle piece for the determination of the astronomical unit and exemplified the human spirit and persistence of a Kuhnian “puzzle solver”.

Daniel Osewold

Students’ conceptions and historical ideas about (mechanical) waves

The main aim of the study is to form a curriculum with a strong historical background. The development of the curriculum is joined with the connection between students’ conceptions and historical ideas on mechanical waves. The idea to find these conceptual connections based on the approach of Piaget/Garcia (see Piaget & Garcia, 1989). The research framework “Educational Reconstruction” proposed by Kattmann et al. (1996) enabled this connection with the perspective for developing a curriculum.
In the talk, I present different types of students’ conceptions on mechanical waves, which I have identified by analysing interviews with 50 students. I discuss these types in connection with historical explanations and descriptions of waves (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, Christiaan Huyghens, Ernst-Heinrich und Wilhelm Weber). I would emphasize the similarities between the students’ conceptions and the historical ideas on mechanical waves.
The paper closes with perspectives of applying the discussed connections to physics teaching, and remarks on potentials of this application to enhance students' conceptual understanding.

W. Gerhard Pohl

Austrian Chemical Society, Linz, Austria

Teaching the atomic structure of matter.
A history of ideas, experiments and pictures.

The properties of matter including chemical reactivity have something to do with its microscopic structure. For explanation of macroscopic changes of matter Greek philosophers developed the model of atoms. Molecular models have been used by Dalton, Loschmidt and van´t Hoff to explain the properties of matter. The first experimental evidence for the real existence of molecules was a phenomenon called “Brownian movement” described in 1827 by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown. Physicists were fascinated by this observation, that very small particles suspended in a liquid show irregular movements when observed with a microscope. This movements did continue indefinitely without supply of energy to the system. Several qualitative explanations of this phenomenon were put forward in the 19th century. The first quantitative theory was published by Albert Einstein in 1905. Marian von Smoluchowski developed a theory of Brownian movement from different points of view in 1906, arriving at the same conclusions as Einstein.In 1908 Jean Perrin published experimental results supporting the Einstein-Smoluchowski theory. In 1912 the invention of x-ray diffraction by Max von Laue showed the existance of atoms, ions and molecules in crystalline solids. This method made it possible to build exact molecular models. Molecules of increasing size could be visualized by the indirect method of x-ray diffraction. Linus Pauling reached a break-through in understanding protein structures in the 1950s. Max Perutz finally showed the interdependance of structure and function after determining the 3D-structure of hemoglobin. By combining the results of model building and x-ray diffraction Watson and Crick found the DNA double-helix in 1953. This was the start of understanding genetics in molecular dimensions. Binnig and Rohrer, by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in 1982 found a more direct way to visualize the structure of solids atom by atom. During recent years a growing number of 3D-structures of biological macromolecules has been visualized after x-ray diffraction analysis. In most cases structure-function relations are found from these pictures. Molecular models have thus contributed enormously to understanding processes in living cells and have shown new ways for treatment of molecular diseases.
All these experimental findings are excellent tools for teaching. I find it important to stress that we are dealing with models and atoms should not be imagined as solid spheres like glass beads even if they look so in STM-pictures.

Literature:
W.G. Pohl, From Democrit to Hyperchem. Models in chemistry education of engineers. In: Education by Communication. Schriftenreihe Ingenieurpädagogik
Bd. 36, 1996, p 553-562; A. Melezinel, I. Kiss (Eds.) ISBN 3-88064-266-4

W.G. Pohl, Models in teaching the history of chemistry. XX. International Congress of History of Science 1997, book of abstracts SU 12

David Rudge

History of Science in the Service of Middle School Science Teacher Preparation

“Enlist, Equip and Empower: A Program for the Preparation of Middle School Science Teachers” is an NSF sponsored project aimed at recruiting qualified and caring individuals into the profession, providing training specific to the needs of middle school science teachers, and supporting teachers during the first crucial years of their careers. In this paper I discuss three ways history of biology is being used to promote understanding of the nature of science. These include recapitulating the discovery of blood circulation (William Harvey), discovering why dark moths became more common in soot darkened areas after the industrial revolution (Bernard Kettlewell), and exploring a mystery disease (sickle cell anemia) from the standpoint of six subdisciplines in biology (Anthony Allison).

Christian Sichau

Beyond the Textbook: Telling (Hi-)stories about Science with the Help of Scientific Instruments in Museums

Textbooks and science as (often) taught in the class room focus on general scientific principles, concepts and natural laws which are considered to be universally valid and “timeless”. In the past objects in museums – scientific instruments and apparatuses – have mainly been used to illustrate and “explain” these general “ideas” and their “discovery” (the physics gallery in the Deutsches Museum opened in 1959 is a good example); we find a similar situation today in many science centres. In this paper I will turn the perspective around: My starting point are the objects as found in museums (or: in the real world) with all their peculiarities and their individual histories. I will show that the rich stories which then emerge can provide many important insights into the history and nature of science. The real strength of a museum consists, as I will argue, in these complementary aspects of science teaching.

Arthur Stinner

From theory to pracitce: placing history into the science classroom

I will summarize my thinking about how to launch the last phase of our research, that is, connecting the history of science with classroom teaching, using a modified version of our "Units of Historical Presentations"

Jürgen Teichmann

From Babylon to Quintessence – Are there Revolutions in Astronomy?

I will demonstrate by examples from the history of astronomy how this science changed from a classical observational to a laboratory dominated science. By new experimental/instrumental methods like spectroscopy, photometry and later on radio and x-ray astronomy, also the profession of an astronomer changed totally. The necessity of high technology for this progress created the Big Science Astrophysics. But in spite of this it remained a strongly “philosophical” science: The cosmos plays the metaphorical role of an “unknown ocean”! What is the origin and what is the end of the world? How singular is mankind at all?
All this makes history of astronomy in the 20th century a splendid example to combine science and reflections about science within education of science.
Examples from the large Astronomy exhibition and from the teacher training courses in the Deutsches Museum Munich, Germany may prove this.

John Theibault

Chemical Heritage Foundation, USA

Lives in Science as Illustrations of Scientific Practice:
'Science Alive!' and Percy Julian

Brigitte van Tiggelen

Louvain de Neuve, Belgium

Teaching the chemistry through history :
lessons in polymers and halogens

When it comes to teach chemistry, one has to deal with some a priori statements such as the opposition between natural and artificial, sanity and pollution, and so on. Among the substances that are most associated to these antinomies, one can find chlorine and plastics. Even if mention is made by the teacher that macromolecules are also to be found among living organisms, most students end up with the idea that macromolecules are "man-build". The idea of using history as a new teaching tool to reframe concepts such as polymers and macromolecules came out from a conference organized for teachers on the historical developments of plastics, and emerged from the teachers themselves. The long history of rubber associated with the chemical questions it raised from the XVIIIth century onwards made this material the most suitable candidate to encompass all aspects of notions ordinarily taught in this chapter. The teaching sequence makes use of several different student activities (text reading, experiments, modeling macroscopic properties at different microscopic level, Š) and has shown, after testing, to be much more efficient than the usual framework.

In contrast with the story of natural and synthetic rubber, the teaching sequence on
halogens does not give attention at all to the problematic image of chemistry in the public opinion. It is rather aimed at making discover by the students what a column of the periodic table is or means. Since chlorine - and even more the other halogens- is quite tricky to manipulate, all experiments are carried out by the teacher alone, but they form the core of reasoning chain.
Most operations require a good knowledge and command of "Microgas chemistry", a term coined by Bruce Mattson (Creighton university) to name a technique allowing the production and manipulation of small quantities of gases in 60mL syringes, safely and with a minimum amount of chemical products, hence of waste. The narrative follows the sequel of the isolation of halogens, putting emphasis on the similar properties and the inference, as early as the beginning of the XIXth century, of a kind of "chemical family". History also documents these discoveries, and show how the different conceptual settings explained the chemical behavior from phlogiston times to contemporary chemistry. First testing is on the way.

Ian Winchester

The right angled triangle in the history of physics and engineering

This history of physics since the 17th century is initially a history that brings four of the old Greek disciplines together: physics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. A large part of geometry for the Greeks was connected with the study of the right angled triangle. It turns out that most of the early thinking in "natural philosophy" in the late 16th and 17th centuries continued that trend. Thus in the work and discussions of Descartes, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton the right angled triangle is central to their physical thought. Newton's approximation methods relating to the infinitesimal calculus, as indeed those of Leibniz, also presupposed that the one definite result that could be found when two of three variables were in a sufficiently near connection weas that of the right angled triagle. Even in the physics of our own time any actual calculations in, for example, general relativity, require that one calculate locally and use the facts of the Pythagorean theorem.
In engineering similar calculations are everywhere. The screw, the wedge, the inclined plane find there way into mechanical engineering ubiquitously. Similarly in electrical engineering the right angled triangle is central to all calculations requiring an understanding of regularly fluctuating alternate currents.
If it were not true that in Euclidian space the Pythagorean theorm were true, or if it were not possible to appoximate more sophisticated spaces by Euclidean spaces for local calculation purposes, physics and engineering would be impossible.

Gudrun Wolfschmidt

Understanding the Earth and the Cosmos

• Magnetism in Cultural History, Geophysics and Astronomy
• Three Examples for Contextual Teaching

I present three examples of instruments used in the field of magnetism.
First I discuss the development of the compass in China, in three steps (Sinan, Zhinanyü and Zhinanzhen), followed by its transfer to the western countries in the 13th century. Then I examine pre-1600 experiments with magnets and their applications to navigation, as well as the topic of the Earth as a magnet. Finally I mention the importance of the compass for sundials.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769--1859) initiated a European geomagnetic network in 1829. In 1833 Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777--1855), in collaboration with Wilhelm Weber (1804--1891), founded the "Magnetischen Verein'' in Göttingen. I present, in this context, the construction of magnetometers and the further development of geomagnetic observatories.
Finally I discuss the solar-terrestrial relationships discovered in the middle of the 19th century, as well as their effects on the Earth including auroras, geomagnetic storms and radio interference. I show examples of the measurement of solar and cosmic magnetic fields by using radiotelescopes and satellites.

Gabor Zemplen

The Nature of Science in not even 9 and ½ weeks. - Pilot module for the IBO TOK class

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) launched a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course in the diploma programme in 1999. The short course description states that:
TOK is an interdisciplinary requirement intended to stimulate critical reflection on the knowledge and experience gained inside and outside the classroom. The course challenges students to question the bases of knowledge, to be aware of subjective and ideological biases and to develop the ability to analyse evidence that is expressed in rational argument.
TOK is a key element in encouraging students to appreciate other cultural perspectives. The course is unique to the IBO, which recommends at least 100 hours of teaching time spanning the programme’s two years .
The subject is structured around the so called TOK diagram, organising approaches areas of knowledge, ways of knowing and focusing on the knower(s):

In case all “areas” and “ways” are treated with equal emphasis, appr. 10 contact hours are left for discussing and studying the natural sciences. I have earlier argued for potential conflicts between the general approach taken by the critical-thinking skills oriented TOK and traditional science subjects, and have highlighted some possible solutions (Zemplén 2006).
In the paper I am going to describe a 6 week module (12 x 45 minutes) that tries to tackle major „nature of science” issues from an unusual perspective. Following recent trends in science studies (Collins 2002, Labinger and Collins 2001) I will attempt to develop a view of science that grows out of sociological and anthropological considerations of expertise and views on legitimation (Weber). The broad sociological starting point can help students understand the presence of values in science, the often criticised bias that scientists at times show and still appreciate science as a privileged form of knowledge-production. This approach runs counter to general trends, where science is first introduced as characterisable with a distinct and specific method, reliance on empirical data and logical reasoning (as opposed to other social institutions), and this view is gradually „softened” once it is recognised that there is no distinct scientific method, there is no guarantee to cut nature at its joints, or a guarantee that the observations will favour one theory as opposed to another. The traditional approach has to make concessions to account for science in practice. The road the pilot module takes is the opposite: starting from „soft”, social considerations one can appreciate the renewing attempts of scientists to tackle sources of errors and acquire as reliable knowledge as possible about the natural world.
Topics in the 6-week module also include reflection on the choices students make: is it based on the arguments that parties put forth or based on evaluation of the expertise of speakers? What is the difference between accepted science and not accepted forms of knowledge production in the light of this socialising approach? Can one grasp the nature and significance of scientific method using this model?
The study is based on classroom-experience carried out in 2006. I will give outlines of the classes, responses from the students, and report on successes and failures – and eagerly wait for helpful comments

Collins H. M. 2002. The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, No. 2, 235-296
Labinger, J. A.; Collins, H. 2001. The one culture? A conversation about science,. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zemplén, G. Á. 2006. Conflicting Agendas: Critical Thinking versus Science Education in the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge Course. accepted for Volume 16 Numbers 4-5, May 2006 of Science and Education.

This conference is supported by