Actually, the most consequential finding of the physics education research community, based upon the force concept inventory test, has been that traditional science education has fundamentally failed to facilitate changes in belief from peoples’ intuition. The fact that changes in belief do indeed tend to happen sporadically for entire cultures over the course of decades does not at all help modern people to deal with the incredibly rapid rate of discovery which is typical of modern science. There is no precedent for what is happening today, and we should not be looking to the past to formulate our expectations on this important point. After all, if you look at immunity-to-change research (see Harvard researchers Kegan and Lahey), you will learn that subject-object interviews done in two separate studies demonstrate that less than 1% of the population is capable of actually altering their own beliefs in light of evidence (self-transformational mindset).
Rather than talking about hypotheticals, let’s look at what actual studies say about change in belief from actual traditional physics courses. From the paper titled “Force Concept Inventory” at http://modelinginstruction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/FCI-TPT.pdf …
Every student begins physics with a well-established system of commonsense beliefs about how the physical world works derived from years of personal experience. Over the last decade, physics education research has established that these beliefs play a dominant role in introductory physics. Instruction that does not take them into account is almost totally ineffective, at least for the majority of students.
Specifically, it has been established that (1) commonsense beliefs about motion and force are incompatible with Newtonian concepts in most respects, (2) conventional physics instruction produces little change in these beliefs, and (3) this result is independent of the instructor and the mode of instruction. The implications could not be more serious. Since the students have evidently not learned the most basic Newtonian concepts, they must have failed to comprehend most of the material in the course. They have been forced to cope with the subject by rote memorization of isolated fragments and by carrying out meaningless tasks. No wonder so many are repelled! The few who are successful have become so by their own devices, the course and the teacher having supplied only the opportunity and perhaps inspiration.
If you look carefully at what the force concept inventory research is telling us, it is saying very plainly that the fundamental problem we face today in science education and communication pertains to supporting changes in belief. The immunity to change research supports their thesis, and from a completely different line of investigation.
Peer review serves an important purpose, but it offers us little-to-no support in formulating new beliefs in science. What we can say about peer review is that it is only relevant to the domain of a particular worldview (the model-level of discourse). Any discussion which involves competing worldviews in science will fall outside of peer review’s scope. And to be clear, that is not some small percentage of the total set of scientific conversations we might have; it’s actually a significant chunk.
I realize that it has become trendy amongst even incredibly prestigious university science professors to completely ignore the ominous data we’ve seen coming out of physics education research journals for about three decades now, but the public shouldn’t necessarily repeat that horrible mistake. It stands to reason that if less than 1% of the population has apparently learned how to alter their own beliefs, based upon evidence, then chances are that we are spending too much time talking about the merits of older theories. It very plainly suggests that there are good ideas out there which demand our attention, but which are not getting it for the simple reason that people have not figured out how to assimilate new findings in science.
The FCI indicates very, very serious problems in how we ALL think about science today, for the simple reason that we’ve all basically been trained in more-or-less the same manner – which research is now indicating is definitively flawed.
For more info on the FCI, see the MindShift article at | KQED | News, Radio, Podcasts, TV | Public Media for Northern California. This should be required reading for anybody who has even a cursory interest in science today.
