What’s wrong with Science education?

By Dr Wendy Nielsen, Faculty of Education

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a science educator, I am sometimes asked, why do our kids have trouble learning science? The related question is, ‘what is wrong with science education?’ These questions may reflect an echo from a media story or an education minister’s complaint about weak science knowledge or PISA results posted by our students. Most often, they reflect the questioner’s personal memory of how science was learned (perhaps from the perspective of one who was successful at learning science). The predominant experience and/or memory for most people is from their own high school science classrooms, where students sat in rows and copied notes that were either written by the teacher or recited in a lecture style. You too may ask, well, what is the problem with that? Those that can, will learn the information, and those that can’t, well, they don’t really need to, because they aren’t going to be scientists anyway.

The problem is that this is a 1960s attitude toward the nature of science knowledge: science as a field of study weeds out the best students so that they will be trained as scientists. Science is important for all students because they learn about how societal understandings have been built over human history, including the structure of knowledge; the bases for evidence and logical argument; a critical ability to question claims (made across all sectors of society); an open view of the nature of knowledge and how new knowledge is built; a passing fluency with the big discussions that have historically puzzled humans and human ingenuity; a foundational ability to contribute to discussions about big issues, involving for example, the environment, land and resource management, agriculture, urban infrastructure, transportation and communications, to name just a few. In short, learning science teaches students about how to think and how to inquire into problems. A population that is a) unable, or, b) unwilling, to engage with these and other issues that have science knowledge at their core is impoverished and retrospective, rather than innovative, entrepreneurial and future-oriented and, further, lacks the capacity for problem-setting, let along problem-solving.

Science educators could wring their hands and argue that society has moved in a direction that doesn’t value the knowledge scientists conceive as important. I would argue that the knowledge itself (growing all the time, I might add) is not what needs to be packed into the heads of our children. Rather, 21st century learners (and citizens) need a frame of mind, along with enough background knowledge that both enables and encourages them to be engaged in the discussions. Open, critical conversation is at the core of democratic society. An educated populace is more relevant than ever, and yet, science has fallen in status, particularly among primary school teachers, as being too hard, takes too much time or equipment, and lacking depth of understanding themselves, becomes an add-on to the prescribed and already packed curriculum.

What is the solution? How do we foster curiosity and wide interests among our students? What background knowledge do teachers need and what tools support their ability to engage children? Returning to the opening questions asked in this discussion, children struggle to learn science because they have been turned off. Our job as educators is not delivering content knowledge (although standardized tests examine students’ recall of such)—all of which is available on the internet, but to develop meaningful and relevant working knowledge, it needs to be accessed through personal experience with the big discussions and issues of our society through an inquiry focus that asks more questions than it answers. Curiosity as a virtue and value of schooling will equip our students—all of them—to be part of the conversations, and eager to contribute to it in ways that reflect interests, abilities and the possibility for contributing to societal improvements. Some of them will still want to become scientists, but assuming that only those who will be scientists need to learn about the big ideas in science leaves us impoverished as a society, and with a mistaken conception of what science knowledge, and by extension, what science learning, is all about.

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