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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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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 Twenty First Century GCSE Science course is, of course, just one response to the challenge of teaching science for scientific literacy. There any many other possible ways of interpreting this challenge and responding to it. The value of a concrete response – in the form of a fully articulated teaching programme, with textbooks and other support materials – is that it enables the developers to communicate their vision more clearly, and makes it easier for other science educators to assess and evaluate its potential for their own situation. Some of the design criteria used in developing Twenty First Century GCSE Science seem fundamental to any scientific literacy course. Amongst these are: seeing the learner as a consumer, rather than a potential producer, of new scientific knowledge; and aiming to teach some science content (accepted scientific knowledge) and also something about science itself (the nature of science and scientific enquiry).
Beyond that, however, choices and emphases might well differ. The hope of the team that developed Twenty First Century Science is that it will stimulate other developments that will provide the international science education community with a range of worked examples of scientific literacy courses – so that we are better able to assess the potential of such courses, and gain a better understanding of the challenges of developing and implementing them.
The development of the teaching materials for the Twenty First Century Science pilot was essentially a test of the feasibility of the curriculum design outlined above. Our work has shown that it is possible to design a course with the structure shown in Figure 2, which is workable and attractive to many teachers – something which we did not know when we began. The evidence from the pilot and from the first two years of more general use of the course is that a scientific literacy emphasis can significantly improve students’ engagement with science ideas and issues, in schools where teachers have a sound understanding of the rationale for the course and are generally supportive of its aims and aspirations.
This is not, however, a quick or easy ‘fix’ for the problems of student engagement that arise in many countries. We need to begin to change the curriculum for younger learners too, not just for 15-16 year olds. And we need to be aware of the demands that new ways of teaching put on science teachers, and provide effective support for them in making the changes that many wish to make. The Head of Science in one Twenty First Century Science pilot school wrote:
“I know that my students are better prepared for A-level. Their understanding of difficult concepts is much better. In the unit on electricity, for example, … my former students would know the formulae and rote definitions, but not understand what was happening in a circuit.”
But he also went on to make an observation about the demands on teachers’ expertise:
“Twenty First Century Science is harder to teach, you need to be more creative in producing practical activities, you need more access to ICT [information and communications technology] and the coursework takes a good, strong teacher to manage well. But from the eyes of students it is a universe ahead of anything else.”
It is that final comment (and others like it from many teachers involved in this development) that encourage us to think that teaching science with a scientific literacy emphasis can lead to a significant change in our students’ engagement with the world of science.
Copyright (C) 2008 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 9, Issue 2, Foreword (Dec., 2008). All Rights Reserved.
