大学教養課程における物理教育の改善 : 科学的思考力の育成と評価

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Students in high schools in Japan are well trained in memorizing written statements and laws, and applying them to problems in physics. On the contrary, they feel much difficulties in finding facts from observations and experiments, or making inductive intuition from experimental results or from a given model. In other words students are not much acquatinted with scientific thinking. Therefore, it is important to give them good opportunities for the training of scientific reasoning in the earlier years at colleges and universities. This kind of training is important not only for science major students but also for non-science major students. However, present teaching in colleges and uiversities is sometimes far from it. For example, "the explanation" of scientific thinking is made for non-science major students, but "the explanation" is accepted by students just as knowledges and it doesn't change their way of thinking. In other words, students study the general outline of scientific thinking, but they can't use the knowledges in practical problems. The author suggests some practical ways of the improvement of physics teaching in order to afford a more effective training of scientific thinking. The suggestions are presented here based on the author's experiene in teaching general education courses and general physics courses. The lectures in colleges are sometimes one-way teaching where students need not struggle to find something but they just accept knowledges through the prepared way of thinking. Frequent quizes or assignments are useful to stimulate students' active thinking to find unknown facts or laws in the assignments. Students' responses to the assignments should be analized by the instructor and some appropriate suggestions will be given to impove their ways of thinking. The author once tried this type of lectures in general education courses and got very active reactions from students. This is an example of improved way of teaching to be replaced for an one-way lecture. The assignments in this case does not mean ordinary problems to apply known laws or principles but special problems related to the study of the process of scientific reasoning. The ordinary problems in physics are usually closed type questions; all the necessary conditions are given in the question and the answer is uniquely determined by those conditions. On the contrary, different types of questions are necessary for the training of scientific thinking. Students sometims have to find out all the possible interpretations from one fact, or clarify all the necessary conditions to get a uniqe conclusion. These types of questions are related to deductive or inductive reasoning. There are few college-level problems which belong to this kind of open-ended questions. The author thinks it important to develop this kind of problems for college students. The amount of memorized knowledges and the ability to apply them to solve the ordinary closed type problems have been the main categories to be evaluated in college physics courses. The evaluation of the ability of scientifc reasoning will have to be introduced in future to judge the over-all ability of students' learning. The improved evaluation method can be applicable to any of the courses in social science, humanities and languages.

著者

石川光男
国際基督教大学理学科

大学教養課程における物理教育の改善 : 科学的思考力の育成と評価

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