New Perspectives in Science Education

Anchoring Phenomena (AP) have become a popular way to show students the real-world relevance of the science concepts(s) being taught in a particular lesson or textbook chapter. When using an AP, the topic of the AP is normally introduced, the lesson content is taught, and then students are shown how the concepts in the lesson relate to the AP. One of the purposes of an AP is to show students the “light at the end of the tunnel.” It shows them an interesting science topic or application that awaits them someday if they learn the fundamental science concepts being taught in their courses. Unfortunately, even with the use of APs we lose many promising science students because of the amount of background that is required before a student gets to the interesting topics in science. The purpose of this paper is to show how the concept of an AP can be greatly extended so that it becomes a cutting-edge, interesting topic (vehicle) that can be used to teach an entire introduction to the physical sciences course. In this paper, we show how large educational topics such as the search for a “Theory of Everything” (unification of all four fundamental forces), the Big Bang Theory, whether AI can ever completely reproduce all aspects of the human mind, etc. can be used as vehicles to teach students with little or no science background the majority of the learning objectives in a standard introductory physics, chemistry, biology, or physical science course. This approach of providing the required science background on an “as needed” basis while developing the topic of the interesting vehicle also allows the students to be introduced to high-end topics they normally would not see in an introductory course, such as quantum mechanics and general relativity. In this paper, we show how the specific topic of the search for a Theory of Everything can be used as a vehicle to teach a plethora of introductory physics, chemistry, technology, math, and history of science concepts.  We show how this vehicle that is on the cutting edge of modern science provides enough lesson content for a full-semester introductory science course.