The Materiality of Scientific Instruments and Why It Might Matter to Science Education

• In Event: 73.041 - Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education Research and Practice?

Abstract

The issue I explore in this paper began with my decision to investigate the history of how science came to know about the relationship between boiling point of water and air pressure (Author, 2013). My studies into the history of this relationship led me to realize how much I had taken an instrument, the humble thermometer, for granted. This experience led me to realize that a focus on conceptual elements of science with an emphasis on theory development can seduce educators into ignoring the cultural affordances of the material practice of scientific instruments.

What is an instrument?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first record of use of the term, instrument, in English comes from the 14th century when it was associated with something used by an agent for the performance of an action, sometimes associated with religion as in “God’s instrument”. By the 17th century, instruments such as the barometer, air pump, telescope and microscope were being developed and people started to group them "as tools of experimental or natural philosophy" (Warner, 1990, p. 83). I consider these instruments constitute elements of the material culture of science.

Thinking about scientific instruments
Typically, the history of science has been about the history of theory, so instruments were considered “reified theories” (van Helden and Hankins, 1994, p. 2). The power of instruments is that they allow different and new experimental questions. Specific instruments become so accepted as material objects that they are used unproblematically as reliable means for eliciting natural phenomena by serving to separate the phenomenon of study from the noise of the observed world (Latour, 1987). Something becomes an instrument through a social process by which it attains taken-for-granted status from consensus associated with the proper use of the instrument that disciplines users, a standardization of manufacture that ensures the development of uniform scales of measurement and routinized methods of calibration (Golinski, 2000).

For all its focus on practice, national science education documents, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Achieve Inc., 2013), tend to ignore or take for granted instruments in educational practice. In the document, A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012), instruments are mentioned in discussion of science as a community but not problematized. So the question I was left with of why there is so little attention given to understanding the role of instruments in the construction of knowledge, especially in science education. In this paper, I explore the need to examine the role of material culture especially as it is instantiated in the instruments we take for granted in science teaching and learning. I build on the work of scholars (e.g. Resnick et al., 2000) who conducted case studies of children building scientific instruments by examining how instruments such as thermometers and spectroscopes can be problematized through the use of history of science to as a way of making students more active constructors of their thinking.

Author

• Catherine E. Milne, New York University