Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: “Disembodied Science: On why the abstract is difficult to grasp, and some thoughts on the imperceptibility of impending(?) climate disaster”

My most faithful guest blogger Kirsty writes about why things that are far outside of our direct experience are so hard to imagine and thus so hard to understand (and teach).

It is very common in science education to illustrate concepts using (supposed) everyday examples; depending on the discipline, it is more (e.g. geosciences) or less (e.g. physics) normal to use analogies where a (new to the learner) scientific concept (the target) is introduced with some sort of comparison to a (supposedly) familiar (usually everyday) concept (the source). Note that analogues, with a parallel scientific description, though perhaps very different appearance (e.g. clock pendulum and LCR circuit that are both harmonic oscillators), are quite different. However, it has been increasingly recognised in the science education literature, that embodied cognition — that is usually tacit knowledge and conceptualisations gained through simply living and moving through in space, and less noticeably in time, not from repeating verbal statements — is an important part of learning. From what I can understand of the history, in cognitive science this was established in the 1980s, and has been a core element of some fields of science education research for c. 20 years. However, while using actions to reinforce or enable learning (e.g. role play of Compton Scattering, arm waving for CO₂ molecular vibrations) is fairly common, considering the embodied knowledge that students bring to the classroom, and what these preconceptions mean for their learning seems to have received comparatively little attention.

This lack of consideration is somewhat surprising given a fairly early (in the discussion of embodiment in science education) paper where Niebert, Marsch and Treagust (2012) performed a meta analysis of studies into the success and failures of metaphors (including analogies) for science learning.

They start by summarising that embodiment in science is important for the following reasons:

• • “abstract thought is largely based on metaphors and analogies,
  • metaphors and analogies engendering a conceptual understanding are embodied, meaning grounded, in real experience, and
  • imaginative thought is unavoidable and ubiquitous in understanding science.”

And conclude that instructional metaphors (including analogies) fail when one (or more) of the following is true:

• The source is not embodied — that is, it is in some way abstract and requires imagination to construct — e.g., chemical equilibrium is a school dance (one has to carefully imagine what happens at a school dance);
• The source is ambiguous — that is, the meaning of source words is not the intended or important point — e.g., the gene is a code (more likely to think of code as cryptographic, rather than something that encodes information);
• The source used does not include the necessary experience — that is, the source does not contain the target aspect, or the target aspect has to be imagined (see also the first point) — e.g., force causes movement (passive forces on objects in equilibrium are missed).

They conclude that everyday life experiences often evoke ambiguous meanings (think of different examples of floating — how much is submerged? what movement is there?), and advise educators to:

• enable experience of the target domain (where possible);
• refer to an embodied source domain;
• create tangible examples that illustrate the abstract concepts while reflecting an embodied source domain;
• reflect on the aspects of the target domain highlighted by a given source domain highlights, and which aspects are hidden.

Their thesis is that experiential learning (which would now be grouped under ’embodied cognition’), drawing on embodied experience can be helpful for explaining why students hold certain conceptions, and that its lack of consideration can go a long way to explain why some instructional strategies fail. They also advocate for considering the role that direct experience (or relation to) has in the development of new conceptions.

I have hopped through the paper somewhat, focussing on the motivation, results and conclusions. Let me now turn to the introduction and perhaps make the distinction between abstract and direct clearer.

Direct or embodied conceptions are grounded in things that we have experienced — or can experience. Simple examples may be of containment, effort or movement. Abstract or imaginative conceptions are those that are not — and often cannot be — grounded in direct experience, rather, they combine different aspects of direct experience to provide an explanation (hopefully satisfactory) of an abstract phenomenon. Going from the realm of direct physical experience to explanation of an unseen process requires imagination; verbally this is encoded in metaphors. The distinction is between whether the meaning of the statement is its literal meaning (a mug is a container; mine currently contains tea and a tea bag) or a figurative meaning (the atmosphere surrounds the earth and can be thought of as a container filled with varying proportions of different molecules, including ever increasing fractions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄)). The utility, relevance, and correctness of abstract conceptualisations — and the validity and importance of imagination in science — is confirmed through the explanatory power and the correspondence of data with predictions.

So what can one learn from this about understanding — or not understanding — critical issues such as climate change?

Direct conceptions occur on the scales of human experience that we can appreciate. I will consider two of the SI base quantities that recur frequently in discussions of climate change: time and mass, and make some remarks on amount and why many may struggle to appreciate that 2 ppm is vitally important. I summarise the typical human (my direct) scale of experience and the scales commonly involved in discussions of climate change (that I have encountered), and comment on whether the conceptualisation is direct (that is easily understood and appreciated as ‘correct’) or abstract (that is requiring mental effort to make sense of and easily dismissed as ‘imaginary’ — that is ‘unreal’).

TIME: human experience is c. 1/10th second to decades; for children and young people, the upper limit is much shorter, years; for the oldest humans, a century; the reference ‘pre-industrial’ levels in climate change are c. 150 years ago (though my knowledge of history, placing the industrial revolution at around the start of the 19th century, means I automatically interpret this as c. 250 years), and the rate of change imperceptible (as well as often of abstract quantities). I think there’s another, critically important factor that may also be underappreciated, not so commonly featured in discussions, and may also be rarely taught in school science: trees absorb significant (but unfortunately decreasing since they are heavily persecuted) amounts of atmospheric CO₂, and many mature trees are upwards of 100 years old (birch and cherry are exceptions; their life-spans are somewhat shorter, 50 years or so). Trees grow — and, through photosynthesis, convert carbon dioxide into sugars, stored in their wood, and oxygen — on time scales that are on the border of and often beyond direct human experience (what were you doing 20 years ago?) — and yet they can be cut down in the very human duration of mere minutes (and entire forests disappear through fire or felling in similarly human durations of days to weeks).

MASS: The most common values I seem to see quoted in connection to climate discussions are tonnes (flights) and gigatonnes (total emissions) of CO₂. It’s fairly easy to see why these can be completely baffling: the range of typical direct experience of mass is from a fraction of a gram to struggling or failing to move something up to a few times our own mass (colloquially referred to as weight), though it’s unlikely that many of us regularly lift — or try to lift more than 1/2 our mass. This is further complicated by the fact that CO₂ is mostly encountered as part of air (or in gaseous form), and we generally do not feel (that is, have a direct experience) that air has mass. Perhaps it would be better to talk about the number of tonnes of coal or litres of oil whose most efficient (and, for comparison, typical) possible burning would produce such an output.

AMOUNT: my first question was whether we have a direct conceptualisation of amount that is separate from MASS, but I think we do, though the standard unit (moles, abbreviated mol) is clearly an abstract conceptualisation. Even if one regularly attends huge gatherings (tens of thousands, even a million), it seems unlikely that one encounters directly more than a few hundred people. So can ‘parts per million’ (ppm) or even ‘parts per thousand’ (or 1000 ppm) be easily understood? And can the importance of CO₂ as a little over 0.04% (at times, 427 ppm; just over 1/2500) be readily appreciated when one’s voice is unlikely to be heard distinctly in a group of more than 20-30, and barely make a noticeable contribution to the noise made by a hundred or more? And as for an increase of 2 ppm/year? Critically important, but awfully abstract, even when considered as a fraction of the existing level: 2/400 = 1/200 = 0.5%.

Niebert et al. (2012) discuss the issues of direct and abstract understanding in the context of ‘traditional’ content-focused science learning, and the implications for whether metaphors (including analogies) can achieve the desired learning outcomes. I have taken their framing and briefly considered a couple of the challenges of communicating climate change and its drivers, though I’m not sure I have any clear ideas on how one can use these insights.

Featured image and full image below: an old silver birch (Betula pedula) tree (estimated 60-70 years old, which is very old for a birch) that has been falling down for about 30 years; the bend in the trunk has become particularly obvious over the last decade or so (I’ve been inspecting the tree approximately once a year for c. 15 years).

K. Niebert, S. Marsch, D. F. Treagust (2012). Understanding Needs Embodiment: A Theory-Guided Reanalysis of the Role of Metaphors and Analogies in Understanding Science. Science Education 96 (5) 849-877