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Developing Disciplinary Intuitions in the Natural Sciences

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Disciplinary Intuitions and the Design of Learning Environments
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Abstract

This chapter presents case examples from genetically modified (GM) food crops, and from the water cycle, to suggest pedagogical approaches for developing Disciplinary Intuitions in the natural sciences. The guiding question is the nature of scientific knowledge – what are the underlying regularities that inform our construction of science? If these regularities exist, how could we use them to generate intuitive understandings in learners? A key tenet of Disciplinary Intuitions is the notion of disciplinarity that our intuitive understandings of reality correspond closely to disciplinary boundaries and that these boundaries correspond closely to non-arbitrary, real distinctions between phenomena. In considering scientific knowledge, the immediate contrast would be with natural philosophy, the collected wisdom about the functioning of the universe that has accumulated through the ages.

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Correspondence to Michael Tan .

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© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

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Tan, M., Tan, M. (2015). Developing Disciplinary Intuitions in the Natural Sciences. In: Lim, K. (eds) Disciplinary Intuitions and the Design of Learning Environments. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-182-4_5

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