John Clement – författare

This book describes new, model based teaching methods for science instruction. It presents research that describes these new methods in a very diverse group of settings: middle school biology, high school physics, and college chemistry classrooms. Mental models in these areas such as understanding the structure of the lungs or cells, molecular structures and reaction mechanisms in chemistry, or causes of current flow in electricity are notoriously difficult for many students to learn. Yet these lie at the core of conceptual understanding in these areas. The studies focus on a variety of teaching strategies such as discrepant questioning, analogies, animations, model competition, and hands on activities. Five different levels of organization for teaching strategies are described, from those operating over months (design of the sequence of units in a curriculum) to those operating over minutes (teaching tactics for guiding discussion minute by minute).

How do scientists use analogies and other processes to break away from old theories and generate new ones? This book documents such methods through the analysis of video tapes of scientifically trained experts thinking aloud while working on unfamiliar problems. Some aspects of creative scientific thinking are difficult to explain, such as the power of analogies, the use of physical intuition, and the enigmatic ability to learn from thought experiments. The book examines the hypothesis that these processes are based on imagistic mental simulation as an underlying mechanism. This allows the analysis of insight ("Aha!") episodes of creative theory formation. Advanced processes examined include specialized conserving transformations, Gedanken experiments, and adjusted levels of divergence in thinking. Student interviews are used to show that students have natural abilities for many of these basic reasoning and model construction processes and that this has important implications for expanding instructional theories of conceptual change and inquiry. "I regard this work as the most comprehensive account ever attempted to show how imagistic, analogic, and sensory-motor representations participate in creative thinking." Professor Ryan Tweney