Monday, May 10, 2010

The teaching of science and the science of teaching

Why is it that science has such a low profile in our formal education system?

Into the mouths of babes

Babies and young children are natural scientists. They spend their lives conducting experiments - testing the world around them in order to understand it.

What was the first experiment you (or your babies) conducted? Perhaps it was putting your thumb in your mouth to see what it was, what it tasted like, what shape it was, whether it would stop you feeling hungry. Perhaps it was something else... smiling at the face in front of you to see if it would smile back; seeing if you could move a limb to an intended destination; biting a nipple to see if it made the milk flow faster ;making a certain sound and waiting to see if it prompted someone to meet your need....Whatever it was, your first five years, like everyone else's, were shaped by a series of "scientific" experiments - an ongoing series of situations where you interacted with the world around you in a purposeful way in order to refine or expand your understanding of it. Taste. Observation. Manipulation. Interaction. An ongoing and vitally important process of trial and error. Of course, you were unlikely to formulate or rationalise the process with the level of verbal sophistication you would use now, or that I am using now, but the integrity of the scientific process was there none the less.

It's no wonder that children love science. It has been their constant companion since before they could talk.

And then they go to school...

So, why does it languish in so much of our formal education system?


It's not (all) rocket science

Here's a challenge: see if you can capture the internal dialogue you go through when someone says the word "science". What does that label conjure in the recesses of your subconscious? I'm betting that for many of us, it goes something like this:

"H'mm - science. That means laboratories and equations and test tubes...
...it's things I don't understand....
... writing things in notebooks and diagrams of bunsen burners and things...
...it sounded like it should be fun before I started doing it. Why wasn' it fun?...
... so many rules and don'ts ...
...so hard to get the right answers first time. Never long enough to figure out why..."
 One of the things I realised in reflecting on this, is that part of my subconscious framing of 'science' is that it is, by definition, things I don't already know about. The the things I know already or can do, aren't 'science', they're facts of life, folklore, skills, habits... something other than 'science'.  Science is the scary unknown.  As in: "It's not rocket science."

Good grief! How did that happen? I love science - the idea of it, anyway. I'm fascinated by the ideas, the cutting edge theorising about how things are, what they are, and why they are. I even carry a little book called The Little Book of Big Ideas - Science in my briefcase to read on the bus. When my kids were at  ECE I used to love setting up experiments for them to explore ideas - wave theory, floating and sinking, gases, all the usual 'science games'.


So what is 'science' if it's not the big scary unknown stuff?
Back to ECE days, my working definition of a scientist for  my 3- and 4-year-olds was "someone who finds out the answers to questions".  I've recently had that amended to "someone who does something to find out the answers to questions".  Which, by extension, makes science the process of doing something that helps you find out answers to questions. 

Now, doesn't that sound suspiciously like a definition of learning?

So why is science languishing in our schools? I suspect that it's at least in part a victory of form over substance.  'Science' in school isn't really about developing a robust process of trial-and-error that will provide answers to our questions - satisfying our natural curiosity about what, how, why, and so on. It's
about being right. Keeping the 'right' records, getting the 'right' results in your classroom experiments, labelling the 'right' parts of the diagram, looking up the 'right' part of the textbook (or internet site).

How ironic.  Real science isn't about being right first time. It's about asking the questions we can't answer, learning from the things we didn't get right the first time when we try again (there's no "trial and error" if you don't allow "error").  In trying to ensure that we direct students to the right answer in the shortest possible time, we have quite literally schooled curiosity out of our education system, and out of many of our students.

The science of teaching
This idea of science as a process of doing something concrete - interacting with the world around us - in a purposeful way that will increase our understanding, is pretty much the same as the idea of 'action research' or, in this year's jargon, "evidence-based practice". It's what we ask our teachers to do when they collect information about student achievement to evaluate the effectiveness of their classroom programmes and practices.

So why does it seem so hard to transfer those ideas to  physical sciences?  I'm not sure I have the answers -  but perhaps we should be  looking a bit harder for ways to join the dots.

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