Curriculum change in science teaching: the need to listen to teachers

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 1, Article 1 (Jun., 2001)
Amanda Berry and John Loughran
Curriculum change in science teaching: the need to listen to teachers

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Assessment vs. Reporting
An ever-present issue in our interviews was the disjunction between assessment and reporting. This is an issue that may well be regarded as being a constant in many schools and that the CSF simply exacerbated it for many science teachers. Many of the schools in which we conducted interviews were operating on a timeline that involved moving from curriculum auditing processes and into implementation of new reporting procedures - designed around the CSF format. In the overwhelming majority of cases, schools were under pressure to produce new report formats that reflected the CSF and this internal pressure was reflected in a somewhat superficial approach to reporting on assessment. For example, it was not uncommon for schools to be busy constructing new reporting formats that reflected the CSF learning outcomes despite the teachers themselves either disagreeing with the underlying assessment requirements, or simply not understanding how these learning outcomes could be understood or reported in a meaningful way at all.
Most science teachers were coming to understand the possibilities associated with reporting in relation to the 'achievement' categories of: beginning; consolidated; and, established. However, in many cases, the completion of a particular Level was related to the amount of content completed. Hence, it was common for a science department to decide that students could not be regarded as having satisfactorily completed a Level until they had completed all of the content within the strands at those Levels - exacerbating further the reporting problems noted in the previous paragraph. Therefore, assessment of Levels was synonymous with the completion of content rather than the level of achievement of learning within that content.
In this instance, assessment is not appropriately informing reporting and this is an issue of concern to science teachers as they work to meet policy requirements but struggle to interpret these appropriately in practice. The difficulty with this issue is that it has the potential to drive science teaching to be more transmissive (Barnes, 1976) and hinder the important growth in understanding of science teaching which has emerged in the past two decades that has challenged this 'knowledge delivery' approach to science teaching. One important example of this growth in understanding the development of science teaching was the McClintock Collective (1988) which placed inclusive teaching procedures on the agenda for science teachers and pre-service science teacher programs. With a perception of a shift back to more traditional teaching, it is interesting to ponder what will become of the advances of programs such as the McClintock Collective and other science support materials that better linked science education research to classroom practice.
The development of assessment strategies and their relationship to progression through the CSF is an issue that is important for science teaching and learning. Further, these developments need to inform the reporting practices which are consequently adopted and refined. In the CSF 2000, these issues have subsided as teachers have had a chance to better align the curriculum and its intended outcomes to the report formats, but the underlying philosophical issue of what is being reported and what it represents continues.