Volume 6 Number 1 - Adm.monash.edu - Monash University

MONASH UNIVERSITY GAZETTE
SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN SCIENCE EDUCATION
By P. J. Fensham, Professor, Faculty of Education
Late in 1968 the Commonwealth Minister of Education
and Science announced that the Government was prepared
to make a substantial contribution towards an
interstate venture to produce a new science curriculum
for the first four years of secondary schooL Over a fiveyear
period the budget for this project will amount to
more than $1,000,000. This announcement marked the
entry of Australia into the ranks of large money-spenders
on courses for science education, such as the Nuffield
Science Projects in England, and a variety of agencies in
the U.S.A. which have spent large sums in recent years
developing material for various science courses at all
levels of schooling, from elementary to senior secondary.
The Federal Government had, five years earlier, announced
a programme of special grants for building
and equipping science laboratories in all types of schools.
Indeed. science education was singled out as having
such peculiar priorities that it was a suitable case to
justify the double precedent of Commonwealth entry
unilaterally into secondary education and of making
public money directly available to non-government
schooTs.
These events in Australia have had their counterparts
in many countries of the world. and the launching of
the Russian Sputnik in 1957 is a convenient event which
is usually taken as the harbinger of a new era in science
education. However, the technological demands of a
nationalistic race for space supremacy, while substantial,
are only one of many pressures that have produced
a ferment in science education that is rapidly spreading
to aU parts of the world. The pressures may be different
depending on the stage of national development. In
an undeveloped nation there is the need for skilled
scientists and technologists to take up particular features
of the struggle for modernization. But there is equally
the task of making a scientific way of thinking sufficiently
indigenous to the population at large that scientific and
technological potential for progress can be realized and
accepted.
At the other end of the scale. in the more developed,
and hence more technologically-dependent nations, there
is a growing need to produce a higher and higher proportion
of the work force with a high level of scientific
and technical education. In these countries, this proportion
is already so large that the need can only be met
by including science more and more as part of the
general education of the whole population, so that the
base from which specialists can be selected remains as
large as possible. This follows from the usual assumption
that science itself is sequential, so that there can
only be 'dropout' for the study of science; no real
attempt is made to resume science after they have
abandoned it for years.
These aspects of human resource development, which
call for more and better science education. are inextricably
mixed with a growing awareness of the contribution
that science has to offer to education in its more
general sense of developing individuals and groups.
An illustration of the way that these 'pure' and 'applied'
aspects of education become one is the following
comment: 'Creating in students the ability to cope with
new and unexpected findings is a central objective of the
innovators who have been experimenting with educational
programmes in the last fifteen years.'
Despite the different reasons for improving and extending
science education, all countries are experiencing
the same problems of an acute shortage of qualified and
capable science teachers, of an urgent need for new
science curricula with supporting teaching aids and
materials. and of expanding laboratory facilities and
equipment for the teaching of science. Universities have
important contributions to make to the solution of these
problems, especially to the training of teachers and to
the basic research upon which the development of curricula
and instructional materials depends.
However, it has only been in the last three years
in Britain and Australia that the first appointments have
been made in universities of professors of education with
particular reference to science. It is new universities
in both countries that have taken this step. The University
of East Anglia has a chair of chemical education
within its school of chemical science. The University of
Surrey has a professor of physics who also holds a chair
of science education, and the University of Stirling has
a professor of education who has a biology background
and who has introduced special courses for biology
teachers. The two universities in Australia with special
work in science education are Macquarie and Monash,
with a director of teaching (with special reference to
science) at the former, and a chair in science education
at the latter.
In all of these cases there is a strong emphasis on the
link between the science departments of the university
and the education departments or faculties. This link
is also strongly evident now in the U.S.A. where science
education departments have existed for a number of
years, but were. previously, usually rather isolated from
contacts with practising scientists.
Development of New Science Curricula
The formation of new curricula and the development
of associated instructional material has been the area of
science education in which the most striking progress has
been made since the Sputnik dateline. These projects.
whatever their emphasis, have shared certain common
clements. They have been initiated by distinguished
scientific scholars who have worked side by side with
teachers and educational psychologists. They have drawn
on all the light that contemporary psychology and related
disciplines can provide. They have been conducted
outside the educational establishment of state
departments of education and have usually been associated
with a university centre, so that the link with working
scientists is maintained. Examples of these are the
relations between the Massechusetts Institute of Technology
and the Physical Sciences Study Course (now used
in fifth and sixth forms in Victoria and Queensland),
the University of Colorado and the Biological Science
Curricula Study, Chelsea College. London, and the Nuffield
Science Projects, and the U.N.RS.C.O. Chemistry
Project and the University of Chulalongkorn, Thailand.
In the new look at the place of science in the educational
programme of schools, these curricula constantly
stress the need to teach the particular science as a
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