New Perspectives in Science Education

Within the research literature in STEM education, documented difficulties concern the epistemological issues arisen by the relationship between the technical aspects of mathematical models and the empirical reality, like: what does the model represent (real objects, abstract concepts)? Where and how do the mathematical outputs of the model relate to reality? The use of mathematical models in science education is often considered an obstacle because of their abstractness, compared with the concrete dimension of science that is expected to enhance students’ motivation. The transition from classical to quantum physics makes this aspect more problematic because of the need to give up familiar images or spacetime descriptions. These problems encouraged the Bologna’s Physics education group to design a teaching/learning path on quantum physics, according to some guiding principles (multidimensionality, multiperspectiveness, longitudinality) that problematize the epistemological and metacognitive issues pointed out by the mathematical models used in quantum physics. One of the main goals of the teaching path was to promote in the students a process of appropriation a la Bakhtin, through which students are encouraged to attribute personal meanings to scientific discourses. This path was experimented with high school students. Data were collected through individual semi-structured interviews. In this paper, we focus on a case study built on the analysis of the scientific discourse of a student, whose position towards mathematics was of total trust; she considered mathematics the main tool to reach the “truth of Nature” and posed it at the basis of her personal appropriation process. The analysis of the student’s discourse is based on Habermas's rationality construct, used to show the multiplicity of epistemic rationalities that lie behind her discourse. It emerged the prevalence of the mathematical rationality: the mathematical formalism and assumptions are the keys for connecting models and reality and validating the empirical facts; she feels the need of mathematics to go beyond the misleading perceptions. In the paper we will present the main features of the path as well as a detailed analysis of the case study to show both the productiveness of this form of rationality and its limits in appropriating quantum physics.
 

Keywords: High-school students; STEM education; Quantum Physics; Appropriation; Epistemic rationality;

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