good-practice-in-science-teaching-what-research-has-to-say

SCIENCE TEACHING AND COGNITIVE ACCELERATION 97
can be recognized and it can be used again. Perkins and Saloman (1989) have
shown the importance of metacognition in the development of general cognitive
skills which can be transferred from one context to another, and Brown
et al. (1983) and Larkin (2001) have provided more details of the nature of
metacognition.
In translating psychological perspectives on cognitive development into
a clearly defined set of pedagogical principles, the CASE literature describes
these three features as the central ‘pillars’ of teaching for cognitive acceleration
that now guide and characterize all cognitive acceleration programmes,
extended from the original KS3 science to KS3 maths, technology, and a wide
variety of primary CA materials. This pedagogical framework is also extended
to six pillars (Adey and Shayer, 2002). The three additional pillars include
concrete preparation, the first 5 minutes or so of a CASE lesson when some of
the words which are going to be used are introduced, and the nature of the
problem discussed. This phase sets the students up in preparation for the surprising
or difficult-to-explain event, which causes conflict. Another is bridging,
linking the type of thinking developed in the CASE lesson with other opportunities
in the science curriculum or beyond where that type of thinking will
be useful. The sixth pillar is the set of schemata (singular schema) or general
ways of thinking such as seriation, classification, proportionality, and probability
which underpin all scientific thinking. These schemata form the content
matter of the 30 Thinking Science (Adey, Shayer and Yates, 2001) activities
comprising the published curriculum materials of CASE. Students in Years 7
and 8 (aged 12–14) are mostly just entering the doorway to formal operational
thinking, and the activities are structured by the schemata which Inhelder and
Piaget (1958) describe as characteristic of formal operations. They all require
multi-variable thinking, and all can be identified as underlying aspects of the
National Curriculum in science that appear from about level 5 and 6 onwards.
An example
We can illustrate these principles with one CASE activity, called ‘Treatments
and Effects’. The schemata addressed are causality and correlation. Students
are offered this picture (Figure 5.2).
It is emphasized that all other conditions are kept the same across the two
samples of carrots, and the question is: ‘Does Growcaro make carrots grow
larger’
This is an activity one can do with Year 5 children, with Year 8, with Year
11, and with science teachers, obviously expecting increasingly sophisticated
ways of dealing with the raw data and interpreting the results. An immediate
response might be ‘Yes, because there are more big ones with the Growcaro.’
To which the challenges (which will create some conflict in younger students)
are ‘How many more’; and then ‘Is this enough to be convincing’, ‘What
can you tell by comparing the number of large and small carrots in each row’