In the last post I reviewed the article “Tracking the Footprints Puzzle: The Problematic persistence of science-as-process in teaching the nature and culture of science by Charles Ault and Jeff Dodick which was published in the recent issue of the journal Science Education. I also reflected on my own experience in teaching and writing with the Footprints Puzzle.  In this post, I am going to explore this idea: The Dinosaur Footprints Puzzle: Is it pedagogy or paleontology?  Visit Kip’s blog site for updated and current work and activities.

Ault and Dodick, among other issues, highlight that science teachers have been preoccupied for a long time of how best to connect content and process and to teach scientific inquiry.  Questions arose such as how should schools depict science content and process in science inquiry.    Their view on this question is that teaching science as process was a premier trend and is revealed in this quote from their article:

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the scales tipped away from content as many science educators advocated “a process approach” (American Academy for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1967; Gabel, 1984) to teaching science. This approach treated a small number of content-free skills (typically 14 in AAAS’ Science: A Process Approach [SAPA]) as representative of the sciences, suggesting that mastery of these skills might enhance student learning in several different subjects. Furthermore, the process approach discouraged mixing content knowledge with training in process skills. Proponents worried that students might become confused by the content, feel discouraged, and therefore lose sight of the process objective. For example, in an exercise for teaching about hypothesis testing students were challenged to define variables influencing rotational speed of a “Whirly Bird” device, isolate an independent (or “manipulated”) variable, and test for the system’s response (also defined operationally as the dependent or “responding” variable) to the manipulated variable (Gabel, 1984, pp. 87–92; Science Curriculum Improvement Study & Berger, 1970). Developing the ideas of angular momentum and rotational inertia (or any intuitive precursors to these concepts) remained outside the lesson’s purview—unnecessary complications that might obscure the logic of experimental design central to the process of scientific inquiry.

The authors ague that science is more than process, and that the nature and concepts of the discipline of inquiry (geology, marine biology, astrophysics) ought to be an important part of science inquiry.  We would agree.  They explain the meaning in this passage:

Mary Budd Rowe, a scholar whose contributions to inquiry science remain unsurpassed (e.g., the role of language, wait-time, and fate control; Rowe, 1978), believed in the appeal to students of science as specially crafted stories about the natural world (Bianchini, 2008)—as meaningful interpretations of experiences (“experiments” being a particular type of experience). Paleontological interpretation of fossil dinosaur footprints is one such story. To learn this story means to journey through the landscape of genuine fossil artifacts guided by the imagery of evolutionary thought—to engage in disciplined inquiry. Paleontological inquiry, representative of the importance of context to observing and inferring in particular ways, promises fascinating stories that amplify experience with meaning (Ault & Ault, 2009).

The Footprints Puzzle as depicted in the original ESCP Text designed to help students investigate fossil dinosaur tracks.

So, as I raise in the title of this post, is the Dinosaur Footprints Puzzle a pedagogical exercise, or an experience in paleontology?  The original intent of the science educators that designed the Footprints Puzzle for the Earth Science Curriculum Project materials in the 1960s was an inquiry activity within the construct of paleontology.  Students were told that the footprints were dinosaur tracks, and they were informed that the tracks were fossils, and were made by dinosaurs in Texas during the Mesozoic Era.  The activity as originally used in the ESCP text was to help students use the tracks to tell a story about about dinosaurs, and how paleontologists use by process (measurement) and concepts (geological time) to interpret events in the rocks.  Naturally, the tracks as shown here represent tracks in nature, and as Ault and Dodick point out, the teacher would need to involve the students in examining real fossils, looking at real tracks, determining the age of the rocks in the area of the tracks, and other important paleontological concepts that would help them build a story.

The dinosaur track activity and its selection as an important activity in an earth science course is an example of the application of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).  It is a powerful and useful form of representation of key ideas about fossils, and over time it has been recognized as one way to make some aspects of paleontology understandable to students.

The Footprints Puzzle has become for me an important tool in not only the teaching of geology and earth science, but as a vehicle for teaching science pedagogy.  In geology and earth science, I’ve used the Footprints Puzzle as an activity to help students explore fossils, and geological time.  Supplemented with field work to hunt for and collect fossils, students can use the Footprints Puzzle is use their imaginations to create stories about animals as they lived and roamed the earth, and in this case, during the the Mesozoic Era.

I would agree with Alt and Dodick that the original intent of the activity has been distorted by its use as a simple exercise in which students make observations and inferences about tracks on a piece of paper, with no context, or reference to real fossils, dinosaurs, and the earth’s past.  In some cases, the students are told these are tracks in the snow, perhaps by birds; in other cases, students simply make lists of observations.  Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with doing activities in science that focus on observations.  Many of us have used the CHEM Study activity in which students observe a burning candle and are challenged to make as many observations as they can.  Providing an authentic context (for the Footprint Puzzle) is tantamount to making use of research in the learning and cognitive sciences.  Much of the rationale for this approach can be traced back to John Dewey, and then forward to Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner.

In the next post I will explore how the Footprints Puzzle became an important tool for teaching teachers important teaching and learning strategies.