Kalman, C. (2011). Enhancing students’ conceptual understanding by engaging science text with reflective writing as a hermeneutic circle. Science & Education, 20:159-172.
This research article was absolutely fascinating to me as it contains a very strong correlation to what I am personally interested in with my research and my pedagogical practices as a teacher and teacher educator with literacy and science. The basis for Kalman’s study is looking at who science understanding has changed or can change within a student by looking at the idea of conceptual change theory and then merging that into practice with reflective writing and the idea of hermeneutics put forth by both Heidegger and Gadamer.
The study done was not a study using hermeneutical methodology but was a study that used hermeneutic practices to look at students conceptual understanding of science that they are exposed to in entry level university courses. This is of major benefit to me as my research goal is to look at how students or anyone who self-identifies as being religious, uses their religious literacy and understanding to inform their scientific literacy and the types of questions that they are continually asking themselves in the process of developing their conceptual understanding. Kalman’s study did essentially this, but without the emphasis on religion, which was either not addressed or entirely lacking.
The role of reflective writing within the Kalman’s study is the major hermeneutical facet in that the purpose of the reflective writing is for an internal role of developing understanding within the student and not for any external source. While the reflective writing is analyzed by the researchers and they are essentially external of the writing process, the writing is not seen by the course instructors and is thus not responsible for any source of graded material. By limiting away the external source to the writing, the idea of the reflective processes and hermeneutical understanding can take place internally to only the student as they seek to conceptualize the scientific concept sought. McDermott & Hand (2010) note that “Writing was not being viewed as a knowledge telling process, where students may know the content, or a knowledge regurgitation process, where they give words back to the teacher without understanding them, but rather as a process whereby they were able to construct new knowledge.” Reflective writing leads back to Gadamer’s statement towards textual interpretation that “either it does not yield any meaning or it’s meaning is not compatible with what we had expected (237).” This is the place were a dialogue between the student and the text begins to take place in the writing and the ‘horizons’ may begin to shift. “A horizon is not a rigid frontier, but something that moves with one and invites one to advance further (Gadamer, 217).
Kulman’s methodological practice believes that students are incapable of hiding how their knowledge is formed when they reflect honestly on their reflective writing practices. By explicitly asking students how they engaged in self-questioning and self-dialogue, the researcher can see how the hermeneutic circle plays a part in understanding science content. In doing reflective writing, students set up their own horizons that interacts with either the horizon of the information presented by the textbook or by the information given by the professor (166). Through reflective writing and using the hermeneutic circle, students who participated in the research came to understand they brought with them pre-understanding and conditions that were not present in the science concepts that adversely effected their understandings, but through using reflective writing, they were able to make sense of the science concepts by identifying these pre-conditions.
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