This is the latest in a string of books produced by the author who is Lansdowne Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Victoria. His published corpus, occasionally co-authored, has as its focus ways of understanding how students learn science and then using these insights to improve science teaching. Talking Science follows the same pattern.

Essentially the book is an extraordinarily detailed analysis of the verbal and non-verbal language employed by students when struggling to understand scientific concepts such as the physics of motion, pulleys and levers, and the magnetic pendulum and chaos theory. The book starts off with an introduction which has an extremely useful analogy. The author wanted to learn how to prune and his wife bought him a book entirely dedicated to pruning. Despite taking the book with him out into the garden and comparing the illustrations with his fruit bushes, he found it impossible to properly understand the instructions let alone properly implement them. It was only when he attended a pruning workshop where pruning was not just talked about but actually demonstrated that he began to genuinely understand how to prune. Having an expert talk through the process and answer queries whilst actually doing the pruning was essential to the author's learning process. The author, as a result of this experience, surmises that students must find even more difficulty when trying to grasp scientific ideas and laboratory practices. He goes on to hypothesize that learning a scientific language and performing scientific experiments or, more bluntly, doing science are not two separate things but two aspects of the same thing. In this he is heavily influenced by phenomenology and especially the work of Merleau-Ponty. Indeed the latter's famous saying that "Language takes on a meaning for the child when it establishes a situation for him" (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 2001, trans. Colin Smith, London, Routledge, p.401) could easily form the book's maxim.

The chapters on motion, pulleys and levers, and the magnetic pendulum give in enormous detail how school students clarified their verbal and non-verbal language as they clarified their ideas in discussion with the author as teacher and with their fellow students. Other chapters deal with classroom organization, the use of space and group size, as well as with other more linguistic issues.

The extraordinary level of detail and the language, which is at times quite opaque and difficult to grasp, make this a very specialist book. Teacher training departments most certainly ought to have a copy on their library shelves so that science teacher trainees can avail themselves of its insights. For them in particular this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book.

© 2007 Kevin M. Purday

Kevin Purday is a consultant in international education working mainly in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. His main focus is on helping schools to set up the International Baccalaureate Middle Years and Diploma Programs. He has taught both philosophy and psychology in the I.B. diploma program.

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