The Positive Heuristic: Directions for Progressing the Field

This final chapter shifts the focus from an account of the nature of the (‘constructivist’) research programme (RP) into the contingencies of learning science, and the body of published research that can be identified as engaging with the positive heuristic of the RP, to a consideration of the priorities for further research. Chapter 6 offered an overview of the progress that had been made in responding to the key concerns of the RP, showing that this progress had been uneven. That account suggests that even where lines of research have to date made little progress towards offering reliable knowledge to inform teaching, the work that has been undertaken has been useful in demonstrating the complexity of the issues, and so better highlighting methodological difficulties and indicating the level of sophistication needed of models that will be widely applicable to science learning in widely diverging contexts. This chapter considers the layers of context that make up any learning environment, and considers how research within the RP needs to be directed to make further significant contributions to the field. In other words, this chapter considers how to interpret the positive heuristic of the RP, in view of what we have learnt so far, in order to continue to progress Science Education.

The main conclusion drawn from the previous chapter is that since the adumbration of the RP characterised in Chapter 4 (§4.4), there has been a good deal of work which can be understood to have been directed by (or at least having aims consistent with) the RP. As a result of this body of work, the empirical content of Science Education has increased considerable. There has clearly also been a good deal of theorising, with new ideas introduced, sometimes borrowed from other academic areas, and that there has been considerable interplay between theory and data collected.