Critical attitude and conceptual development in physics : what connections?

Abstract

In a changing world, several competences are universally advocated as educational objectives. One of the expected benefits of this choice is transferability across domains, as in the case of critical thinking. But developing various competences in this way may entail some limitations on other planes – for instance, in relation to disciplinary conceptual knowledge. The question arises of the possible links between development of a critical attitude and conceptual progress in a given domain. To document this question, I present a series of investigations involving future physics teachers at the end of their formation. Reporting their evolution during in-depth interviews on various topics in physics, I focus on the extent to which they critiqued incomplete or incoherent explanations. The findings are discussed in terms of ‘intellectual dynamics’ – that is, differences in the co-evolution of their conceptual understanding and critical attitude. In this context, the most frequently observed intellectual dynamics was ‘delayed critique’: waiting to reach a certain threshold of conceptual comprehension beyond mere logical necessity before expressing a critique of a given text. I will discuss the process by which the transition from critical passivity to the liberation of critical attitude is triggered in this population, discussing how we might help future teachers (and students more generally) to reduce the duration and effects of their critical passivity when they struggle to master the domain in question. I will argue that much more can be learned from students’ responses to an educational setting if analysis of their comments is not confined exclusively to conceptual aspects but attends more to the possible interconnections between conceptual and metacognitive-critical-affective awareness.