Set Induction as an Instructional Tool

Perhaps more clearly than in past times, science education has been expected to contribute to national goals of security and general welfare. The study of science in elementary and secondary schools is expected to build scientific literacy among a majority of our citizenry, in the hope that it will lead directly and indirectly to the establishment of a sizable reservoir of scientifically competent manpower. The National Science Foundation has spent $30,000,000 in support of the development of projects designed to improve the teaching of science in the high school. One of these projects is the Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS). BSCS is concerned with the improvement of biology education through the preparation of curriculum materials related to the study of biology. These materials have been designed to reduce the gap between the classroom and the frontiers of biologic knowledge by emphasizing the revisionary character of knowledge and the processes by which scientific knowledge is derived. Great emphasis has been placed on laboratory activities. BSCS has attempted to present models to educators and publishers of what competent research biologists, high school biology teachers, psychologists, and educators believe to be good methods of teaching general biology at the high school level. In the past, this massive commitment has centered on the production of materials that have modernized the conceptual approach to the substantive and process dimensions. The process of education, however, may be viewed as being composed of three distinct dimensions: (i) the substantive, or what is being taught; (ii) the behavioral, or the dynamics of the teaching-learning act; and (iii) and the environmental, or the physical setting within which the teaching-learning act takes place (Downy, 1965, p. 88). When an analysis of the BSCS program is made within this frame of reference, it becomes apparent that a majority of the developments resulting from the efforts of its designers fall within the environmental and substantive dimensions, to the exclusion of the behavioral. In his recent book Fantasy and Feeling in Education, Richard Jones comments that while modern educators have constructed several new curricular programs that have influenced the schools of America, their emphasis has been on instructional material rather than method (Jones, 1968, p. 3). Until very recently, this trend has been predominant in the thinking of BSCS, which has stimulated a rethinking of the goals and purposes of biology education in our high schools. In a recent BSCS publication, Glenn Peterson (1969, p. 67) has pointed out the importance of preparing the teachers of the new biology in teaching skills as well as insuring their competence in the discipline. He maintains that attempts to stimulate change and additions in teachers will fall into two categories: knowledge of new developments in the discipline and knowledge of new developments in the teaching of the discipline. The primary purpose of curriculum innovation, he believes, is to induce change in the substantive envionmental and behavioral dimensions and, as a result, to influence the educative process in pursuit of desired behavioral goals.