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A group of scientists, including people from the Royal Society of Chemistry, recently proposed that experiences such as licking an ice lolly should be part of the science curriculum. By licking a lolly and seeing how it melts—the idea goes—children would better learn about melting, and therefore about chemistry and physics.
But does licking a lolly, or experiences such as kneading dough, playing with shadows or digging in soil, actually help pupils to learn science? Deploying examples and demonstrations in the classroom can be a helpful gateway towards deeper understanding, but it’s not a shortcut to knowledge.
The idea of learning through experiences has a long history. It’s perhaps most closely associated with the work of educator John Dewey in the early 20th century. Dewey and other educators of the time were concerned that an emphasis on rote learning would lead to “inert knowledge”: facts that students wouldn’t be able to apply to the real world.
An experience like licking a lolly may at least be memorable—especially if you’d never done it before. Licking a lolly or seeing it melt in class would lead to what psychologists call an episodic memory: a memory of an event in your life.
However, there is a difference between having memories for events and having knowledge. There is a difference, for example, between having personally lived through the French Revolution and knowing what happened.
The latter involves a different type of memories—semantic memories. These are based on understanding how things work and what they mean. It is the type of memory that is at play when you use a word such as “heavy,” unconnected to a specific heavy object. Such understandings are essential to both scientific learning and our use of language.
2024-09-04 13:15:04
Post from phys.org