Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Methods in Science Teaching

1931; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00221546.1931.11772411

1538-4640

Elliot R. Downing,

Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies

IF ASKED to state in what particular the teaching of science differs from the teaching of other subjects, the average educator would probably name the laboratory method as a distinctive characteristic. Yet the laboratory method is a relatively recent innovation in the teaching of science. Amos Eaton and his fellow teachers, like Griscom and Holbrook, were teaching by the laboratory method in the third decade of the nineteenth century: Eaton in the Academy at Albany, Griscom in a private boys' school in New York City, and Holbrook in an Agricultural Seminary at Derby, New Hampshire. Eaton was the pupil of Benjamin Silliman, of Yale University, who had studied under Thomas Thomson, of Edinburgh, Scotland, the first teacher of chemistry who, so far as I know, opened his laboratory to students. Apparently, however, this effort of Eaton and his fellow teachers to establish the laboratory method of instruction was fruitless. The real introduction of the laboratory method into the secondary schools came some seventy years later. It was introduced into this country first in research work in the universities where it was copied from the European institutions; later it was introduced into college instruction; and finally into the secondary schools. The first chemical laboratory to be opened for student instruction in this country was that of the University of Pennsylvania in I835. Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave the first laboratory work in physics in i868. Agassiz' laboratory-an old boathouse-was the first for college biology. In all these students worked without guides or supervision. As late as I8 72 there were only six colleges in this country teaching chemistry by the laboratory method. In i88o, in response to a questionnaire sent out by the Bureau of Education, it was found that physics was being taught in slightly over two hundred out of more than six hundred high schools that existed. Only four of these were teaching it by the laboratory method; fifty, by the demonstration method; and the remainder were using the book method pure and simple. It was in the decade between i88o and i890 that laboratory work began to be introduced into the secondary school. In i886, Harvard University set a list of experiments in physics that must be done by students presenting that subject to fulfil