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

228 JULIAN SWAIN
than girls. This difference was mainly due to the higher performance of boys
in the earth science, chemistry and physics areas. Perhaps more surprising,
from the table, is the high international performance of all countries in the
life sciences and environmental science areas and the slightly lower performances
on the chemistry and physics. This finding, of course, not only raises
issues about the international performance in these areas but also about the
validity of the questions used to assess them. However, such data do provide
countries with the opportunities to re-examine their curricula and pedagogy
in order to identify possible weaknesses and to implement strategies to correct
these in the future, and so use the information obtained in a formative way.
Indeed, a comparison of the 2003 results with those from previous surveys
show an improvement in the scientific performance of young people in many
countries.
The performance assessments from the 1997 study
This was the first and only time that international comparisons of practical
science had been attempted and so a brief overview of this study is included
here. Science is regarded as a practical subject and to ignore this domain, as
the APU work showed, would be to automatically invalidate the overall assessment.
Only 19 countries took part in this component (IEA, 1997) and so
generalizations from these assessments to all the countries must be exercised
with caution. In these performance assessments, five practical tasks (measuring
your pulse, magnets, batteries, rubber band, and solutions) were used to
assess the practical domain. Each task had specific performance criteria; so,
for example, the ‘pulse’ task, where students had to look at changes of rate
on exercising, assessed the presentation and quality of the data from the measured
pulse rate, a description of the trend due to the increasing exercise and
an explanation of the results.
The results showed that the position for England and Wales, second only to
Singapore, was better in this domain than for the written components. If the
standard errors are taken into account, then the two results are comparable.
One likely reason for the high performance here must originate from the
students’ exposure to the investigative practical work in the science National
Curriculum (see, also, Chapter 6 in this volume).
A fuller analysis shows that there is variation in performance across each
country on each task. For example, Columbia, the lowest scoring country,
produced one of the highest scores for the ‘magnets’ task. There was also
overall variation between tasks; ‘pulse’, for example, was the most difficult
task and ‘magnets’ was the easiest. This implies that students should be given
experience of investigational practical work in a variety of scientific domains
rather than a single one.
Simple tables of results can hide much of the richness of the data collected.
For example, despite overall similarities, there are wide differences in the performance
on specific skills, such as collection and presentation of results,