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. Continue reading ‘What’s wrong with Science education?’
