1. Problems of Meeting Diversity
·
Language Issues
This
Section deals with two main aspects of language and science learning, learning
to speak and write the language of science and meeting the demands of learning
science in languages other than mother tongue or home languages. In English,
early work in science education research often focused on the language demands of
learning science (Sutton 2004) and continues to develop including the
realization of the multi-modal ways that students learn science. Scientific
language has specific demands. There is an extensive vocabulary to learn. Some
studies show that the vocabulary demands of some secondary school science
programmes are greater than those of second-language programmes (Williams
2009). This is clearly expecting too much, particularly if the language of
instruction is not the same as the students’ home language. There have been
many studies on how science uses this vocabulary in ways that tend to be
different from everyday language use (Halliday and Webster 2006). The emphasis
here on basic science education, on understanding rather than simple
reproduction of information, means that students should be using the language
in which they feel most comfortable, especially when meeting new ideas. They
should be developing understanding first and technical vocabulary second. The
language challenges vary within and between countries. In some countries such
as Bolivia, where there are several official languages, teachers are expected
to be at least bi-lingual. Such language skills mean that early or basic
science education can be in a language that reflects the local community. However, this solution does not solve the
many, often delicate issues of language diversity, and their connections with
social class and ethnicity. It is beyond the scope of this report to try to
attempt an answer.
The Science
across the World project mentioned above has some suggestions for science contexts and
the UNESCO Position paper (2003) clarifies the challenges of bilingual and
multilingual education. It remains for research to see how this context of
basic science education. Perhaps a particular focus should be rural areas.
Language, class and socio-economic status all combine to reduce the freedoms and
possibilities of children in science (Guadalupe 2004). This is especially
urgent as major issues of sustainability and global warming will affect the
poor more heavily than other sections of society (DfID 2009). They therefore
have a special need for the sort of quality basic science education we are
advocating.
·
Gender Issues
The
issue of gender in science education again has been the subject of many
investigations.
This
is an important concern for both the individual students involved and their communities.
International studies such as TIMSS and PISA show that the higher-attaining countries
are those where there is less inequality. Gender equity is a long-time concern
for UNESCO. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, girls have tended
to be underrepresented in science education. Wherever there are choices to be
made, girls seem not to take up or be able to take science options. The view of
basic science for all of Section 2 should go some way to removing some of the
barriers to equal participation. Studying science in everyday contexts makes
for better science for all and is less likely to raise barriers to girls’
participation. Indeed, in some contexts where science is compulsory in basic
education, girls’ attainment is higher than boys’, a change that has occurred
over the last 20 years. However, the way that such attainment is achieved may
present more powerful longer-term outcomes for boys than girls (Bell 2000).
In
other contexts, it is not simply that the quantity of science education is
different. Asimeng- Boahene (2006) shows that in many parts of Africa, girls
also receive a science education of lower quality than boys. She suggests
detailed steps that teachers and school authorities can implement to reduce
such inequality. This presents a challenge for initial and in-service teacher education.
Teachers need to know the sources of such inequality and how to overcome them
so that there are more equal outcomes for all. Steps to improve the education
for some seem to lead to the improvement of education for all.
2. Problem of Science Literacy
1. Science literacy, the science that
the majority of the population will experience, is the key goal in school
science. We will take the advice of Fensham (2008) and go beyond the use of
scientific literacy to say what we mean by the terms and how it might look in
practice and in policy. We will show that scientific ways of argumentation,
knowledge and understanding are necessary for future citizens to take an active
part in their futures, namely education through science. The students will have
an understanding of science that gives a broader view of the world and ways of
looking at that world, as well as ways to change their worlds, education in
science. Students must leave School to be able to bring together these two
aspects, education through science and education in science. That will provide
them with what is needed for their future working lives and their ability to
take future decisions in food and health policy; the environment and how we can
best look after it for future generations; changing energy supplies and
sustainable development all. Basic science education should also prepare those
students who wish to pursue further studies, jobs and careers in science at all
levels, education for science.
·
Beyond
Science Literacy
In
this section, we will explore the changing and changed nature of school science
as we try to meet the rationale set out in Section 1. These aims have developed
with the changing social, economic and technological circumstances, hopes and
expectations of society. Such development will carry on into the future and
students must be prepared to respond and contribute to those developments. In
his paper for UNESCO, Delors identified four pillars for learning. In line with
Section 1, we will elaborate on these , drawing on Macedo (2006); namely (1)
learning to live together; (2) learning to be; (3) learning to do; and (4)
learning to know. These four pillars help us decide what we should include in scientific
literacy for all.
1. Learning to live together. School science necessarily
implies practical work of different sorts. For a number of reasons, both for
managing the class and for good pedagogical reasons, students work in groups to
carry out science investigations. Given appropriate support from their
teachers, students can learn that the quality of the outcomes is dependent on
the work of all. Taking into account a diversity of views means that together
we can go further than we can, by ourselves (Baines et al. 2008). Knowing how to
present your views and listen to the views of others is an important skill in
life and group work in science is well placed to develop. Such debates, which
necessarily draw on experiences from everyday life, bring in ethical and social
dimensions to issues that surround the students and their schools and help them
connect the life within their classroom with their lives outside school so
helping their science become more applicable. By working together to develop
their science knowledge and processes, students are learning to live together.
2. Learning
to be. School science, through the
way it is taught and learnt, should help to develop the way that students and
future citizens should act. Science itself has its own values and ways of being
and school science ought to parallel these.
There
is a portion of the human minds that good science education, better than any other
school subject, can cultivate in school, such as for example:
- The spirit of observation,
- Calmness, Self control
- The practice of looking for the causes
of things
- Order
- Caution in making claims
- Admiration
of nature
- Modesty
- Tolerance
and so on (Comas Camps 2004).
This
is the issue of values accompanying scientific competences, which we discussed above.
Such
outcomes from science education, combined with those from learning to live together,
are a valuable contribution to the development of future citizens. They have to
be developed through teaching. Rather than leaving such outcomes implicit as
was often the case until now, making such desirable outcomes explicit should
make their attainment more likely. Then the student will be better equipped to
participate as an active citizen in society, where science related concerns are
ever more pressing.
3. Learning
to do. Through science learning,
students will learn to define, refine and resolve problems and ideas. They will
learn to do this through practical data gathering, collecting information from
a range of sources, transforming that data to make broader generalizations, explaining their outcomes
and justifying their positions. They will start to realize the limits of their data and their
arguments and how they might be developed further. They will be developing their powers of logical reasoning and
abstraction, a theme that is taken further
in the following Section. La Main a la Pâte has shown in detail the benefits of
taking an inquiry-based approach. Students are given material to stimulate their
thinking and prompt scientific questioning. These questions lead to hypotheses
for testing, leading to student learning science concepts and developing their speaking
and writing (In French, see Annexes or http://lamap.inrp//). However, as we have seen, the contexts for
learning these concepts should relate to the lives and concerns of the
students, rather than the arbitrary abstractions identified by Fensham (2008).
From the perspective of science, students should develop key ideas and understand
their interconnectedness, such as the relationship between the macro and micro-structures
of materials and their properties, the concept of energy, ideas about cells and
interdependence in biological systems. This knowledge is accepted by practicing
scientists, which they have built on the available knowledge following accepted
methods. Scientists also know that science does not have all the answers and
that scientific knowledge is continuously under transformation as new information
is acquired. As identified above, such knowledge about science is something
that should be included in basic science education. A second aspect of coming
to know these key ideas is that they are often counter-intuitive. This helps
develop more powerful ways of thinking so students are then able to use them in
other contexts 4.
Through
these four pillars, students should have opportunities to develop their
imagination and creativity as they become active learners. In the longer term,
such developments will support the students to lead more fruitful lives individually
and as members of future societies.
These
changes have to come about within a changing culture of schooling, which take
seriously the challenges of current views of school science identified by
Fensham (Section 1.3): Science Education and the World of Work). What it means
to teach and learn will have to change if we wish to develop better school
science, better matched to science in the wider world. We need to consider what
scientific knowledge and concepts we should include in basic education, along
with scientific ways of working, changes that will impact not only within the classroom
but also the wider school contexts, the homes of the students and their society.
Later we will address these issues and try to show not only that they are
achievable but essential for the good of all students and teachers.
3. Problem of Developing the Teaching of
Science
To meet the
challenges discussed so far means that there will have to be changes in the way
that students learn science in school. The material in Section 1.3 Science
Education and the World of Work, as well as surveys by international groups
such as the European Commission (2007) found that schooling in science was
often related to learning information rather than to understanding concepts and
investigating them.
They argue
for inquiry-based education, as it has shown to be effective in raising
attainment across basic education, contributes to increased student and teacher
motivation for science, and makes a positive contribution to including a wide
range of students through their success in science. In other words,
inquiry-based approaches can meet several of the major challenges we have identified
above. A major literature review and meta-analysis carried out for the New
Zealand Government (Hipkins et al 2002) gave more detailed guidance on what
such an inquiry-based approach might look like. They show that the link between
theory and evidence is important yet largely invisible for students. Kuhn (2001)
shows that this invisibility is one big difference between children’s science
and the science of scientists. Making the separation and links between theory
and practice is something that is best made visible to develop student
understanding. Hipkins and Kuhn show us ways to do that. Such strategies are
keys to linking theory, concepts and practice together. Furthermore, being able
to distinguish evidence, to hypothesis, to develop theory and to conjecture are
important life skills to which science makes a key contribution. The New
Zealand work presents a clear list of pedagogical strategies that meet many of
the requirements made clear in Section 2.
Pedagogy
for conceptual, procedural and NOS (Nature of Science) learning in science
education could be more effective and inclusive when:-
- The existing ideas and beliefs that learners bring to a lesson are
elicited, addressed, and linked to their classroom experiences;_
- Science is taught and learned in contexts in
which students can make links -between their existing knowledge, the classroom
experiences, and the science to be learnt;
- The learning is set at an appropriate level
of challenge and the development of ideas is clear – the teacher knows the
science;
- The purpose(s) for which the learning is
being carried out are clear to the students, especially in practical work
situations;
- The students are engaged in thinking about
the science they are learning during the learning tasks;
- Students’ content knowledge, procedural
knowledge, and knowledge about the nature and characteristics of scientific
practice are developed together, not separately;
- The students are engaged in thinking about
their own and others’ thinking, thereby developing a metal cognitive awareness
of the basis for their own present thinking and of the development of their
thinking as they learn;
- The teacher models theory/evidence
interactions that link conceptual, procedural, and NOS outcomes and discussion
and argumentation are used to critically examine the relationship between these
different types of outcomes, (Hipkins et al 2002). These recommendations mean
that we have to rethink how we structure the curriculum in science. Rather than
being structured according to the ideas in scientists’ science, we need to
think of the curriculum structure from the perspective of students’ learning
and how their ideas might develop to those of standard science. This may seem
ambitious, with important implications for stakeholders at all levels. However,
evidence shows that the outcomes from such approaches show that they are well
worth the efforts for students, teachers, parents and their communities, as
well as at regional and national level. By debating their ideas, students can
see how the science view of the world matches the view of the world important
to their communities. Rather than local views being a barrier, students can see
how different world views can enrich their understanding of their world and the
part they play in it. A rich science curriculum can also help students share,
develop and extend their experience to take them beyond their immediate
environments.
The
way that we can help bring this about in the classrooms of the world is
discussed in sections that follow. The parallel paper on mathematics argues for
very similar strategies. In many schools of the world a single teacher is
likely to teach much of the curriculum for the students. Such pedagogy can
develop learning in mathematics and science, make links between them more
evident, and can be used across the curriculum. The documents annexed to both
sections of this Report show further examples in practice and the range of
positive outcomes that can be expected. The key actors in this are of course
the teachers and we will expand on how we might support change in the classroom
in Section 5 Teachers and Science. However, before dealing with teacher
development, the subject of assessment and learning will be briefly outlined, which
will enrich the debate on teachers’ development
·
Teaching Science for All.
This
challenge is having teachers of sufficient quality to meet the demands of
educating future citizens. There has been progress in moving towards universal
primary education, with the consequence of increased demands on educational
systems. To meet such demands, teachers need support in developing their
pedagogical, didactic and subject knowledge for basic science teaching. As in
the parallel report on mathematics, especially in primary schooling, teachers
have had little education in science. This is a particular problem in countries
where there are numbers of unqualified teachers or where their own education
goes barely beyond secondary level. However, compared with the numbers of new
entrants, the proportion of teachers already working in classrooms is high and
their development will present a significant challenge to all educational
systems, both rich and poor. Teachers have a range of knowledge that they use
in their work and what might be seen as the most obvious point, teachers’ own
knowledge and understanding of standard science is the first consideration.
Surveys
revealed that serving primary teachers often hold science ideas that did not
seem to be in line with the standard science as defined in the curriculum.
Logically, it would seem that the more teachers know about the subjects they
have to teach, the better it is for all concerned. Newton and Newton (2001)
found that higher science background correlated with more subject-relevant
interaction (effect size 0.73) and with more causal explanations (effect size
0.65) and these teacher behaviours may lead to better science learning.
However, other empirical studies show that the correlation between teaching
quality and science subject knowledge accounts for a very small percentage of
the variance in teaching quality. Brophy (1991, p350), in summarizing a range
of investigations and reviews of the topic came to a clear conclusion.
Subject Matter Knowledge does
not directly determine the nature or the quality of their instruction. Instead,
how teachers teach particular topics is determined by the pedagogical content
knowledge that they
develop through experience
in teaching those topics to particular types of students. (Emphasis in original) Pedagogical content
knowledge is the knowledge teachers have about learners and how they learn in a given
context. In generalizing from Brophy’s work we have to be careful that it is drawn from studies in
countries where teachers have generally had several years of postsecondary education and so have some
met some essential minimum standards of science subject knowledge. However,
in countries where teachers have had less science education of their own, the
definition of what this basic subject knowledge for teaching might be is for
future research - though completing secondary school science might be an
appropriate minimum for teachers in the earlier years of basic education.
4. Problems of Spreading Good Practice
Many curriculum
projects in school science in the 1960s and 1970s generated a wealth of
resources yet did not lead to a great change in practices. At the time, the
feeling was that producing such resources would help teachers bring about profound
changes in the classroom. Recent studies show that such profound change requires
a different approach. New materials may be necessary but are not sufficient to
change behavior significantly. Fensham (2008) shows how the issues of policy,
practice, assessment and research were often treated as independent rather than
interconnected issues. He argues that where these different aspects develop
together in an orchestrated fashion then they are more likely to lead to real
advances in the curriculum and classroom pedagogy. However, where researchers frame
the outcomes of their work in terms that relate to the issues of the different
groups profound changes can come about in both thinking and practice. For
instance, the work of Black and colleagues on assessment for learning, much of
it carried out in the context of basic science and mathematics education, seems
to have had an impact because they wrote about the outcomes of their research
in different ways for a variety of different audiences (Black and Wiliam 1998).
When leaders of local authorities and schools saw the outcomes expressed in
terms they understood, they were quick to advocate the approaches suggested.
However, what subsequent studies show is that classroom adoption requires
sustained effort and support for teachers over about a year, with the costs in
a research and development context being something like 8% of the cost of an
annual teacher’s salary. The outcomes are better science education and better
attitudes to science for both students and teachers. In addition, the approaches
act across the curriculum as the changes introduced alter relationships in the
classroom and school and lead to better learning across the curriculum. While
such research and development thought of as acceptable in business development,
in schools we will need research on the relative costs of scaling up approaches
to innovation. Involvement of teachers in curriculum research, development and
innovation provides them with
an understanding of the
projects, of what they are trying to achieve and how they are trying to bring
about change. This teacher understanding, missing in the projects of thirty or
so years ago, is seen as key to helping teachers do the necessary adaptation of
the materials to their particular contexts. The collaborations between
teachers, researchers and curriculum developers bring benefits to all these groups and especially
to the students in the classroom. By creating a range of options, including spaces for teachers and
students to grow, scaling up is likely to be more effective (Gass 2007). Working together, each of these
groups can contribute to the development of each of their respective fields of classroom
practice, of curriculum development and of research in pedagogy and didactics (Annexes and Black and
Harrison 2004, Main a la Pâte at http://lamap.inrp.fr//). Where ‘teacher-proof’ materials are developed and their adoption required,
initially there is a tendency for the superficial features of classrooms to change followed by an eventual
return to the status quo (Cordingley
and Bell 2007). Rather than seeing the adaptation of materials to specific contexts as
shortcomings, researchers now realise that such adaptations are necessary and lead to better materials, better
resources and better student learning
(See case studies in the Annex). Classrooms thus become spaces where all can grow - both
teachers and students.
A novel approach to
spreading good practice, the Colombian Expedición Pedagógica is to take an Appreciative Inquiry approach
(Reed 2006) to recording the ingenuity of
teachers show in adapting national requirements to the local situation. The scheme has collected
some 3,000 accounts of teachers
and their practice to show
how the diversity of situations and teacher creativity and resourcefulness shape classroom practice. Many groups of teachers, often with parents, researchers and
teacher educators, have come
together to develop their
practice in ways that are described above. Such groupings help develop a clear, mutual understanding
of what they are doing
and why they are doing it.
The range of materials that teachers have produced is impressive,. They show how classroom practitioners can
develop and share the results of their activities, and how such appreciative approaches act as a
powerful form of teacher development (Unda Bernal et al. 2003).
In the
commercial world, different people are expected to need different products to
suit their circumstances. The same also applies to health provision. Perhaps in
education, we should also expect a diversity of supply. If a teacher were to
take a particular approach to teaching a topic such as renewable energy and the
students did not seem to be responding as the teacher hoped, then he or she
would automatically try a different strategy. Teachers thus personalize their
students’ learning by adaptation to local needs on the ground. It may be that
at system level there should be an expectation of diversity rather than
uniformity. The issue of how to take projects to scale so that the benefits of
different approaches can be made available to all should become a focus for
research and development efforts (Horner and Sugai 2006). A detailed agenda for
such research and development, which applies equally and simultaneously to
science teaching, is given in the accompanying Mathematics Report.
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