Building the Protective Belt of the Progressive Research Programme

Chapter 5 examined major areas of criticism of the tradition of work often labelled as ‘constructivism in Science Education’. Among these were suggestions that research in this tradition has offered little of use to inform teaching, and that — in effect — the constructivist ‘bandwagon’ had ceased to offer useful insights to progress the field. By considering each of the main directions of research suggested by the positive heuristic of the RP into learning in science characterised earlier in the book (Chapter 4), the present chapter offers an overview on what has been found out through several decades of scholarship. It is argued that progress has been uneven, and that there are not yet clear answers to most of the key research questions. Despite this, the body of literature that has developed offers a wide range of models and constructs, informed by diverse empirical evidence. It is argued that taken together this work provides the basis for understanding why simple answers have not often been forthcoming by highlighting the complexity of the phenomena studied (learning and teaching). Moreover, the various ‘refutable variants’ that have been proposed by those exploring the central research questions, now provide a rich set of conceptual resources for further learning in the field.

Chapter 1 provided some historical background to the development of the ‘alternative conceptions’ or ‘constructivist’ perspective in science, that was set out in a series of seminal papers a quarter of a century ago (Driver & Easley, 1978; Gilbert et al., 1982; Driver & Erickson, 1983; Gilbert & Watts, 1983; Osborne & Wittrock, 1983). Chapter 4 presented the ‘hard core’ of ideas that informed the research reviewed, reported and prescribed in those papers, modelled as a Lakatosian RP (as explained in Chapter 3), showing how the hard-core assumptions provided heuristic guidance for an extensive programme of research.