Studies on educational reconstruction of chaos theory

Abstract

The studies presented here comprise a project on the educational significance of chaos theory. Or to put it in a nutshell, we attempt to analyse critically whether the core ideas of chaos theory (as, for instance, limited predictability of chaotic systems despite deterministic laws governing them) are worth teaching and learning and furthermore we follow up the question of accessibility of these ideas for students. Subject matter structure clarification (i.e., construction of the mentioned key ideas) analyses of educational significance on the basis of widely accepted aims of teaching science, empirical studies on students' learning processes, and finally, development and evaluation of pilot instructional modules are closely interrelated. To put it into our terminology, the studies are embedded in a Model of Educational Reconstruction which may be seen as an approach to curriculum development that, on the one hand, takes into account the major insights provided by the constructivist view of the past two decades resting, on the other hand, on the tradition of German pedagogical theories on framing educational issues.