Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 9, Issue 2, Foreword (Dec., 2008)
Robin MILLAR
 Taking scientific literacy seriously as a curriculum aim
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The outcomes of the pilot trial

There is not space in this paper to provide a full account of the outcomes of the pilot trial of Twenty First Century Science so what follows is a brief summary.  During the pilot, the project team collected data on teachers’ views of the course and of their students’ reactions to it, in both formal ways (though questionnaire surveys) and more informal ones (feedback sessions and individual conversations during training workshops and school visits).  Millar (2006) summarises the main findings of this internal evaluation.  They paint a very positive picture of teachers’ reactions to the course, with many believing it had improved their students’ scientific literacy and had led to significantly higher levels of student engagement and interest.  Apart from the challenge of getting used to a new course and new activities, the main problems teachers identified were the amount and level of reading involved in some activities, and in managing discussions in class, especially of issues with no single correct answer.  The project worked with teachers during the pilot to try to address these difficulties, by developing modified teaching materials with lower language demand and targeting training on teaching approaches that were proving more challenging

The project also commissioned three formative evaluation studies by researchers outside the development team, and engaged another experienced science educator to maintain an overview of this work and write an overview of the findings.  The studies looked only at the core GCSE Science course within the Twenty First Century Science suite, and focused on classroom implementation, teachers’ and students’ views of the course, evidence of changes in students’ attitudes to science, and the development of students’ understanding of some of the Science Explanations and Ideas about Science.  The overview (Donnelly, 2007) and executive summaries of the three studies are available from the project website (www.21stcenturyscience.org).  In brief, these studies reported a positive teacher and student response, no significant difference in students’ level of understanding of science content as compared to ‘traditional’ courses, some evidence of greater interest in reading about science among students who had followed the course, and – perhaps most importantly – the continuing need for support and training for teachers to improve their understanding of the course aims and their confidence with the new teaching styles involved.  There was also evidence that teachers’ understanding of the course, and ability to teach it well, had improved considerably over the two years of the pilot, but still needed, in many cases, to improve further.

While the pilot was in progress, QCA announced its intention to introduce changes in GCSE course specifications from 2006, requiring that all courses have a ‘core + additional science’ structure.  It therefore became necessary to review and amend the pilot materials sooner than had been planned and on a much tighter time scale, so that a revised course could be made available to schools for use from September 2006.  This work was, however, successfully completed and a revised Twenty First Century Science course, significantly modified in the light of the experience of the pilot, and benefiting from many suggestions and ideas from pilot school teachers, was published in 2006 (Twenty First Century Science, 2006).  Twenty First Century Science is now in use in around 1100 schools, or 25% of maintained (state) secondary schools in England, with over 120 000 students completing the first full post-implementation cycle in July 2008.

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