The Aims of Science Education and the Science Curriculum
I have discussed in a previous article some different views on the purpose of education. While this was not debated at all during our training, we, as future science teachers, had to discuss the purpose of science education. In preparation to our discussion, we were asked to read the document entitled ‘Beyond 2000: Science education for the future’, a report of a seminar series funded by the Nuffield Foundation[1]. The document we had to read was insightful, and I shall try to sum up some of its main ideas.
Essentially, there are two questions at the heart of the development of a science curriculum: “What is exactly the purpose of science education?” and “What aspects of science are worth teaching?” The first question certainly overlaps with the general question of “What is the purpose of education?”, but in the reflections put forward in the document it has a much more specific formulation, namely, “Shall science education prepare the students who will be taking on scientific topics at university, or shall it provide the general population with the necessary scientific background that they will need in the workplace and as informed citizen?” In this context, the term ‘scientific literacy’ has appeared to convey the notion of a minimum knowledge of science that any responsible citizen should hold given the importance of science in our culture. Therefore, one aim of science education would be to produce scientifically literate adults who can e.g. understand media reports, take informed personal decisions (for example about diet or medical treatment), and more generally engage with the issues science and technology pose. A tension appears to remain, however, between the needs of future science specialists and those of the rest of population. To solve this tension, the participants of the seminar series suggested having a common curriculum for KS3 and a differentiated one in KS4. Furthermore, another, important issue is the shortage of scientific vocations. Enticing children to study science is therefore an essential aim of science education at school as well. Beyond this aim to increase vocations for STEM professions, a science curriculum should also of course and foremost aim to develop the curiosity of children for the natural world and stimulate them to inquire into its behaviour.
As for the second question, the point made by the authors of the document is actually not to answer in detail what topics should be taught and learned, but rather to explore the idea that science is more than a fixed body of knowledge, and that students should understand how science is made. This has a strong link with the notion of scientific literacy. Indeed, to be able to critically read for instance a newspaper article reporting a claim made by a scientist, it is of paramount importance to understand how evidence and reasoning are used in an inquiry, and so the strength but also the limit of scientific claims. Furthermore, students should be able to sift, sort and analyse information. Since science and technology pervade our society and their use has already shown to potentially have negative environmental and societal consequences, students should also be familiarised with risk assessment and sensitised to ethical and moral implications of some choices that we have to take (e.g. energy production and use, stem cells, etc.) Finally, school science should feature links with the ‘real world’ and the students’ lives.
The document ‘Beyond 2000’ was published in 1998 and contains ten recommendations for the layout of a new science curriculum. I don’t know the details of the chaotic history of the science curriculum in England in the last two decades. I just heard that there have been many changes, with some dramatic resignations of science educators from the expert panel because of some disagreement with the education minister (at that time Michael Gove) on some issues like the importance (or not) of teaching about the nature of science. But I do recognise some of its ideas in the KS4 science curriculum operative between 2007 and 2016, as we shall see in the following. But, first, let’s have a look at the science curriculum and compare in the table below when some of its topics in chemistry and physics are taught in England compared to Germany, France and Italy.
From the data given in the table, the different topics seem to be covered more or less at the same age in the different countries. The picture however changes completely when one knows that following their interpretation of the spiral curriculum (see ‘The Earlier, the Better’ and the Spiral Curriculum), many English schools start almost all the topics that must be covered in KS3 already in year 7, and some of the GCSE (KS4) topics in year 9. One can wonder what students learn in other countries in years 7 and 8! The answer is simple: they learn the foundations. And this is in my view the heart of the problem of the way the spiral curriculum is implemented in England: the very notion of foundations has been lost while ‘the earlier, the better’ philosophy has become dominant.
Let’s consider chemical substances as an example. It seems a sound idea to introduce children to the idea that different chemical substances exist and that they behave differently. And this can be experimented and learned at a macroscopic level — or just sticking to the concept of ‘particles’ — before, at a next stage, looking at these substances at a microscopic level in more detail and hearing about the periodic table of elements, the structure of the atom, chemical bonding, etc. Year 7 students in England may learn about different chemical substances and their different behaviour (like acids and alkalis) from a macroscopic point of view, but at the same time they will learn in the course of a few lessons about atoms, elements and their periodic table, molecules, compounds, pure substance, mixtures, solutions, chemical reaction, word equation, symbol equation… Whatever the topic, one will find the same approach: an incredible amount of concepts are already taught in year 7 and then taught again in year 8, and in year 9, etc. And it might even be part of the GCSE curriculum, so maybe year 10 students will start over with these topics. I think the best comment I’ve heard about this came from my PGCE colleague Stephanie who taught in the same school as mine. She had to teach electricity to year 7s and was desperate to find ways to have her students grasp in a few lessons all the complex ideas of current intensity, voltage, resistance and power. “It’s just mental”, was her conclusion.
With this method, students are stimulated to memorise facts or ready-to-use explanations without understanding. Students often deliver explanations that can mislead you in the belief that they are super stars. For instance, I heard a year 7 explaining that bubbles are the sign of a chemical reaction — and I thought he had already fairly well understood what a chemical reaction is — or a year 12 telling me that, in the multiple slits experience, the diffraction angle increases with increasing light wavelength — and I thought he had already understood everything of path difference and interference. However, by asking further questions, I could discover how my students understand something (or not) — and almost always the students just knew a fact or a keyword but didn’t really understand what they were saying. Of course, we are happy if our students know some scientific facts. But we want them to question the natural world and to use what they know to answer new questions. Knowledge is nothing without understanding. Doubtlessly, we all have already repeated some piece of knowledge heard from someone else without really understanding it, but this is certainly not something that schools should encourage!
Certainly, the ideal put forward in ‘Beyond 2000’ of science lessons that don’t present science as a fixed body of isolated pieces of knowledge is not reached. One of the ten recommendations (number 4) was to present scientific knowledge as a number of key ‘explanatory stories’. I believe this is a great idea. It may have influenced the national curriculum for KS4 and, in turn, the exam boards for GCSE, as the content was clearly organised around a ‘context’ rather than a scientific concept. For example, by studying the atmosphere (context), students would learn about molecules and chemical reactions (scientific concepts). However, the result was a wishy-washy presentation of scientific concepts diluted in a mass of facts and figures that students have to memorise for the GCSE.
It is also interesting to look at how the development of scientific literacy of GCSE candidates is sought. The fact that some stories of history of science are part of the syllabus demonstrates a will to have students think about historical discoveries and how reasoning was applied. For instance, students learn how Alfred Wegener developed his theory of plate tectonics, and what barriers he had to break to see his theory accepted by the scientific community. Also, the notion of risk is omnipresent in many topics, be it the risk to catch a certain disease, the risk that a material breaks, the risk of using vegetable oil to produce fuel, or the risk of nuclear plants. The difficulties arise when scientific literacy is assessed. Some GCSE questions clearly aim to assess whether a student can distinguish between correlation and causation. It is a noble objective, but trying to teach it before teaching — through science education! — logical reasoning and, in particular, causal relationships is like putting the cart before the horses. In addition, some GCSE questions gave me the feeling that they should rather belong to PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) than to science. For example, students could be asked to discuss the pros and cons of undertaking a genetic test for a woman whose father has a genetic disease. This is not science any more. Rather, it concerns considerations about whether science is helpful or not in certain situations. I am not saying these are not valid or pertinent questions, but dealing with them in science lessons was a mix of genres I felt uncomfortable with. And, finally, I was puzzled by the way students would deal with that sort of questions, i.e. by rote learning elements their answer must include without making any sense of them, to throw them later in random order on their exam paper. But this might be a more general issue associated with learning for exams.
Furthermore, there is a purpose in science education that I consider central, but which is missing in the ‘Beyond 2000’ document: by learning science (and maths), one develops crucial skills and in particular logical reasoning by using abstract concepts in a consistent and logical system. Rather than focusing exclusively on the scientific content that has to be covered (or on some aspects of the nature or history of science), one should look at the conceptual understanding that will be developed with each topic and for each key stage. This is where foundations and progression are so important: you first learn basic concepts that you can understand — probably with some effort, but if it is doable, in that way your brain will grow — , before moving on to more complex concepts that require higher cognitive skills. If you have experienced cognitive development, then you shall be better equipped to learn new things, which you will have to do in your life in any case, even after having left school. Isn’t it what it is all about? Of course we do hope that some key facts and figures in all the subjects you have learned at school will somehow stick in your mind, but searching for a piece of knowledge is an easy task, especially nowadays in the era of the internet. Making sense of it is another story. And for this, you do need basic knowledge in a broad range of topics but also cognitive skills, such as the ability to sort and filter information, make connections between pieces of knowledge, distinguish between causal relationships and correlation, identify the relationship between variables, make deductions, etc. Schools should develop both knowledge and cognitive skills of their students. In my opinion, the second part, summarised by Montaigne with the phrase “A brain well formed rather than one well filled”[2], is often neglected in science eduction.
I felt on the whole quite alone with this view during all my PGCE year, except during two sessions at university where I could sense attempts by some education scientists to go in that direction. The first one was a session on Let’s think[3]. It was originally a series of 16 lessons to be taught in year 7 and year 8 instead of regular science lessons. The first results found by the researchers who developed them is that even if the students missed some regular science lessons, they didn’t lag behind in science in year 7 and year 8 compared to their peers who did attend these lessons. The second and amazing result was that these students actually outperformed their peers at GCSE in all the subjects. And what are these lessons about? Surprise, surprise: about foundations, that is, the exploration of fundamental science concepts where students could develop basic cognitive skills in terms of classification, proportionality, probability… In this session, we heard a little bit about brain and working memory capacity (wow!). In a second session, we were given a leaflet of the National Curriculum entitled ‘Personal, learning and thinking skills’, featuring the basic skills, not only cognitive but also behavioural (team workers, effective participants, self-managers…), which should be developed during KS3. One of the messages of the session was that KS3 should strengthen core concepts and key skills. While I completely agreed with this message, I deplore that again we were given no clues about how to achieve this. We were asked during the lesson to pick a section in the KS3 curriculum and to draw a flow diagram to show how the concepts will build up over 5 lessons. But if we are supposed to already know how to do it, why should we be doing this training? The thing is that it’s not something that is very easy, so we’d have needed some expert guidance here.
In addition, the issue of the delusional schemes of work at school seems unsolvable. If we have to follow them while they clearly don’t focus on foundations and the development of basic skills, how can we still do something good? I suspect that our teacher was well aware of this delicate problem, but, having no solution, he preferred giving some hints like this leaflet rather than pointing at it. Was he hoping that at some point we would have enough influence to change things in school? Or was it just to ease his conscience? The fact is that you hear at university about lots of things you should be doing, but no one there tells you exactly how. I am afraid constructivism had hit again, giving our teachers the perfect excuse to be lazy.
[1] Millar, R. & Osborne, J. (1998). “Beyond 2000: Science education for the future (the report of a seminar series funded by the Nuffield Foundation)”, London: King’s College London, School of Education.
[2] In French: “mieux vaut une tête bien faite que bien pleine“
[3] See http://www.letsthink.org.uk/
