ABSTRACT
Science is the subject area in which by far the most research on constructivism has been done (e.g. Driver 1985, Shapiro 1994, Osborne 1990). Perhaps one reason for this is that the content of the secondary school science curriculum is full of concepts which run counter to ‘intuitive’ or common-sense notions, and pupils often have difficulty in learning them. Until fairly recently, the assumption among teachers was that this could be overcome by more effective exposition (‘explanation’) of the ideas, together with suitable demonstrations and, of course, hard work. There was no lack of evidence that students often held mistaken ideas or misconceptions (test results showed this all too clearly), but the traditional strategy was to ignore these ideas (which, being ‘wrong’, were judged to be useless), and to try to present the ‘correct’ science in a way that could be learned: i.e. memorised.
