Abstract
It is widely argued that the skills of scientific expertise are tacit, meaning that they are difficult to study. In this essay, I draw on work from the philosophy of action about the nature of skills to show that there is another access point for the study of skills—namely, skill transmission in science education. I will begin by outlining Small’s Aristotelian account of skills, including a brief exposition of its advantages over alternative accounts of skills. He argues that skills exist in a sort of life cycle between learning, practicing, and transmitting, which provides reasons to think that we should pay close attention to the way skills are transmitted in teaching and learning. To demonstrate how a study of skill transmittance can be revealing about the nature of skills in expertise, I explore an example—what I identify as the skill of tension-balancing in model-building. After describing the skill, I briefly examine two case studies from the science education literature that reveal insights about the skill of tension-balancing as it functions in the practice of model-building.
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Notes
A more fine-grained taxonomy of expertise is offered by Michelene Chi (based on the work of Hoffman (1998)), who identified several stages of development of expertise, beginning with “novice” and moving on to “initiate,” “apprentice,” “journeyman,” “expert,” and finally ending with “master” (Chi 2006, p. 22).
See Hornsby (2012) for some discussion of how to interpret his work.
The similarities of the inarticulate expert to the accounts of expertise and tacit knowledge I referenced above is, I think, non-incidental. Nor are the similarities between the inarticulate expert and the stereotypical scientist who is skilled and knowledgeable but a terrible teacher.
To give a full and detailed account of why this is the case, we would need to do a deep-dive into Aristotelian metaphysics about natures and the process of habituation, which could be a distraction from the main topic of the present article (for an overview, see Cohen 2016).
Incidentally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Small’s Aristotelian account of skills is strikingly similar to Aristotle’s account of human conception (Frey 2015).
Miniature, of course, refers not to physical size but to their status as more junior members of a discipline.
Of course, not all instances of learning must follow this roadmap. There are many instances in which student creativity plays an important role at an earlier stage of learning, as the two cases I consider demonstrate.
They reported that in a class with 18 projects, only six of the original scientific models being examined were error-free—i.e., such that the students did not have to revise them in their re-creation of them. Ten had parameter errors and two lacked sufficient specification of the terms of the model.
This is not to suggest that a similar insight could not have developed from a direct observation of the skill of tension-balancing.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Tarja Knuuttila, Jennifer Frey, Michael Dickson, and four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments during the writing of this article. Valuable feedback was also provided by attendees of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice Meeting in 2016, as well as by attendees of a philosophy of science seminar at the University of Helsinki.
Funding
I am grateful for financial support from the University of South Carolina Office of the Vice President for Research and the Department of Philosophy, which funded research visits to the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and the Complutense University of Madrid, during which the bulk of this article was written. I am also grateful to the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation, for fellowship funding, under which I finished this article.
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Boesch, B. Skill Transmittance in Science Education. Sci & Educ 28, 45–61 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-0020-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-0020-x