PIC process

Introduction

It is a common conception that science is about certain results, i.e., insights or facts about the physical world – and that science (and analogously STEM) teaching would consist in teaching these facts and thus creating scientific knowledge. In conclusion, a STEM curriculum would consist in facts amounting to different content of the discipline.

Regardless, modern curricula reconsider science as being not only about the facts, concepts, models, or formular but also about the process of gaining insight – thus viewing both knowledge and processual competences as important.

In this context, STEM educators use the term inquiry to point out a multistep process similar to scientific research. In exposed problems or questions, students hypothesise, devise or choose tools (mainly experiments) for examination and eventually use them to verify or falsify the hypotheses.

The pandemic in recent years showed us, how fast the distinction between layman and experts is unworldly, while going beyond static notions of “facts” is important to deal with complex reality. In order to be debatable, scientific evidence has to be accompanied by a transparent representation of the argument that led to its acceptance.

The PIC process wants to enact scientific processes of gaining insight in a multistep way, therefore hopefully fostering processual, social, and farther competences beneath raising content-related knowledge. The teacher or educator inherits a moderating and supporting role.

In the whole process, participants individually (and partly collaboratively) document their work to profit from this in different phases of the whole sequence as described hereby and synthetised in Table 3.

• In the first step, called ‘Profiling’, learners receive a strong incentive (prepared by the teacher or educator) in being confronted with the exposition of a phenomenon or an actual problem. It should have a peculiar interesting or surprising feature to raise questions and prompt further study. Learners re-enact and profile the phenomenon or appearance by creating a case description – solely descriptive. The phase ends with a collective roundup.
• In the second phase participants collectively speculate about the nature and effects of the phenomenon, while the educator moderates the discussion. A first set of investigation strategies is provided along required equipment. The learning group is encouraged to modify the strategies or come up with own ideas for exploration. The participants inquire the phenomenon and keep documenting, while the teacher or the educator arranges organisational aspects like follow-up meetings to share and discuss results, ideas, or failures or to plan next steps. Again, a collective roundup debriefs this phase.
• In the third and last phase, the aim is to explain and compare the results while casually strengthening related competences and possibly even self-concept, motivation, and interest. As a product, learners are required to facilitate some sort of paper or poster as a product, whereas the educator has to provide adequate guidance and support. The product has to follow, i.e., fulfil, certain rules regarding the structure and presentation – depending on context and circumstantial factors. The documentation from before is all designated to be used for the progressing product and discussion. In the end of PIC the learning products are presented.
• In Annex 1 It is described an example of the PIC process applied to a learning experience at the Paedagogische Hochschule Weingarten University (PHW).

PIC process: Profile, Investigate and Create