Retorts

Teaching Future Scientists

Education has always been rife with gurus who have the answer to all the world's educational problems. There have been numerous such fads in education such as "whole language", "discovery learning", and "mastery learning", all purported by their creators to be the answer to better learning. However, in the past, few people in the community have been aware of these evangelical movements and happily they had little more than a passing influence on actual school teaching and learning.

The latest fads in the recent reform of science education in New Zealand are less innocuous. In contrast to previous "innovations", these most recent developments of "constructivist learning" and "content-free curricula" are likely to have a profound effect on the education of our future scientists and engineers.

Moreover, many reforms are being introduced which do not have the research to support their overall superiority over previous instructional methods particularly for high achieving students. We need a curriculum which will not only encourage students to pursue science as a career but will also give these students the best possible preparation for further study.

Let's look at some of the factors that have influenced the new science curriculum in New Zealand.

In the 1960s, a new field of educational research came into existence. It was discovered that many students -- even those who did well in science examinations -- had understandings about many of the fundamental concepts of science which were different from those of scientists.

By about 1993 when the latest tally of which I am aware was made, some 1,500 studies of the so-called student misconceptions had been published. One of the most important effects of this research was to plant the seeds of doubt as to the effectiveness of the current methods of instruction, and to condemn what was seen as didactic teaching, rote learning or even discovery learning.

The 1980s saw a number of other factors which were to have a major impact on the development of science curricula. The post-modernists and social constructivists advocated the view that all science is tentative and thus, taken to its logical conclusion, there is no point in teaching any science if it is all likely to change in the next few months!

This idea, combined with a naive interpretation of the information explosion, led to the view that since any fact can be obtained via computer when required, there is no point in teaching scientific knowledge. What is needed is merely the access skills.

Constructivism, which permeates the whole science curriculum, promotes the view that individuals build their own unique understandings from their experiences. Thus all learning is based on what was learnt before, and children's prior learnings are highly significant in the learning that might follow. However, there is no comment on how learning ever starts in the first place and how it is possible to develop new understandings not based on previous knowledge.

Constructivism skirts around the learning of an established body of knowledge. Using constructivist principles it is not clear how one would teach knowledge that is largely abstract, like the concepts of velocity or acceleration, or knowledge of concepts of which students can have no direct experience, such as atomic structure or cell process, or other concepts for which students are likely to have no prior knowledge, such as antibodies or viruses.

Another nail in the coffin of knowledge was added in the 1950s when Benjamin Bloom developed a taxonomy of educational objectives -- a hierarchical list of educational aims which placed knowledge at the bottom and evaluation at the top. Although this ranking was based on the cognitive requirements of the objectives rather than their educational requirements, this provided further support for the idea that factual knowledge has little or no value.

All these factors have contributed to the devaluing of necessity of understanding the concepts and structure of scientific knowledge. The science curriculum for new entrants to Form 4 has no core knowledge content. It specifies only the processes that can be learned, and appears to consider that there is no value in teaching a coherent structure of concepts.

Science education in New Zealand schools is now centred around a few skills and what the students think they might like to know, rather than around the basic principles that have taken scientists hundreds of years to develop. This is a blatant disregard for the logical structure of a subject which is the product of some of the greatest human minds.

Although this may be difficult to teach to some students, we should be directing our efforts into devising strategies which will enable all students to understand, rather avoiding the task and merely entertaining students. If we do not, we will have lost a generation of scientists.

We can only hope that the next fad that comes along will be less destructive to the learning of science than the present one.

Lydia Austin, Education Department, Auckland University