Grounding Scientific Inquiry and Knowledge in Situated Cognition

We used ethnographic methods to study the cognitive processes and the social environment in an organic synthesis laboratory for its particular kind of human problem solving in scientific discovery (Klahr & Simon, 1999). Current work in situated cognition fills the fissure between problems posed by psychologists, both cognitive and behavioral, which have tended to focus on individual learning and learning of academic tasks, and the problems posed by sociologists of science who examine social influences on knowledge production within organizations. Further, Greeno (1998) asserts that the situative perspective, as it examines intact activity systems, can provide a synthesis that subsumes the cognitive and behaviorist perspectives on learning. We hypothesized that a research laboratory follows the literature conceptions of situated learning in terms of communities of practice, cognitive apprenticeship, scaffolded learning, affordances, constraints, and the production of valued knowledge and other products via a social epistemology. We found that researchers adapted their reasoning to performing effective organic synthesis research, which is an attuning process in a type of cognitive apprenticeship. The researchers were guided and constrained in their reasoning by the organic research community’s practices utilizing particular objects and processes. Aspects of any problem to solve attuned them to perception of new affordances, thus stimulating learning in emergent intention and attention. Each field in science has different things to reason about, different consequences to gauge, and thus, different criteria for justifying the conclusions drawn (Toulmin, 1977). We conclude that the thinking and acting occurring over time by apprentice researchers in the organic COP molded everyday thinking into the scientific reasoning required to be “certified” in this field as a research scientist. Recent work in situated cognition fills the gap between (a) the problems posed by psychologists that have tended to focus on individual learning and learning of academic tasks, and (b) the problems posed by sociologists of science who examine social influences on knowledge production within organizations. Situated cognition examines how humans learn, remember, and understand as a result of sense making that occurs from physical and mental interactions with the objects and events of an everyday setting (Lave & Wenger, 1991); that is, the learning that develops in close relationship to doing. Our study explores a research group performing organic synthesis of novel molecules. We are interested in the way graduate researchers’ thinking and learning (cognitive processes) are influenced by the research environment as they learn how to carry out scientific inquiry, reason scientifically, and acquire scientific knowledge. We propose that the development of graduate researchers is a closer parallel to the learning of science students than studies of science as an institution. We theorize that situated cognition is plausible and fruitful as a theoretical framework for understanding scientific reasoning and growth of scientific knowledge in day-to-day scientific inquiry; that is, that a research laboratory follows the literature conceptions of situated learning in terms of communities of practice, cognitive apprenticeship, scaffolded learning, affordances, constraints, and the production of valued products, through a social epistemology.