PhD in Chemical and Materials Sciences

An insight into epistemological and didactic issues related with science teaching

An insight into epistemological and didactic issues related with science teaching

Academic year 2016/2017

Sommario del corso

• Program
• Teaching tools

Program

The teaching will consist of 3 seminars to be held in March 2017. It is addressed to PhD students of the Science and Innovative Technology School. Each seminar will tackle an issue related with science teaching, from an educational and/or epistemological perspective. Students’ achievements will be assessed through specific activities.
Each seminar will tackle the following topics:

The relationship between material reality and models in science education and in the experimental practice - Teacher: Elena Ghibaudi
Building up scientific knowledge implies an unceasing dialectic between the material world - which is the object of experimental investigations - and theories and models - that are formal constructions through which the material world is interpreted. The clarification of the relationships between empirical phenomena and formal systems that codify them (i.e. models) is a necessary premise to both teaching activity and experimental practice of any scientific discipline. There is strong evidence that this conceptual step is often overlooked or taken for granted in science teaching: such lack of attention contributes to make teaching ineffective. In fact, the message addressed to students is often misinterpreted, due to the lack of conceptual tools suitable for its decoding. This seminar will discuss the above-cited problems, with a special focus on the related educational aspects.

Science teaching in the world: a comparison between European and American models - Teacher: Giuseppina Cerrato
Teaching practices, in particular those relative to scientific disciplines, among which Chemistry, proposed in schools and universities in Europe and the United States follow very different patterns: during the seminar some of the most common practices at world level will be thus presented, with particular attention to the Italian situation, as well as with some reference to the pedagogical models to which those practices are connected to.

The assessment of learning and the different steps of the assessment process - Teacher: Floriana Vindigni
The assessment process represents, in the normal practice, the final step in an educational path. However, addressing the challenge of learning assessment, means having the awareness of the multiplicity of objects and aspects involved in the process. Docimological research (Docimology: Measurement and Evaluation in teaching) has shown that the assessment is characterized by ambiguity and unreliability of votes/ratings. During the seminar, starting from the results of docimological research, which have highlighted the unreliability of the evaluators, the main tools used in the assessment process (questions, objective tests, structured or semi-structured, etc.) will be presented. Particular attention will be paid to the disadvantages of each tool, in order to find strategies that will eliminate or reduce the unreliability and the ambiguity of the assessment.

Class schedule

• Teaching materials
• Exams and finals
• Go to Moodle
• Visit the forums