Science education policy-making: eleven emerging issues; 2008 - OEI

the secondary years the role of S&T in the students’ worlds outside of school should play a
powerful motivating role.
Paralleling these curricular decisions about interest and science, practices that inform
students and their parents about the exciting prospects of science–based careers need
to be developed in school and among the wider public.
Prospects
More students will develop an interest in science, and more will consider scientifi c and
technological careers.
Pre-requisites
Pre-service science teacher education should begin to remedy its students’ lack of
stories of science. Professional development of S&T teachers should give priority to
how real world contexts can be used in their teaching to optimise cognitive and affective
learning outcomes.
Formative and summative assessment modes that encourage affect-including cognition
of science and technology will need to be developed.
ISSUE D: HOW TECHNOLOGY RELATES
TO SCIENCE IN EDUCATION
Background
In keeping with earlier UNESCO/ICASE recognition in 1994 of the importance in society
of the link between science and technology, the Perth Declaration reiterates their interrelatedness.
This is an important corrective to the separation between science and
technology in schooling that occurred in a number of national curricula that appeared
in the 1990s. In these curricula, the title, Technology, was used to give new recognition
was to design, problem solving and making, that had been practical features of subjects
like Craft and Design, Woodwork, Metalwork, Home Economics, Industrial Arts ,etc.
Already, the potential that computers had to transform these hands-on subjects more
than justified that these practical features should appear as a new key Learning Area.
In this sense, the new subject, Technology was quite a separate field from Science and
science teachers are not usually its teachers. The common use of the term, technology,
as applications of Science, does however, very properly belong within the area of science
teachers. In this document, this is essentially what is meant by ‘science and technology
education’.
Entitling this new subject with the word, “Technology” was, however, quite disastrous
for the developments that had become to appear in science education. In the later
1980s innovative science educators were developing materials that enabled science
teachers to include applications of science in the form of technologies in their teaching.
Projects, such as Science and Technology in Society (SATIS), PLON (for physics),
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