ABSTRACT
There is a deep and enduring tension between personal experience and the formal representation of scientific knowledge in school science classrooms. Students have ample personal experience of the physical properties school science seeks to explain: they know that balls rolled along a flat surface slow down and stop after a while; they know that the location of tadpoles underwater is not quite what it seems from above the water. Researchers interested in children’s knowledge of science and cognitive change have explored ways in which students can work through their preconceptions (or misconceptions) about the knowledge of science (see Duit and Treagust, 1998). The tension between students’ common-sense knowledge and the formal knowledge of science remains, however, because of the language science uses to represent important and long-settled knowledge. Scientific knowledge is represented in specialised vocabulary, syntax and genre structures, quite different from the language of common sense. As Martin (1993) has argued, science cannot be understood in the student’s ‘own words’ because science ‘has evolved a special language in order to interpret the world in its own, not in common sense terms’ (Martin, 1993, p. 200).
