How Does a Bicycle Work? A New Instrument to Assess Mechanical Reasoning in School Aged Children (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
Reasoning about mechanisms is one of the hallmarks of disciplined inquiry in science and engineering. Despite the central importance of mechanistic reasoning, its origins are not well understood. Numerous curricular efforts involve simple machines and related physical systems, but these do not yet build toward a systematic and longer-term vision for promoting the development of reasoning about mechanisms. The research we describe here was developed in partnership with a team of engineers and science educators who aim to support the early development of mechanistic reasoning through a curriculum that challenges children to design kinetic toys called MechAnimations. Our research aims to characterize the intellectual resources available to children as they engage in design challenges and to describe the process by which these design activities may promote development of mechanistic reasoning. This paper provides an in-depth look at children’s prior understandings of a key aspect of Mec...
We commonly have a strong sense of causality as events unfold. We often experience one event as causing another. Both perceptual and cognitive processes have been proposed as the explanation for causal experience. However, neither philosophy nor psychology have been able to provide decisive arguments one way or another. Theorists claiming that the origin of causal representation is the perceptual system argue that " certain physical events give an immediate causal impression, and that one can 'see' an object act on another object, produce in it certain changes, and modify it in one way or another " (Michotte, 1946/1963, p.15). On this view there exists a perceptual mechanism that transforms visual sequences of events into a representation of cause. Michotte hypothesized that causal perception was specific to caused motions of objects. More recently Susanna Siegel (2010) argued visual experiences might represent causal relations of a much larger variety. I argue that only the causation of motion is represented by the perceptual system. The questions this essay aims to answer are (i) is there a perceptual mechanism capable of attributing a causal relation, and (ii) if such a mechanism exists what kind of causal experiences are the result of its operations. My discussion of these questions unfolds as follows. Before confronting the questions of this essay I will explicate a few key terms. Then, I will distinguish two senses of causation and two theses concerning the visual representation of causation. The first thesis is the narrow causal thesis , which holds that caused motion of objects is the only mode of causation represented in visual experience. The broad causal thesis is not specific to what kind of causation is represented in visual experience. Following this, I will lay out the proposals for explaining causal experience from Michotte and Siegel's argument for the broad causal thesis. I then turn to evidence that infants representing launching events involves more than representations of spatiotemporal properties as well as evidence suggesting that computations performed by the perceptual system are responsible for the attribution of causation.
Science & Education, 2010
This paper presents an analysis of the different types of reasoning and physical explanation used in science, common thought, and physics teaching. It then reflects on the learning difficulties connected with these various approaches, and suggests some possible didactic strategies. Although causal reasoning occurs very frequently in common thought and daily life, it has long been the subject of debate and criticism among philosophers and scientists. In this paper, I begin by providing a description of some general tendencies of common reasoning that have been identified by didactic research. Thereafter, I briefly discuss the role of causality in science, as well as some different types of explanation employed in the field of physics. I then present some results of a study examining the causal reasoning used by students in solid and fluid mechanics. The differences found between the types of reasoning typical of common thought and those usually proposed during instruction can create learning difficulties and impede student motivation. Many students do not seem satisfied by the mere application of formal laws and functional relations. Instead, they express the need for a causal explanation, a mechanism that allows them to understand how a state of affairs has come about. I discuss few didactic strategies aimed at overcoming these problems, and describe, in general terms, two examples of mechanics teaching sequences which were developed and tested in different contexts. The paper ends with a reflection on the possible role to be played in physics learning by intuitive and imaginative thought, and the use of simple explanatory models based on physical analogies and causal mechanisms.
Spontaneous Reasoning of Secondary School Teachers about the Relativity of Mechanical Magnitudes
1993
This paper presented by the author at the Third International Seminar - Misconceptions and Educational Strategies in Science and Mathematics, held at Cornell University, has as its main theme the misconceptions resulting from the spontaneous thinking of students and teachers of high school physics about the relativity of mechanical magnitudes.<br> It is based on a research work carried out by Villani and Pacca with a questionnaire produced by these two professors and Brazilian researchers that applied them to a sample of Brazilian students graduated in Physics.<br> The author of this communication used this questionnaire with only one more question and applied it to a sample of 53 teachers of Physics with very varied experiences in the teaching of this subject..<br> The conclusions drawn from the research with teachers were identical to those that were withdrawn by the Brazilian researchers with the students graduated in Physics.