A Scientific Research Programme Within Science Education

Chapter 3 introduced Lakatos's model of Scientific Research Programmes, which offers a way of conceptualising research traditions and determining whether they should be considered as ‘scientific’. Earlier in the book it was suggested that Science Education has become an established research field, concerned with teaching and learning in science. Although a relatively ‘new’ field, Science Education is part of a much broader domain of enquiry, some parts of which have long been established (§1.4). This has allowed Science Education to draw upon theories and concepts from cognate fields. In particular it was suggested that two research traditions concerned with learning in science are well established within Science Education. The tradition based upon Piagetian notions of stages of cognitive development was considered briefly in Chapter 1 (§1.6.1). The present chapter offers an account of the establishment of an alternative tradition that has come to dominate much thinking in the field, and is strongly associated with constructivism. It is shown that a good deal of this work can be understood as making up a Lakatosian Research Programme (RP) that was set out in a series of seminal papers around 1978–1983. This highly influential corpus of literature provides both the ‘hard core’ commitments for a RP, and the ‘positive heuristic’ indicating directions for research within the programme.