Abstract
By failing to teach students the real art of discovery, we are failing not just them, but also society, argues
After that discovery, I started an annual science fair at the school where I taught in London, at which students were encouraged to come up with their own questions and use science to answer them. Projects included “Is the chlorine in my swimming pool bad for my hair?” and “Do branded soft drinks taste better than generic supermarket versions of the same drink?”
As a physics teacher, I firmly believe in the importance of pupils conducting their own original scientific experiments and the values that experiments such as these instil – a keen sense of inquiry and questioning, and knowledge of science for science’s sake. Instead, we might be moving away from this situation, and not just in terms of experiments.
Science teaching has undergone seismic changes since I first started teaching 21 years ago. Teachers have been encouraged to flip classrooms, an approach where students are introduced to learning material before class rather than during, textbooks are increasingly “digital”, and it sometimes feels like schools exist solely to produce “data” about children. Most importantly, perhaps, there has been a battle for the heart of science education, played out between those who believe the primary role of school science is to produce “future scientists” – people who study science at university and potentially go into science-based careers – and those who want science education to meet the needs of all young people.
The 2017 Wellcome Trust report Young People’s Views on Science Education stated that 68% of young people “said they found science lessons at school very or fairly interesting”, which suggested 32% did not. My suspicion is that this 32% will remain constant or increase over the next few years due to recent changes to the science curriculum which embrace the “knowledge-rich” approach promoted by the current UK government. Research tells us that some students are turned off science at school because they see the subject as consisting largely of a collection of facts that need to be remembered. In their 2010 paper Pupils’ Views of the Role and Value of the Science Curriculum, Jonathan Osborne and Sue Collins warned that “accompanying the attempt to squeeze more and more content into the curriculum pot is an unintended. . . negative outcome which may be seriously damaging the health of contemporary science education”. It’s a pity that this warning has not been heeded.
Osborne co-authored the 1998 report Beyond 2000: Science Education for the Future, which was a reimagining of how science should be taught, “driven by a sense of a growing disparity between the science education provided in our schools and the needs and interests of the young people who will be our future citizens”. The vision presented in the paper led to a major shake-up of the national curriculum for science in 2006, introducing an element called How Science Works. Alongside teaching the facts and findings of science, teachers were required to explicitly teach students that “there are some questions that science cannot currently answer, and some that science cannot address”, and that scientific and technological developments, such as nuclear power and cloning, have their “benefits, drawbacks and risks”.
The noble idea behind the introduction of HSW was to ensure all students grew up as citizens who could differentiate between science and pseudoscience, make sense of data presented to them in the media, and appreciate the significance of science as one of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements. However, not everybody welcomed the changes.
HSW featured in all the science courses for GCSEs (exams taken by students usually around the age of 16) introduced after the 2006 changes, but was implemented so poorly that it frequently led to confusion and irritation for both teachers and students. A common complaint was that the amount of science content was significantly reduced to make room for explicit HSW teaching. Many critics felt that process was emphasised at the expense of content, and argued that the introduction of HSW had a damaging effect on the way we taught other important aspects of science.
A physics lesson in Berlin, 1931. Science teaching has undergone drastic changes over the years, but are all changes good?
CREDIT: ullstein bild/Getty
An obvious problem with asking science teachers to adhere to HSW was that it required an understanding of ethics, and the history and philosophy of science, which many science teachers simply did not have. Examining students’ understanding of HSW was also problematic – GCSE questions were considered ambiguous, subjective and downright unscientific. For example, a 2007 GCSE exam asked students to “suggest possible reasons” why the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority banned human cloning and why members of this authority were not all scientists. Students and teachers complained that science exam questions were now more like English comprehension exercises.
Gradually, the vision of the Beyond 2000 report was watered down, if not entirely abandoned. There is now no official requirement that students should be taught “there are some questions that science cannot currently answer, and some that science cannot address”. Instead, we’re back to a situation where even the most well-intentioned discussions around science education seem focused on how we can get more young people going into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers. We’re in a situation which is far removed from encouraging students to be creative and to ask questions.
That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of good in the classroom. There’s a lot of excellent work being done on how to get more girls doing physics A-levels (exams usually taken between the ages of 17 and 18), and even on how science education can be a force for “social justice”, but there is a distinctly utilitarian feel to all these efforts – the “science capital learning approach” literally encourages teachers to plan lessons to help students “recognise that learning science is useful for any job”.
And while the experiments continue, they’re the same “experiments” children have been doing for decades – seeing what happens to the length of potato chips soaked in varying concentrations of sugar solution, for example. They don’t encourage new inquiry.
Science is undeniably the most powerful tool we have for arriving at facts about the natural world, but I fear that the way it is taught in schools gives the impression that it is an apolitical process which is somehow free of the values and biases of the people doing it. By prioritising the notion that the function of school science is to prepare students to access Stem careers, we have relinquished the opportunity to teach creativity and to teach sophisticated critical thinking skills. By failing to give sufficient weight to the history, philosophy and ethics of science in the curriculum, by failing to emphasise the limitations of science as well as its strengths, and by failing to encourage a sense of discovery, we fail to serve our students, and society at large, as well as we could. At a time when truth, democracy and facts are under attack, I can’t help but feel that this is a mistake.