Abstract:
Sciences exist to demonstrate the fundamental order underlying nature.Chaos/complexity theory is a novel and amazing field of scientific inquiry. Notions of our everyday experiences are somehow in connection to the lawsof nature through chaos/complexity theory‟s concerns with the relationshipsbetween simplicity and complexity, between orderliness and randomness(Retrieved from http://www.inclusional-research.org/comparisons4.php). It is interested in how disorder leads to order, of how complexity emerges in nature. There appears to be many striking and eye-catching similarities between the new science of chaos/complexity and education. An understanding of chaos/complexity theory seems almost crucial to our general understanding of education and teachers‟ and students‟ needs within educational systems. Chaos/complexity theory raises some very significant issues in an educational context, including responsibility, morality and planning; the significance of non-linear learning organizations; setting conditions for change by emergence and self-organization; the role of feedback in learning; changing external and internal environments(Morrison,2006); it emphasizes on the fact that schools and learners as open, complex adaptive systems; cooperation and competition; pedagogy; and thesignificance of context (Larsen Freeman, 1997).This paper tries to providean overview of this science and how it can inform education.
Machine summary:
Chaos/Complexity Theory and Education Mansour Fahim Associate Professor, Allameh Tabataba‟i University Fattaneh Abbasi Talabari Ph. D student, Allameh Tabataba‟i University Abstract Sciences exist to demonstrate the fundamental order underlying nature.
Chaos/complexity theory raises some very significant issues in an educational context, including responsibility, morality and planning; the significance of non-linear learning organizations; setting conditions for change by emergence and self-organization; the role of feedback in learning; changing external and internal environments(Morrison,2006); it emphasizes on the fact that schools and learners as open, complex adaptive systems; cooperation and competition; pedagogy; and thesignificance of context (Larsen Freeman, 1997).
But chaos, being approached scientifically, refers to the issue of whether or not it is possible for someone to make accurate and precise long-term predictions of any complex system if the initial conditions are known to an accurate degree (Oestreicher, 2007).
Chaos theory is the study of nonlinear systems, in which seemingly random events are actually predictable from simple deterministic equations.
The two main aspects of chaos theory are the ideas that systems - no matter how complex they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple, minor events can cause very complex, major behaviors or events in the results.
Like chaotic systems however, the outcomes of these local interactions may not be linearly influenced by the initial conditions of the system, and so the prediction of the global action of a complex system cannot necessarily be dependent upon an understanding of the behavior of the lower-level components alone.
Prediction then becomes improbable, and we have a random phenomenon (Sardar & Abrams, 1999; Larsen Freeman, 1997; Retrieved from http://www.