About the Book

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This compendium highlights a ninety-year history of science education focused on how demonstrations have been used for the express teaching and learning of science at the high school, college and university levels. It is presented in three chapters: (a) Experimental Studies Comparing the Lecture Demonstration Method and the Individual Laboratory Method of Teaching Science (1918-1989); (b) Further Types of Demonstration-related Comparison Studies (1958-2008); and (c) More Recent Demonstration-related Non-Comparative Studies (1980- 2008). Organization of the research in this manner revealed that an interest in investigating this type of research by science educators had and continues to evolve. This work was constructed from an intense and nearly exhaustive review of the research.

While the authors believe that it can be misconstrued that the scholarly literature and empirical research are one in the same, we can show that it is necessary to make a distinction between the two sources of information. Upon review of the scholarly literature and empirical research on the demonstration topics, a salient outcome is that these two bodies of information are only loosely corroborated. From this point on we use the terms literature and research when referring to each of these bodies of information.

To begin, we describe studies comparing the effectiveness of the methods of lecture demonstration and the individual laboratory. The very early attempts (1918-1964) to determine the superiority of the lecture demonstration method over the individual laboratory method of teaching science, and vice versa, remained unresolved through the mid-1960s. Cunningham (1946) suggested several reasons for the inconclusive nature of the results reported by researchers of lecture demonstration and individual laboratory comparison studies. After carefully reviewing the studies up to 1946, he noted that there were numerous variables that should have remained fixed for the duration of the experiments. Some of the variables that confounded the results of those investigations included the uncontrolled variables related to: (a) the teacher; (b) the complexity of experiments and apparatus; (c) the time spent on each method; (d) the amount of science studied by students; and (e) the performer of the demonstrations.

Even after exacting a procedure to control for the teacher variable reported by Cunningham (1946), Yager et al. (1969) were able to show that students who participated in a discussion-demonstration group or discussion-laboratory group developed more skills than those students who received science instruction via a discussion-only method. The results of Yager and his predecessors suggested that neither the demonstration method nor the laboratory method for the teaching and learning of science was superior.

From 1958 to 2008, investigations comprised of multiple demonstration-related comparison studies were also unable to confirm the superiority of the demonstration method for the teaching and learning of science as compared to other methods in each study. For instance, Oliver (1975) compared three methods of teaching high school biology - lecture-discussion, a combination of lecture-discussion and demonstration, and demonstrations. Initially, although he determined that the lecture-discussion method of teaching biology was noticeably superior in terms of biology content acquisition during the onset of the semester, this result was ephemeral, and dissipated at the termination of the following semester. Comparing a self-paced instructional method and a teacher demonstration method of teaching college chemistry, Eniaiyeju (1983) concluded that students’ achievement scores were higher when they participated in the self-paced program; in

About the Author

David M. Majerich, Ed. D. (Temple University, 2004), is presently a Research Associate with the Equity Studies Research Center at Queens College, City University of New York. Hehas taught science education methods courses at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include improving how science is taught to and learned by nonscience majors in the large lecture hall. Joseph S. Schmuckler, Ed. D. (University of Pennsylvania, 1968), is presently a professor of chemistry and science education at Temple University, Philadelphia. He has taught chemistry to nonscience majors and science education methods to teachers of science for over thirty years at Temple University. His research interests include improving the manner in which science is taught to and learned by nonscience majors in the large lecture hall. Kathleen Fadigan, Ed. D. (Temple University, 2003) is presently an Assistant Professor of Science Education at Pennsylvania State University and a Senior Research Associate with the Equity Studies Research Center at Queens College, City University of New York. She has taught science education methods at Temple University and Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include informal science education, gender equity in science education, and teacher/student understandings of the nature of science and evolution.