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

It should be noted that this movement will continue to be built on a strong conceptual base
of science, but with the added benefits of deeper learning that enables this conceptual
learning to be mastered to the point of being to be applied in novel situations.
Prospects
Deeper level of conceptual science learning enables transfer of learning to novel
contexts.
An increase in student interest when the enabling contexts are well chosen.
Real world contexts make possible a greater variety of scientifi c investigations.
A better appreciation of the strengths and limitations of science since real world contexts
are never purely scientifi c.
Pre-requisites
Acceptance that fewer details in science topics will be covered in order to strengthen
learning of what are identifi ed as important ideas and explanatory frameworks in
science.
Disciplinary trained science teachers will need professional development with the
interdisciplinary aspects of S&T real contexts and the more open-ended nature of
investigating them.
Pre-service science teacher education should be asked to move to a context-based
curriculum for content and pedagogy.
ISSUE E: THE NATURE OF SCIENCE AND INQUIRY
Background
If the second resolve in the Perth Declaration about ‘increasing students’ interest in
and recognition of the roles of science and technology in society’ is to be achieved, there
is no doubt that how problems are identified, investigated, and solved in Science must
have a prominence in the curriculum. Students, who are seen as successful in school
science, know many bits of scientific information, but they often have little or no sense
of the path this knowledge has been through in its establishment, and what might lead
to it changing. Without a good sense of these aspects of the strength and limitation of
scientific knowledge, they do not have the capacity to establish the worth of the claims
that are regularly made in the name of science or the many forms of pseudo-science.
The students have been deprived of what gives Science the power and influence it has
or should have in their lives and in society, and where its boundaries of influence lie.
Furthermore, the students are ill equipped to relate the science aspects of S&T issues in
the real world to those other aspects - social, economic, aesthetic, political, etc. - that
are also so often present.
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