Describing and supporting effective science teaching and learning in Australian schools

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 2 (Dec., 2001)
Russell TYTLER
Describing and supporting effective science teaching and learning in Australian schools - validation issues

Previous Contents Next

The provisional, political nature of the components
It is not possible, in any account of science classrooms, to capture reality. The classroom must be conceived of as a site that affords multiple interpretations (see, for example, Clarke, 2001). Any attempt to describe effective teaching and learning must involve decisions about the level of description, what aspect of practice are to be focused on, and where the emphasis is to be put. The validity of the SiS Components, described thus far, must therefore be regarded as partial and provisional. That is why the question of purpose is central.
The SiS Components, looked at coldly, contain nothing that a careful reading of the literature may not have uncovered. Their strength lies, however, in the way they have harnessed significant themes to a particular purpose:

their explicitness that both clarifies practice and enables monitoring and hence empirical validation;

their recognition of a broad range of science education literatures, beyond the purely conceptual;

their embedding in recognisable and demonstrable effective practice;

their explicit challenge to transmissive teaching approaches; and

their framing in terms of classroom and learner, rather than teacher characteristics.

The strength of the SiS Components lies, therefore, in their political nature rather than in their representation of any fundamental new truths about teaching and learning. It could be argued that the SiS Components to some extent represent a status quo view of teaching and learning, being derived from current practice and consistent with the literature. However, the extent to which they have challenged teachers in the project to shift their practice attests to their power in supporting change. What is status quo for a reader of the literature is very different from the status quo in schools. For a project such as this, the challenge is not so much to uncover fundamental learning principles, but to find an expression of these which serves the particular purpose. The tension, however, between the need to provide a proven framework, and the need to encourage innovation, has been a constant planning issue.
The level of description

A choice we had to make within the project concerned the level at which effective teaching and learning is described. The SiS Components, with their interpretive documentation, are pitched at a variety of levels, to try to cater for the twin demands of explicitness and lattitude for individual variation. There are two concerns with this level of description. Firstly, there may be some deep seated beliefs that underlie the components that should be made more explicit, and we have been attempting to address this through a more careful alignment with the research literature, and by a reanalysis of the original interviews to uncover broader themes.
Secondly, there is a concern that even carefully structured teacher self reporting may either misrepresent actual practice, or may miss something more fundamental that underlies the Components. Our plans for 2002 include finer grained analysis of classroom teaching and learning, to align the Component Map results with observations of classrooms, interviews with students and teachers, and student achievement results from a wider range of assessment instruments.