Integration: An Approach to Science in primary schooling

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 1, Article 10 (Jun., 2001)
Peter J FENSHAM
Integration: An Approach to Science in primary schooling

Previous Contents Next

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND : THE 1990s
- The idea of curriculum focus
The international curriculum review that was carried out as part of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), described countries with long detailed lists of content for learning as having a "diffuse" curriculum for science. In these curricula, in any year of schooling, a large number of different topics were to be taught, placing great demand on the primary teachers, and raising a likelihood of incoherent, superficial learning. Those countries, like Japan, which in contrast had relatively few topics per year, were described as having a "focussed" curriculum. The demand on teachers was less in terms of topics to be covered, but more depth was required, if the opportunity for deeper more coherent learning was to be realised. A focussed curriculum, we shall see, is another important curricular feature for the advantages integrated teaching of science can have.
Some educational systems reinforced these new intentions for primary science by specifying time per week to be spent on science, commissioning new support materials, instituting standardised regular tests of learning progress, and providing varying degrees of professional development for primary teachers. At least officially, it looked as if primary science was at last established. In practice the problems of actually implementing these now much more demanding intentions were even greater than they were with the more modest suggestions I outlined in the previous section.