CHAPTER 26
History of Science Curriculum Reform in the United States and the United Kingdom
This chapter examines the history of curriculum reform in science education in the United States and the United Kingdom. For the United States, it identifies several periods of marked change from the mid-1700s to the 1980s and highlights some emblematic features of each one; more recent American curriculum developments are examined in all the other chapters in this section of the Handbook. In the case of the United Kingdom, the scope extends into the twenty-first century.
While certain parallels are evident in the development of science education in the two countries, educational change is influenced by both national culture and indigenous organizational structures. Thus there are noteworthy differences. The United Kingdom is a “unity” of England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. For all except Scotland, government legislation in education emanated from the London Parliament until devolution of power was introduced in the 1990s. Scotland has always been different, but nevertheless was controlled from London until recently. For most of the twentieth century, about 90 percent of the schools (secular and denominational) were supported by central government, and pupils paid no fees. Yet, until 1988, these schools had a great deal of individual freedom to choose what they taught, the textbooks they used, and the teachers they recruited.
In the United States, the Constitution does not mention education, which means (by provision of the Tenth Amendment) that responsibility for schools resides exclusively in the individual states. Nevertheless, funds have been provided since 1917 by the federal government to meet special national priorities (initially to improve vocational education for industry and agriculture). Such was the case in 1959, for example, when Congress appropriated funds to improve science and mathematics education after the launch of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union. At the present time, about 7 percent of total education expenditures come from the federal government, mostly to assist “special-needs” students and those in low-income neighborhoods. As with many federal programs, however, the influence on the states is often disproportionate to the amount of money provided. “Unfunded mandates” from Washington are a continuing source of tension in the federal system. Historically, and on balance, however, there has been considerable latitude at the state level with respect to schools—and rhetorically at least, the principle of local control is unchallenged.
Two distinctive features have limited such latitude in the United Kingdom. One has been the influence of the universities: they established several examining boards that assigned, through their tests, school-leaving certificates. These have been the main requirement for university entrance, so they acquired status sought by parents and employers. Schools were constrained to ensure pupils’ success in these tests, and the curricula became more uniform. Moreover, because they were driven by the needs of the professors for well-qualified freshmen, the aims that dominated the testing in science were to prepare future scientists.
The other feature has been the class structure of British society, reflected in the disproportionate power of a small number of fee-charging and independent schools. The upper classes sent their children to such institutions and expected them to be prepared for the best universities and for the professions. In the government-maintained schools, a system of selection at age 11 supplied an upper tier of academic secondary schools with the high attainers, predominantly middle-class children whose parents also wanted education to secure the most favorable life chances for their children. Between them, these selective schools and the independent schools had the best teachers. Reform tended to be biased in their interests because they had both political power and the people most competent to fashion changes.
From the beginning, the United States had more egalitarian principles, and its social class structures were more fluid. With heavy immigration, “common schools” were created in the nineteenth century to help all children become “Americans.” Test scores did not become a significant factor in college admission until the latter half of the twentieth century. Some of the greatest American universities, especially in the Midwest, had been public since the creation of the land-grant colleges during the Civil War (Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, for example). Through World War II, they accepted all high school graduates—despite the fact that about 80 percent did not remain after the freshman year. The principle, fully honored in practice in the land-grant institutions until the late 1950s, was that any high school graduate should have a chance to earn a college degree.
In both countries, the most significant initiatives in science education began in the nineteenth century and first affected primarily institutions of mass education: the schools for young children. Since then, development in these schools has been driven, until very recently, by forces quite different from those of external certification and the elite professions that were dominant at the secondary level (especially in Britain). For this reason, the account of the United Kingdom begins with an examination of primary-school science, and this educational level is also singled out for special description and special analysis in the American section.
THE UNITED STATES: THE EARLY YEARS
European education at the time of the American colonial period emphasized classical languages for older children and skills in reading and arithmetic for the younger ones. This curriculum was the starting point for education in what was to become the United States. But even before the American Revolution, there were seeds of something educationally different from a focus on language study alone: an emphasis on more practical work. This development was led and epitomized by Benjamin Franklin's creation of the Philadelphia Academy in 1750. The new subjects Franklin introduced focused on fields like agriculture, navigation, and surveying. Although the classics were still taught, his aim was to broaden schooling for those who may not have been preparing for the clergy. The idea of preparing students for a broader world of work struck a responsive chord in a developing country, and such schools proliferated rapidly and continued to grow in number for more than 100 years.
Science and science-related practical subjects thereby entered the American education scene early and on a relatively large scale. They began to compete with the subjects featured in the Latin grammar schools. (The new subjects gradually entered the colleges, as students sought a curriculum of greater usefulness at that level, too.) This is not to suggest that science in the academies was taught well. “The teachers [in the academy] were poorly prepared… . The courses were primarily book-taught, with the recitation of memorized texts the mode of instruction” (DeBoer, 1991, p. 20).
The picture for younger children was different. At this level, children's literature for the purposes of instruction began to appear in the late eighteenth century. Many of them were full of first-hand science experiences and featured directed observation of and contact with natural phenomena. They seem to have been intended initially to be read at home, but they soon were recommended for use in schools. Frequently they were reviewed and advertised in education journals (Underhill, 1941).
Typically a book would tell a story set in a family, in which the focus of the activities and conversation among children and adults was about subjects like the planets, or the water cycle, or the structure of a housefly. Writing about these books decades later, one authority commented, “Sometimes the learned tutor takes his pupils for a walk and discourses on all they see; or else Harry, thirsting for knowledge, extracts it by questions from a remarkably accurate and omniscient mamma” (Field, 1891, p. 256, cited in Underhill).
Although these children's books were rich in science content, it is far from clear that the teaching of science was their main purpose. Early formal education in western societies centered on piety and moral instruction, in addition to classical languages. It is true that the introduction of science in these books was intended to encourage children to learn more about natural phenomena. The science, however, was to be put in the service of a larger purpose, that of moral uplift and religious reverence. Although education was becoming more secular in the early 1800s—with natural history and geography replacing fables in books for children—the emphasis was usually on the moral virtues and the wonders of the Deity. “… [T]he sciences may be taught not only experimentally, but religiously. The pupil may be led to God through the material world, after having once become acquainted with the nature of the divine mind… . When the natural sciences can be taught in this manner, there can be no doubt of their beneficial effects” (American Journal of Education, 1828, authorship not ascribed).
In one story for young children drawn from children's literature of the period, a family is sitting around the kitchen table, and the daughter observes a cloud of steam over the water kettle. (Girls seemed in these books to ask questions as often as boys.) Her observation stimulates the father to deliver a short lecture and demonstration about vaporization and condensation by placing a cool metal sheet in the cloud of steam. In another book, the family comes across a compound flower during a walk. Using a hand lens, the father identifies the parts with precision—then emphasizes that the flower surpasses the ingenuity of man, thus proving the existence of God. When his son trips, father spends several pages on the matter of untied shoestrings. The point is that if he had obeyed his mother by being more careful, he might have avoided a bloody knee. Thus, using science as a vehicle, the aim was to promote moral virtues like obedience, modesty, courtesy, and even thrift—along with religious awe (Hughs, 1818; Alfred, or the Youthful Inquirer, 1824).
DEVELOPING THE MIND
Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, there was significant attention in American elementary schools and in the academies to common objects and events within the experience of the students. The development was loosely unified by a range of principles enunciated by education philosophers and theoreticians like Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart. Though different from one another, all of the theories were based on some form of sense realism, that true learning comes through experience. Methods of teaching emphasized principles like the importance of children being active participants in their own learning, a focus on the individuality of the pupil, and learning proceeding from the simple to the complex and from the proximate to the distal. Additionally, the learning process should be enjoyable.
Principles like these were often considered to be in harmony with nature, and a “natural method” was seen as uplifting and harmonious. “The postulation of a natural method rests on the assumption that there is a unity in nature and that nature is purposive and has direction. Man must work with nature rather than against nature … Nature becomes exalted and even deified” (Underhill, p. 31, emphasis in original).
By about 1860, a new theory of learning had emerged called faculty psychology. It was built on the belief that the mind is composed of faculties, and that the function of the school subjects was to develop one or another of the faculties, to train the mind. The faculties included observation, memorization, generalization, and reasoning. In the case of science for children in elementary schools, faculty psychology was grafted onto the science-of-common-experiences enunciated by Rousseau and others, which had become popular by the time of the Civil War. In the case of the secondary schools, the result was often the opposite—an education less related to immediacy and practicality, more dependent on reading and reciting, and more focused on mental discipline as an end in itself.
For the elementary schools, Object Teaching was introduced. Imported from England, it took firm root in the United States by the 1870s. Children studied and described objects brought to class: different rocks, metal wire, a piece of wax, camphor, ivory, a mustard seed, leaves, india rubber, various household chemicals, and much more. Theory in faculty psychology stated that although elementary school children are not capable of “reasoning” or “generalization,” they can observe and memorize. If the Object Teaching manuals for teachers that were published at the time are any indication of classroom activity, the nine-year-old students were expected to demonstrate their growing ability to observe by accurately using adjectives like the following (not wrenched terribly out of context): argillaceous, farinaceous, astringent, acidulated, chalybeate, iridescent, ligneous, oleaginous, malleable, vitrifiable, unctuous, and many more (Mayo, 1876). The faculty of memorization was honed when the children were asked to recall the adjectives that were appropriate for the various objects. In the history of science teaching, the Object Teaching curriculum may be the one most pervasively influenced by a particular theory of learning, namely faculty psychology. Although very popular at the time, and actively promoted in teacher preparation programs, Object Teaching declined rapidly in the late nineteenth century because it was increasingly seen as sterile and remote from the lives of children. The objects were concrete, and many senses were employed by students in studying them, but there was little connection to matters of consequence in children's lives.
THE COMMITTEE OF TEN
The most influential development at the high school level at the end of the nineteenth century was the report of the Committee of Ten (National Education Association, 1893). This seminal document was intended to give consistent form to the high school curriculum and standardize college admission requirements. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, chaired the group, which was composed of university presidents, high school principals, and the U.S. Commissioner of Education. James Baker, principal of Denver High School at the start of the study (and president of the University of Colorado at the end), was chair of the coordinating group that synthesized the reports of nine, separate subject-based “conferences”: Latin; Greek; English; other modern languages; mathematics; physics, astronomy, and chemistry; natural history (biology, including botany, zoology, and physiology); history, civil government, and political economy; and geography. The conferences consisted of professors, high school principals, and teachers. (Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at the College of New Jersey—later Princeton—was a member of the conference on history, government, and political economy.)
Recommendations were made about the age at which each subject was to be introduced, the number of years it should be taught (and the number of hours each week), the topics to be included at the secondary-school level, the form in which the subject should be factored into college admission requirements, and whether or not the subject matter should be different for those headed for college as compared with others and (if so) at what age.
The recommendations were extensive and detailed. Four sample programs were listed to offer some flexibility, particularly with respect to the study of classical languages (National Education Association, 1893, pp. 264–265). Perhaps the most provocative recommendation was that all students should study many of the same subjects and topics, the only difference being the number of years that students of different abilities and interests should pursue those studies. A close second was the diminished role of the classical languages and the recommendation that a relatively new subject, the sciences (including geography) constitute 25 percent of the high school curriculum.
NATURE STUDY
The late nineteenth century saw the continued ascendancy of educational theories that focused on links with nature. Louis Agassiz, a charismatic Harvard biologist well known to the public for his attempts to popularize science (and for his opposition to Darwinian theories of evolution) was often credited by his many followers with the slogan “Nature not Books.” The ideas he espoused are easily traced to Rousseau, Herbart, Pestalozzi, and others. G. Stanley Hall, a noted psychologist and educator, extolled the virtues of studying nature, though he expanded the scope to include all human relationships—possibly because he was one of earliest of the psychologists who saw the field as a science and themselves as scientists (Holder, 1893, chapter xv; Underhill, 1941, p. 107).
The broader canvas against which these developments played out was one in which emphasis on connections between education in the schools and the broader community were in the ascendancy. From the days of Franklin's Philadelphia Academy, there were steady pressures to relate work in school to the world in which students lived. By the 1890s and particularly in elementary schools, the emphasis shifted from utility in a narrow sense of personal living and individual advancement to one that encompassed broader social purposes, particularly the conditions in which people lived, and the requirements of good citizenship.
This emphasis took many forms, including the introduction of materials that taught about the dangers of alcohol, stimulated by the growing influence of the Women's Temperance Union. By 1895, 41 of the 44 states had passed laws about teaching temperance (U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1902). However, it was at Cornell University in the early 1900s that Nature Study took definitive shape as a defined subject for elementary-school students. It reflected a social movement, as well as a curriculum—and it originated in Cornell University's College of Agriculture.
A key purpose of Nature Study was to glorify the rural life. As America entered the twentieth century, the citizenry was associating major societal problems with rapid urbanization. The early 1900s the saw the rise of the “muckrakers,” people like Upton Sinclair (1906) and Lincoln Steffens (1904), who wrote fact and fiction about corruption, exploitation, and disease in the rapidly growing cities. Cities were seen as evil, dirty, and sinful, the country as pure and beautiful. How are people to be kept on the farm?
Led by the Cornell College of Agriculture, materials were developed for children to instill a love of nature, so that they would resist the migration away from farms. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the movement was led by professors at Cornell like Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey, both respected biologists. Bailey frequently emphasized that the love of nature he valued so highly is deepened through intellectual understanding. “The best thing in life is sentiment; and the best sentiment is that which is born of the most accurate knowledge” (Bailey, 1903).
The College of Agriculture established a Department of Education to promulgate the new curriculum, both inside and outside New York State. (The Department resides in the College of Agriculture to this day, though not to promote the virtues of the country life.) The Cornell Leaflets (later the Cornell Rural School Leaflets) represented one of the first attempts at broad-scale and systematic dissemination of an educational philosophy and technique. Four issues per year were distributed, and the publication continued until the 1970s.
In much of the Nature Study literature for children, especially in the early decades of the movement, there was direct appeal to children's feelings to generate a deep sympathy with nature. The emotion-laden approach is illustrated by this excerpt from an article intended to help laypeople understand Nature Study in the schools: “Take for instance, the very common subject of trees… . One short sentence alive with love and inspiration, spoken concerning an oak tree for instance, will live on. The children will remember, if not the words, the idea or emotion that came when the burning word was spoken. Therein lies the secret of success—the word spoken must be a burning word” (Morely, 1901, cited in Underhill, p. 175).
It was only a short step to anthropomorphism. To elicit sympathy for and love of nature in children, mature flowers in the books began to talk to flower buds, and birds began to talk to trees. The conversations were almost always about their respective parts, and in that way many detailed aspects of taxonomic botany and zoology were conveyed to children. To introduce one typical story, the author asks, “We are going to hear a story about a little tree that did not like its leaves.” The children are asked about the kinds of leaves they collected that fall. “Do you think of any tree whose leaves you slighted; one whose leaves you never thought of calling pretty? How do you suppose it felt, then, when it saw that its leaves were so different from those of the other trees?” The story of “The Discontented Pine Tree” then emphasizes that non-deciduous trees also have a special and valued function (McMurry, 1895).
Teaching of science came to focus on the biological world during the Nature Study period, altering the balance between biological and physical science that had existed for more than 100 years. But the same general approach was taken to physical science. At the Oswego Normal School in New York, an institution that had been particularly influential in spreading object teaching, the prospective teachers were taught about questioning and sequencing of ideas in a lesson. The following was cited as a laudable example of definite, clear, and sequential statements, beginning with experiments and observations and ending with conclusions and generalizations:
EVAPORATION
We put some water in a cup on Friday.
We put the cup in the window.
Monday there was not so much in the cup.
The water went into the air.
Who took the water?
The air fairies took the water.
The water evaporated.
Friday we put a cup of water on the window and on the radiator.
The air fairies took the water from both cups.
Which cup had the least water in it on Monday?
The cup in the warm place had the least water in it on Monday.
Why did the cup in the warm place have the least water in it?
The heat fairies helped the air fairies to take the water from the cup in the warm place.
If the heat fairies help the air fairies, the water goes away quicker. (Scott, 1900)
Advocates claimed that such an approach enlists students’ interests and cultivates their imaginations. Often in human history, it was said, myths were the accepted explanation of natural phenomena and therefore were acceptable for young children at a certain level of development (Fistiam, 1908, cited in Underhill, p. 199). There were critics of the approach, of course, including no less a figure than Theodore Roosevelt, who called it “nature faking” (Sullivan, 1930). While the Nature Study movement, with its strong emphasis on children's emotions and commitment gradually atrophied after the first decade of the twentieth century, the emphasis on curricula that stressed students’ interests did not.
APPLICATIONS OF SCIENCE; GENERALIZATIONS; PROBLEM SOLVING; ATTITUDES
The yearbooks of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) are dependable benchmarks for understanding how experts in a field view promising and desirable developments at a particular time. The committees responsible for developing the yearbooks are chosen from among those who represent forward-looking perspectives in a given period, and the committee composition itself generally serves to produce a volume that proffers a consensual view.
Yearbook publication began in 1902 and has continued ever since, usually with two volumes a year. There was one on nature study in 1904, then nothing on science until the publication of A Program for Teaching Science 28 years later (NSSE, 1932). S. Ralph Powers of Teachers College, Columbia University, chaired the committee.
The authors of the 31st Yearbook captured many of the issues that concerned science educators during the first part of the twentieth century. They strove to ground their analysis and recommendations within an overall conception of schooling, including theories about learning and the development of children. They were attentive also to the fact that increasing numbers and percentages of students were entering and completing programs of secondary education and that a relatively new institution, the junior high school, had been created to facilitate transition from elementary to high schools.
They took pains to separate themselves from the kinds of psychological theories (G. Stanley Hall's, for example) and educational practices (Nature Study, for example) that had preceded those that shaped their own thinking. All of Chapter II was devoted to a critique of such approaches to science education. The authors of the 31st Yearbook found their intellectual foundations in the writing of such figures as William James, John Dewey, and Edward Thorndike, all of whom stressed the centrality of experience and social context. At the elementary-school level, Nature Study drew especially harsh criticism from the authors, primarily for emphasizing facts over principles and for expounding a theory of discontinuous intellectual development that claimed that intellectual processes in children are different from those in adults. The authors stated that Nature Study had inherited from faculty psychology the view that younger children could not generalize, for example.
At the secondary-school level, the 31st Yearbook drew heavily from The Cardinal Principles of Education published more than a decade earlier (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1918), a landmark report commissioned by the National Education Association, pointing out that “the manner in which the needs of society and … the schools that were purporting to meet these needs were out of harmony” (NSSE, 1932, p. 18). The Cardinal Principles had recommended a continuous program from kindergarten to university, greater attention to individual differences in students’ intellectual ability and interests, and that educational objectives recognize the needs of individuals and of the society. It also outlined and elaborated upon what it defined as the main objectives of secondary education: fostering good health, gaining command of fundamental processes (reading, writing, elements of oral and written expression), learning to participate in “worthy home membership,” preparing for a vocation, participating in civic affairs, fostering in students the worthy use of leisure time (something relatively new in America), and developing of ethical character (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1918, pp. 5–10).
Associated with awareness of the increasing usefulness of science to society was an interest in and respect for the methods that were used to produce scientific ideas and their application. Thus secondary-school science programs were advocated that helped students understand that science is a “problem-solving” kind of inquiry, as well as a body of basic “generalizations” about the natural world. In the Yearbook Committee's words,
The search for objectives will be one that seeks to determine the major generalizations and the associated scientific attitudes that have come from the field… . This Committee stresses the importance of subject matter and recognizes the responsibility for selection of subject matter which shall be functional for … . a more satisfactory adjustment of the individual to the society of which he must be a part. In this society man must meet and solve problems. The schools will prepare children for their responsibilities by providing experiences with a body of subject matter (1) that has been tested for truthfulness, (2) that exercises methods that have been used in solving problems, (3) that furnishes practice in these methods—in short, with subject matter that contributes to the ultimate comprehension of major generalizations and the development of associated scientific attitudes. (NSSE, 1932, p. 40)
The first two decades of the twentieth century ushered in a period in which Americans became increasingly aware of the impressive impact of science in daily life. The methods of science were powerful. Led largely by the science education group at Columbia University Teachers College, the goal of science teaching gradually became one of helping students to understand the applications of science, especially in technology. Electrification and central heating were emphasized. Science texts also described how refrigerators and automobiles worked. Every student learned how a gasoline engine works in an automobile, including the names of the four strokes in each cycle. There were demonstrations of how how fuses work. Models were built to illustrate the wiring of houses.
At the same time, there was an underlying conviction that “the program for curriculum work in science for the public schools [should] be directed toward the determination of those major generalizations and associated scientific attitudes which together define the field” (NSSE, 1932, p. 43). For example, in the course of providing a detailed description of how students might study the age of the Earth, two major generalizations that frame their respective topics are offered: 1. The Earth seems very old when its age is measured in ordinary units of time, and (2) The surface of the Earth has not always had its present appearance and is constantly changing (p. 48).
AFTER WORLD WAR II: SCIENCE FOR SCIENCE'S SAKE
Changes in science education during the 25-year period after World War II were a sharp departure from the science-in-everyday-life focus of the 31st Yearbook and were characterized primarily by a dramatic increase in active participation in curriculum matters by outstanding scientists, primarily those from the academic research community. The programs that were developed from the 1950s and into the 1970s are often characterized as the “post-Sputnik reforms” because of major new infusions of federal funds in the years immediately following the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik I, in October 1957.
However, the new curriculum movement actually had begun in the early 1950s. It focused on mathematics. Max Beberman at the University of Illinois pointed out that the mathematics curriculum commonly used in schools at that time contained few mathematical ideas developed after 1700. Consistent with the science curriculum of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the mathematics program in the early 1950s stressed applications—mathematics in daily life. Students in elementary and junior high schools balanced checkbooks, calculated compound interest, and noted differences among different retail discounts, for example. In high school, as preparation for calculus and college, they were introduced to Euclidian geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. Beberman and his colleagues developed a program that introduced “new” mathematics—number theory and set theory, for example (Beberman and Vaughn, 1964). These were topics, among others, that corresponded more closely to ideas that contemporary mathematicians, particularly those engaged in research, found important.
A few years later, in 1955, proposals similar to Beberman's were made for high school physics. Scientists newly interested in curriculum for the schools said that it may or may not be interesting for students in physics to learn about the principles of refrigeration, the four-stroke-cycle gasoline engine, or the Bernoulli effect—topics commonly found in the textbooks—but these ideas hardly reflected those that university-based researchers in physics considered interesting. And so, in 1955, the Physical Science Study Committee, a group centered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a course that began with an examination of the ways in which light could be viewed as both wave-like and particulate (Physical Science Study Committee, 1960), a topic considered much more characteristic of the kinds of issues that matter to research-oriented physicists. For the first time, the country moved into a period wherein the teaching of science, as identified by the most advanced scholars in the field, became an end in itself.
Offering something of a counter-example, there was a project across the Charles River in which a physics curriculum was developed that depended somewhat less than the one at MIT on contemporary university-based research. Harvard Project Physics included modern topics, to be sure, but it focused also on how ideas in science develop over the centuries (Harvard Project Physics, 1968). In focusing somewhat more on historical perspectives, the Harvard group was more explicit about the human elements that are integral to the generation of scientific ideas.
A key factor in the marked influence of the country's outstanding research scientists on the curriculum was the extraordinary prestige the group had acquired in helping to win the war. Seemingly arcane and abstract theory had been shown to have extraordinary consequences. Radar and the atom bomb were seen not only as shortening the war but as making victory possible. Just as important, many scientists involved in wartime projects turned their attention to matters of improving science education—several of them never to return to research in science.
This movement led by research scientists crystallized conceptually at a conference in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1959. Thirty-five scientists, psychologists, and curriculum developers were convened under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences to discuss and try to unify their work, which by that time was receiving impressive support from the National Science Foundation. (The Foundation had been created by the Congress in 1950 and assigned two broad missions: to support basic scientific research and to improve American science education.)
Jerome Bruner, an eminent psychologist, was given the responsibility of preparing the conference report (Bruner, 1960). The report pivoted around the concept of “structure.” Each field of intellectual study has a general framework that helps its practitioners understand a relatively small number of major ideas (about patterns, about overarching concepts, about modes of inquiry), which in turn can be used to scaffold new observations and facts. Furthermore, “Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility of solving problems on one's own” (Bruner, 1960, p. 20). Only those deeply knowledgeable about a field are capable of identifying those principles and habits of mind. “It is a task that cannot be carried out without the active participation of the ablest scholars and scientists” (p. 32). And, capturing what many saw as the essence of the report, “[T]he argument for such for such an approach is premised on the assumption that there is a continuity between what a scholar does on the forefront of his discipline and what a child does in approaching it for the first time” (p. 28).
With support primarily from the National Science Foundation, projects were launched in biology, chemistry, and earth sciences at the high school level. There were also several at the elementary-school level during the 1960s undertaken on the same convictions and assumptions. No other curriculum movement in science so centrally involved the nation's most accomplished scientists in work at elementary-and secondary-school levels as those that flowered from 1955 to the early 1970s. Never had so much public money been devoted to the task of developing new curricula for the schools.
But by the 1970s, however, new curriculum priorities arose that began to edge out those of the research scientists. Since the pre-war year of 1939, the percentage of the 20-year-old cohort that had completed four years of high school had jumped from 25 to 75 percent. In many ways, the major story of American education after World War II was its rapidly growing inclusiveness. At the same time, the U.S. by the 1970s had been the first country to put a person on the Moon. These facts, and the steepening decline of the Soviet Union, eased the country's concern about its military strength. Now the balance of trade and the country's competitiveness were sources of alarm. As with the panic after Sputnik, the education system had to respond. Education policy conversations began to center on educating all students, partly because they were now coming to school and partly because they were the future workforce. Better education was one crucial way to stem the perceived decline in the country's economic competitiveness (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). A decades-long focus on “standards” began.
THE UNITED KINGDOM: THE PRIMARY PHASE
In Britain, universal elementary education was achieved in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This period also marks the beginnings of science education in schools. Impetus was given by two ordained Cambridge academics: Dawes, a mathematics fellow, and Henslow, a professor of botany, who moved to country parishes and started schools in which they developed the teaching of a science of everyday things (Layton, 1973). However, the scientific ideas that were at the core of their work tended to be lost in the hands of most teachers. One important approach in elementary science classrooms was the use of “object lessons” (deBoo, 2001), each centered on a common object such as a snail or a lump of coal; these were similar to the object lessons used in the United States, but they gave more emphasis to exercises in observation and classification skills only. There was also much emphasis on nature study, but the aim here was confused: some “naturalists” were interested in the understanding of nature, and others taught only the identification and naming of natural objects. Moves to link physical science concepts to everyday observation (e.g., by measuring the velocities of different rivers) made little progress.
The movements to teach a science of everyday things lost momentum because many reacted by objecting to the time being given to science, both in schools and in teachers’ training. Influential scientists also pressed for a much sharper focus on the main ideas of science, arguing for science as a training of the mind and against trapping children in the very restricted view of the science of everyday objects and phenomena. Although such views prevailed, they helped to create a tension, between the pure and conceptual on the one hand, and the applied and everyday on the other. This tension has continued to bedevil school science to this day.
As elementary schooling grew in the 1850s and 1860s, concern to justify the escalating costs led a system of the state grants for primary schools to be based on their performance in inspectors tests limited to the 3Rs; science then shrank, since it did not feature in the payable results. There were few funds to provide apparatus, so that some districts appointed peripatetic demonstrators, who went from school to school with a handcart of apparatus to present demonstrations. The scientists in the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) recommended in 1908 that this use of demonstrations be abandoned, as it led to superficial presentations that teachers ignorant of science were not able to follow up.
Progress with reforms promoted by the BAAS was halted by the 1914–18 war, with its dire effects in the loss of teachers on the battlefields and in the 1920s recessions in the economy. A further inhibition was the growth in the importance of examinations at the end of primary schooling. These would determine whether or not a pupil could proceed to the “academic” grammar schools, or to the lower status and more vocationally oriented secondary. Since the examination tested only arithmetic and English, science was neglected.
In the same decade, the influence of such thinkers as Montessori, Dewey, and Froebel began to take effect, so that official reports called for a new emphasis on the physical, mental, and emotional development of children (Hadow/Board of Education, 1931, 1933). However, World War II impeded progress, as facilities were damaged, all schooling was disrupted by mass evacuation of pupils out of cities, large numbers of teachers were conscripted for military service, and few were being trained. A nearly bankrupt country could afford little until the 1950s. Although signs of change, from teacher-dominated lessons to child-centered activity, began to be evident, the main obstacle was the lack of training in science of most teachers, so that many primary schools did not feel able to teach science at all: even up to the early 1960s courses for primary teachers taught only biology. Both the national inspectorate and the ministry supported moves to reform, which aimed to develop pupils’ interests in the physical sciences and to involve them in their own science investigations. Yet one of the leaders of reform in Scotland stated that “the aim of teaching science in a primary school is not really to lay the foundations of scientific knowledge, still less to offer elementary introductions to different sciences” (Blackie, 1967), so expressing a belief that the aim was to teach only such processes as observation and pattern seeking in order to develop general reasoning.
The child-centered movement of the 1950s and 1960s did lead to excesses in that children often came to be engaged in unguided play. As one observer put it, “the ripples of change moving out from the centres of quality became distorted with distance and repetition” (Wastnedge, 2001, p. 43). Wastnedge became a leading figure when he was appointed to lead a Junior Science Teaching Project in 1964, funded by a private charity, the Nuffield Foundation. The aim was to foster a child-centered approach to teaching, with the children observing, asking questions, and making and testing hypotheses. Given the poor training in science of primary teachers, it was judged that the stress should be on an approach that depended less on scientific knowledge (i.e., a process approach).
In consequence, as Wastnedge explained (2001, p. 50), “At present we must concern ourselves more with how children learn than with what they learn,” even though this was often interpreted as “it doesn't matter if they don't learn anything.” However, this project, and its successors, were only adopted by about 20% of schools, schools being free at that time to choose the curriculum approach that they preferred.
The general approach was consistent with the growth of a child-centered philosophy of education, which was canonized as national policy backed by a government-sponsored report on primary education, the Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council, 1967). In the 1980s two developments countered this combination of child-centered and process-only approach. One was unease expressed by several science educators about the neglect of content, on the grounds that to present science as a set of commonsense processes was a travesty, and that pupils needed to begin to engage with subtle and apparently unnatural concepts (e.g., that moving objects, if left to themselves, will go on moving forever) that had been the basis of the power of scientific thought (Black, 1983). This thinking led, in 1987, to the Nuffield research project titled the Science Processes and Concept Explorations project (SPACE) (Black and Harlen, 1989), which led to a curriculum development project with a strong basis in new research about the levels of concept that young children could understand (Osborne et al. 1993; Nuffield Primary Science—see Nuffield, 2003).
The other source of change was the belief of the Conservative government that primary education had been undermined by the child-centered ideology—the influence of Dewey, Plowden, and the like had to be destroyed, together with other malign influences of the “educational establishment” (Lawton, 1994). Such thinking was one of the motivations for the setting up in 1988–89 of the Unnited Kingdom's first National Curriculum. Primary science was established as one of only three subjects with national tests at ages 7 and 11, with three content targets and a fourth target on experimental investigations. This stimulated an increase in the effort devoted to helping teachers deal with science. The tests for content were so dominant, that investigations were given low status and low priority. In the late 1990s new requirements to spend designated teaching time each day on prescribed schemes for literacy and numeracy undermined yet again the time given to science education.
SECONDARY SCHOOL SCIENCE
Science at the secondary level was first developed in the late nineteenth century in the elite private schools. For some pupils, the study of science was an alternative for those who could not manage a classical-literary education, but positive impetus came from two sources. One was the changes in medical education, the other was the need for civil engineers, particularly for the military. Both of these professions called for a stronger scientific basis, so higher education, where these professions were trained, required their main providers, the private schools, to teach science at school. The curriculum innovations that were a response to these pressures were largely led by chemistry educators, with some also promoting geology. Biology, having a weaker science basis, was justified by the intrinsic value accorded to the study of nature. Physics suffered because it was not a well-defined subject, and the ownership by mathematicians of the teaching of mechanics curtailed its scope.
Expansion outside the small group of private schools came more slowly. The growing status of science and scientists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the evidence that the country's industrial lead over others was fast being eroded, led to pleas for more science education. In response, in 1904 new government regulations, which applied to the schools that were maintained by government funding rather than by collection of fees, required at least seven hours per week to be devoted to mathematics and science and that the science being taught should be taught without bias toward technical or vocational needs. Yet 12 years later a report deplored the fact that in the private schools many pupils were not studying science, while others studied only general science, which had a low status as a school subject for many years (Waring, 1979).
The coordination of the various school leaving examinations, which were provided by several university-led agencies, developed from the setting up by the government of a Secondary Schools Examinations Council in 1917, gave support to the government's new requirements to teach mathematics and science, but it remained possible for candidates to choose between mathematics and science despite pressures to make science compulsory. Over the next 25 years, controversy focused on the choice between having three separate science subjects in biology, chemistry, and physics, and having a single general science course (Jenkins, 1979). The latter eventually became the course for the less able; later still, it became a course for all at ages 11 to 13, with the separate subjects taught by separate subject specialists from 14 to 16. However, despite pleas that schools give more time to science, most required the more able pupils to choose only one or two of the three science subjects for their examination courses, while the general science courses for the less able were constrained by the time allocation for only a single subject.
At the same time, many reports pressed for science education to develop understanding of the nature of science, although this was understood in terms of a “commonsense” model in which principles arose from the data by induction. There were also pleas by the BAAS that the “broader aspects of scientific discovery and investigation as human achievements and applications by which mankind is benefiting” should find a place in the curriculum (Waring, 1979, p. 37). Yet a teacher trainer writing in 1918 painted a gloomy view: “It is disturbing to discover how many young people … find their school science uninspiring and even boring … [teachers and examiners] … both attach too much importance to the formal and theoretical aspects of science, and too little to those which give the subject value in the eyes of boys and girls” (Nunn, 1918, p. 162).
Nunn's priority was to make pupils interested in science as the finding of new knowledge as an end in itself, but he pointed out, with a criticism which has continued to be relevant up to the present day, that “This is an uncomfortable doctrine to two very different types of persons. One is the ‘practical man’ who supports the teaching of science in schools because he believes in its cash value. The other is the ‘high-browed’ person who assesses all educational effort in terms of ‘mental discipline’” (p. 162).
Practical work was also subject to change and counter-change in this period. The first outstanding influence in Britain was a chemistry professor, Henry Armstrong, who used his status as a university scientist to argue, strongly and effectively, for its importance as an exercise in “guided heurism” (van Praagh, 1973). As the scientific journal Nature put it at the time (in 1901): “Two things are essential for Professor Armstrong's plan, first that the pupils should perform experiments with their own hands, and second that these experiments should not be the mere confirmation of something previously learned on authority, but the means of elucidating something previously unknown, or of elucidating something previously uncertain” (quoted in Woolnough and Allsop, 1985, p. 16).
This approach became widespread in schools in the early years of the century, the emphasis being on practical work as experience of enquiry rather than for developing subject knowledge. However, the impact was blunted in 1918 by a report that criticized the approach as inefficient use of pupils’ time. It argued that experimental work should be restricted, with a focus on experiments that could establish links with general scientific principles and with everyday life, and that careful demonstrations could often be the most efficient way of using lesson time. So there developed a convergent “cookbook” approach to school laboratory work, with an emphasis on practical skills, following instructions, and confirming well-established results.
It was inevitable that when recovery from the after-effects of the 1939–45 world war allowed serious debate about education to re-open in the United Kingdom, the position of school science education was still problematic. A 1960 report of the national inspectorate called for a new integration of practical work with the central task of learning, and for an end to “cookbook” experiments:
There is nothing as a rule to correspond to the clear formulation of a question by the pupil himself; this is provided for him and no value is placed on curiosity. Nor is there any necessity to construct a plan of investigation, to design or make ad hoc experimental devices or to modify them in the light of experience. Nor again, if the answer comes out ‘right’, is there much inducement to consider the results, to estimate their validity or to discuss their further improvements. Finally there is missing the ultimate satisfaction of having really found something out. (Ministry of Education, 1960, p. 38)
The Association for Science Education (ASE), which had a strong membership and support among school science teachers, attempted to foster improvements by the collaborative efforts of their own members, but soon found that its resources were inadequate to the task. The government was sympathetic, but its stance at that time was that it should not play any part in specifying the curriculum.
The outcome was that in 1962 the Nuffield Foundation agreed to fund, but also to direct itself, large-scale curriculum development projects, starting with courses in physics, chemistry, and biology designed for study from ages 11 to 16 for the most able pupils. The steering bodies for these projects were led by eminent professional scientists, and the ASE had hardly any part to play. However, the teams recruited to do the work were composed largely of practicing science teachers. The reform plan was comprehensive, involving extensive school trials, commercial publication, negotiations with equipment manufacturers to provide new apparatus, and arrangements with the examination agencies to provide tailor-made school-leaving examinations and the linked certificates, and with teacher training institutions to provide in-service training for the new courses.
Schools were free at that time to chose whether or not to replace their traditional courses with these offerings, and although no more than about 20% of schools decided to implement them in full, they had widespread influence on many aspects of school teaching. The teams in the three subjects were allowed a fairly free hand, so the styles that emerged were quite different: the physics scheme was tightly prescriptive (the oft-quoted slogan was “if you cut it, it bleeds”), whereas the chemistry course was described as “a sample scheme” to emphasize that schools should feel free to pick and choose the parts that they liked. All gave new emphasis to teaching for understanding rather than rote learning, while also calling for the pupil to be “a scientist for the day.” However, the emphasis on the conceptual structure of pure science was strong: applications of science and social implications were given scant attention. With all the Nuffield innovations, the influence of Bruner's dictum was explicit: “The schoolboy [sic] learning physics is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than doing something else” (Bruner, 1960, p. 60).
Thus, for the new physics course, the ideal was that all lessons be conducted in a laboratory so that pupils could move to and fro in a coordinated way between practical exploration and theory development. However, partly because of the stress on this link, the practical investigations of pupils were largely constrained to “illustrate” theory, and the first introduction to this course attempts to make clear that Armstrong's heurism was not being adopted. The new chemistry course laid more stress on “open investigation,” whereas biology showed a mixed economy, with some work designed for confirmation, and some for genuinely open exploration.
These three projects for students aged 11 to 16 were followed by projects for the advanced study of sciences from ages 16 to 18, projects to devise courses in general science for the “less able,” and courses for all in the age range 11 to 13. These last two types of course gave more emphasis to applications of science and to themes likely to be of interest to pupils. A government decision in the 1970s to ban selection of pupils by ability at the transition from primary to secondary schools implied that all schools had to teach across the full ability range. This change made the division, between pure science for the most able and applied everyday science for the rest, problematic, and when separate examinations for different “ability” bands were replaced by a single system, these curricula had to be revised. The revisions were a compromise between the different aims of science education, but many saw that “academic science” still prevailed.
As ever, the messages of reform for science teaching that underpinned the new Nuffield curricula were weakened in dissemination: one evaluation judged that many “Nuffield” teachers had not “thought through the full implications of changes in philosophy and method presented by the Project team” (West, 1974—quoted in Waring, 1979, p. 207). A study of classroom teaching styles found that most Nuffield teachers used an approach characterized by teacher direction, presenting science as a problem-solving activity and telling pupils to make hypotheses and predictions, but not relinquishing control to the extent required for pupils to personally engage in problem-solving (Eggleston et al., 1976).
Nevertheless, school science in general still defied efforts at improvement. Although experimental work became a more salient part of pupils’ experience, it was, with a few notable exceptions, still largely fixed in the “cookbook” mold, and the national inspectorate was again hinting in a 1979 report that more time should be spent on demonstration lessons and less on class practical work (DES, 1979, p. 184). A review written in 1985 concluded that there had been no significant development in practical work in secondary schools since the Nuffield innovations in the 1960s (Woolnough and Allsop, 1985, p. 28). A report by the ASE expressed a more general criticism: “Science appears to exist outside any valid social context. It is objective, value free and totally aseptic” (ASE, 1979, p. 24).
At the same time, a government report drew attention to the failure of schools to require, or make provision for, students to study more than one of the three science subjects: “No school was found, however, which provided balanced science courses for all pupils up to the age of 16-plus. The majority of pupils in secondary schools of all types were taking either no science or only one science in the fourth and fifth years” (DES, 1979, p. 196).
Such dissatisfactions led to a project in the 1980s, the Secondary Science Curriculum Review (SSCR; see West, 1982), which was jointly sponsored by the government agency responsible for curriculum matters (the Schools Council) and the professional association of science teachers (the ASE). This project had two main outcomes. One was the fostering of numerous teacher-led initiatives to improve science education, for the leaders set their face against any centralized curriculum development in the belief that the only way to secure reform lay through the professional development of teachers who would initiate and own their own reforms. The second outcome was quite different. The project conducted a campaign to establish a single science course for the age range 11 to 16, which would have the lesson time and the examination value of a double subject, and which would cover in a combined and comprehensive manner all of the main aims hitherto pursued in the separate subjects of biology, chemistry, and physics. The point was to replace the situation in which the pupil had to choose between a low-status single-subject science course and high-status courses in the separate sciences: with the latter choice it was almost impossible for a pupil to take more than two of the three science courses. An existing “integrated science” course had already attempted to establish a double-subject and comprehensive science course, but had run into fierce opposition from parents who thought that their children were being offered a course of low market value. The SSCR project therefore worked to gain support for a new “double-subject” scheme from leading scientists, educators, government, and the teaching profession. This campaign was successful, and “double-subject” science became a viable option for schools. Most new courses within this framework did not attempt the controversial label of “integrated” (Black, 1986), and in most schools the “double-subject” was taught in separate sections by specialist teachers of the three subjects.
New directions for change also arose from national sample surveys of science performance set up by the government's Assessment of Performance Unit (APU; Black, 1990). The government brief for these was biased in favor of “science process skills” rather than on science content. Of the six main areas to be assessed, two, one on practical skills and one on conducting open-ended investigations, concerned pupils’ work with equipment, and a third assessed capacity to design investigations using written tests. The findings established that short open-ended investigations could be so composed that pupils could work through them in a one-hour assessment session, and that standards of performance on written exercises were far lower than on matched exercises in which pupils could actually explore the phenomena with equipment.
Everything was changed with the establishment for the first time, by a law passed in 1988, of a national curriculum for the United Kingdom. Science was one of the mandatory subjects in this curriculum, required to be studied by all from ages 5 to 16, with progress tested by national tests at ages 7, 11, 14, and 16. The task of drawing up the specification for this curriculum was given to a group composed of teachers, teacher trainers, and academics in science education. Their recommendations were quite radical in both structure and content, based on a set of 22 sets of learning goals, expressed in a scheme of progression in learning from ages 5 to 16. These 22 “attainment targets” were grouped as four “profile components.” Of these, 16 were grouped under the profile component Knowledge and Understanding, reflecting the established content areas, but adding astronomy and new topics titled Information Transfer and Human Influences on the Earth. A second profile component, Exploration in Science, had two more targets, one for carrying out investigations and one for working in groups. The third profile component was titled Communication and included the targets Reporting and Responding and Using Secondary Sources. The fourth profile component, titled Science in Action, combined Technological and Social Aspects and The Nature of Science. Taken together, these called for a significant broadening of the science curriculum and one that would have linked it more closely with other school subjects. A final recommendation was for a single double-subject requirement to take 20 percent of curriculum time at the secondary level.
The government minister could not accept these proposals. He asked for an extra proposal for an optional alternative—a subject having single rather than double-subject weight, and in both options for more weight to be given to knowledge and understanding, and for the number of profile components to be reduced. The proposals were sent out for consultation. Only 10 percent of replies supported provision of a single subject option, only 10 percent supported the reduction in the number of profile components, and 80 percent opposed the recommendation to change the weightings (Boyle, 1990). Nevertheless, the single-subject option, a reduction to two profile components—Knowledge and Understanding and Exploration in Science— and an increase in the weighting, in teaching time spent and in mark assignments in examinations, for knowledge and understanding at secondary level from the 40 percent recommended to between 65 and 70 percent, were all put into effect in the final government orders. Five of the original targets were removed, leaving 17: 16 in Knowledge and Understanding and one in the Exploration of Science. The attempt of the profession to reform its subject had failed, probably because of the right-wing government's suspicion of the educational establishment, fueled by lobbying from conservative teachers in the influential private schools.
It turned out that within three years the curriculum had to be revised, because of widespread teacher opposition to the excessive load of the contents of the new curriculum, and the number of the content attainment targets was then reduced to three, covering the conventional areas of biology, chemistry, and physics respectively, and losing the last of the novel topics, The Nature of Science (Black, 1995). The curriculum was revised again in 1995 (DfE, 1995) and yet again in 2000, but without further radical change.
Practical work, as required in the fourth attainment target, now called Experimental and Investigative Science (profile components were now abandoned), was particularly problematic. The requirement was that the work should:
… encourage the ability to plan and carry out investigations in which pupils:
| (i) | ask questions, predict and hypotheses; |
| (ii) | observe, measure and manipulate variables; |
| (iii) | interpret their results and evaluate scientific evidence. (Black, 1995, p. 171) |
Many teachers were disoriented by this requirement, which went well ahead of current practice and experience (Jenkins, 1995). Even those who did experimental investigations valued them for motivation, not for the learning of concepts (Simon et al., 1992), reflecting a bias that was also evident in the earlier tests of experimental work established by the APU, which had influenced the target's formulation. Many used comparative exercises as used by agencies testing retail products to advise consumers about the “best buy,” which usually involved no application of science concepts. Evaluations also reported that too little time was being given to this activity (NCC, 1991) and that some teachers conducted investigations as isolated exercises designed only for assessment purposes (Russell et al., 1995) while having difficulty in conducting the assessments of this work that they were required to make (OFSTED, 1993a, b; Buchan, 1992; Buchan and Jenkins, 1992).
An overarching problem was still the impact of testing. The testing agencies had to set up a system for including scores for practical investigations in the assessment for school-leaving certificates, and this system had to require exercises that the pupils’ own teachers could conduct and assess in normal laboratory time. To secure reliability and comparability, the agencies set up very strict rules about the choice and conduct of such assessments. Teachers, under pressure to secure maximum scores, could not afford to take risks, so many specified for their pupils the same stereotyped exercises year after year and thereby made the work yet again into the old cookbook type of exercise. Ways out of this dilemma have yet to be found.
Although several agencies produced guidance material to help teachers with this new area (Jones et al., 1992; Solomon et al., 1994) and others began to research the problems involved (Millar et al., 1994), there were groups who argued that the target should be abandoned, leading others to publish affirmations of support (Hannon, 1994). However, when the curriculum was again revised in 1995, the investigation's target survived, although the stated aims moved it in the direction of more traditional work.
Foreseeing the revision planned for the year 2000, a group of science educators obtained a grant from the Nuffield Foundation to support a set of expert seminars, followed by consultation including open meetings, to reconsider the science curriculum, and hopefully to influence the revision. Their report (Millar & Osborne, 1998) attracted wide attention. Their main plea was that the science curriculum, from ages 5 to 16, should have the main aim of enhancing a broad and general education in science to meet the needs of all citizens, represented by the title “scientific literacy”; only in years from 14 to 16 should there be an aspect devoted to the early stages of specialist training in science, which should not be allowed to distort the primary aim of promoting scientific literacy.
The report also developed an argument that science education had focused too much on detail, so that pupils had lost sight of the major ideas. This was to be offset by organizing the curriculum in a new way, deploying the power of the narrative form to make ideas “coherent, memorable and meaningful.” Stories should be organized around such major themes as “the particle model of chemical reactions” or “the earth and beyond.” Examples of questions that could form the basis of particular explanatory stories would be How do we catch diseases? or How old is the Earth and how did it come to be? The report also stressed, “Young people need some understanding of the social processes internal to science itself, which are used to test and scrutinize knowledge claims before they can become widely accepted” (p. 20).
Ironically, the government's anxiety about the low morale and decline in numbers in the teaching profession, due largely to the burdens of frequent change in the curriculum and testing rules, made it reluctant to make any significant changes when it was revised in 2000, so the report's ideas, despite the widespread support that they had evoked, produced only a limited response. The investigation's target was renamed as “Scientific Enquiry.” The earlier prescription for investigative skills remained but was accompanied by a second section on “Ideas and Evidence in Science.” This latter section includes study of:
- how scientific ideas are presented, evaluated and disseminated
- how scientific ideas can arise
- how scientific work is affected by the context in which it takes place
- the power and limitations of science, including social environmental and ethical questions
However, there are other signs of change that can clearly be seen as outcomes of the report. A wholly new course, Science for the 21st Century, has been developed and has gained official sanction, in that its trials can be supported by tailor-made examinations leading to nationally approved certificates (Nuffield, 2003). Its proposal is to divide the double-subject science into two components. One, Core Science, is for all, based on current issues, bringing in moral and social implications, and leading to a single-subject examination certificate. For the second, there is a choice between Applied Additional Science, which should provide a basis for technical, pre-vocational, and vocational courses involving science, and General Additional Science, which should provide a basis for further advanced study in the sciences. Either of these options is to lead to a second single-subject examination certificate. If this scheme succeeds, it will at last help the science curriculum to address themes of interest and concern to the young, rather than to require all of them to undertake studies fashioned only in the image and structures of established pure science.
SOME CONCLUDING COMMENTS ABOUT THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED KINGDOM: THE DRIVE OF SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
The changes described in our histories are driven in part by social and technological change, although the influences are often indirect. The movement toward education for all, first at the primary/middle level, then at the high school level, and now toward college level, has meant that science education, like all features of formal schooling, has had to expand from serving only future specialists at the upper level to serving the needs of all.
The change from agrarian to mainly industrial economies has meant that the contexts in which pupils learn and into which they carry their learning at the end of their education have changed. Rural-oriented science now has split into the high-tech needs of a far smaller number of agricultural producers, and the quite different needs of all citizens who need to understand how to protect the environment. Similarly, an aim of helping young people to understand how things work in a technological world is being transformed because the objects that are produced are losing transparency as they gain sophistication. The self-sufficient adult who used to be able to fix things for him- or herself now has changed into one who knows how to read the instructions and when to throw the artifact away.
Aims of Science Education
Above all the other external pressures, the increasingly powerful influence of science and technology on all societies makes judgments about the aims of science education more complex and yet more critically important. As it is realized that “scientists’ science,” oriented toward the painstaking construction of conceptual frameworks that explain how the world works, is of limited use to the vast majority, new ways of enabling the citizenry to comprehend and operate in a scientific and technological culture have to be sought. Education must be fashioned in ways that are evocative for young people who are being shaped by rapidly changing societal influences. Indeed, one overarching problem is whether science education can keep up, given that educational change often appears glacial.
Such a change of aims could develop in several directions. A recasting of a “love-of-nature” orientation, so prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, into the context of preserving the future of the planet, a growing international concern in the twenty-first, would lead to an emphasis on interactions in complex systems. It thus might offset the drive to reductionist analysis that has characterized many of the sciences. And a focus on social influences, if it is not to be unrealistic, must introduce moral questions, values, and clashes of belief into the science classroom. The particular attraction of science as a training in dispassionate judgment based on evidence will then have to be protected within carefully delineated boundaries if it is to continue to be a contribution to education. In all of this, studies of the lessons of history, particularly of contexts that are not too dissimilar from those of the present, might be valuable.
All of these possibilities make clear that the changes in aims that are being, or ought to be, pursued now create new problems for the teaching profession. Any discussion of the effects of scientific and technological change has to confront issues of conflicting social priorities. Many events in the last century have made it clear that the idea of a value-free and unbiased science is a dangerous myth. Yet many science teachers, themselves educated in the shadow of this myth, feel uneasy in confronting controversy. It may be that alliances with teachers of humanities and social science will be the best way forward, for conflicting values are often at the heart of these studies.
Who Has the Power of Control?
In the United Kingdom, the teaching profession has highly qualified science teachers at the secondary level—the majority possessing university degrees in the separate disciplines of physics, chemistry, or biology. The most influential of these have been in the elite schools. The heads of those schools always have had the ear of the government minister and of other private institutions, as well as having the most highly qualified science teachers to formulate and carry through changes.
The picture in the United States is different. Many high school teachers of physical science are not credentialed in the subjects they teach. School districts in most states can assign any credentialed teacher to teach physics or chemistry. They also can award “emergency” credentials to people with no regular license in any subject field. It is not unusual to find a biology teacher, or even a physical education teacher, teaching chemistry or physics. Consequently there has not often been a recognized cadre of science teacher-leaders. One may be emerging, however. In recent years, a system of National Board certification has been established, along the lines of specialty board certification in medicine. There is a rigorous and expensive assessment system, with those who earn national certification receiving extra pay, and influence, in many states.
Reform movements in the United Kingdom have been fashioned mainly by inspiring the teachers. Although academic scientists had oversight on behalf of the funding agencies, they entrusted most of the work to the best practicing school teachers, and to professors whose main interest and experience was in science education. The efforts focused on the professional development of teachers. The new curricula were given a strong framework by providing tailor-made tests that were not limited by any tradition of inexpensive multiple-choice testing. For example, one Nuffield 16-to-18 curriculum led to nationally recognized certificates with theit own tests that comprised two three-hour written tests, each with separate parts in a variety of question styles, together with a test in a laboratory and teacher assessment of experimental projects. The cost of running this centrally for 30,000 candidates was of course high but was seen as acceptable. There was no serious attempt to make new curricula “teacher-proof.” Heavy emphasis was not placed on the textbook as the instrument to implement the reform; indeed, one Nuffield curriculum had no pupils’ textbook and advised that pupils might consult several as the needs arose.
In the United States, the picture was more mixed. Curriculum revision in the post-Sputnik era was undertaken mostly by university-based scientists, with only modest involvement by teachers. Considerable emphasis was placed on writing new textbooks, sometimes with the explicit intention of limiting the latitude of teachers to make changes. There were few external examinations in science until late in the twentieth century.
There is no single answer that emerges from the histories of the two countries to the question of who has special policy influence in the field of science education. At various times, industry and the professions, the academies of the sciences, the academies of education, the teaching profession, and governments have exerted pressures to produce changes. It would not be easy to judge, even in hindsight, whether or not the influence of any of these has been benign or malign, for in the end the judgment would often come down to a choice among core values—as will any prognosis for the future.
Two trends in the power struggles seem important at the moment. One is that education researchers are now developing more powerful tools (in their theories of cognition and of affect, for example) and can therefore claim credibility in attempting to influence curriculum and teaching. Indeed, they are developing more effective relationships in collaborative reform with teachers and school administrators. It is no accident that the scientific academies now recognize this point, as can be seen in the ways in which the U.S. National Academies of Science and the UK Royal Society involve leaders in science education, including researchers from universities, in their deliberations about education. The second trend is that the move to mass education has made the education budget such a large part of all national economies that governments can hardly leave education alone: what matters then is whom politicians choose to listen to. These two trends could be in harmony, but equally well come into conflict.
The Student Perspective
At the secondary-school level in both countries, there have been few influential voices with the power to speak and act for the needs of the majority who were not going to be scientists. That concern has increased in recent decades, but only modestly. Two forces are influencing the scientific community to now speak to these needs. One is that the pupils have been voting with their feet: The numbers of those choosing to continue to study science after age 16 and so become qualified for degree training in science and engineering has declined. The other is that the new public distrust of scientists is seen by many in the scientific community to reflect the weakness of science education in not preparing the young to fully appreciate and use the accomplishments of science.
The feature here that now commands the most attention is that of connecting school science with the broader world. It is assumed that such an approach is more likely to engage the preponderance of students who are not likely to choose scientifically oriented careers. Therefore curricula grounded in contemporary problems of importance to young people have been developed in many countries, including the two highlighted here. Close engagement with the science embedded in these contemporary issues might be shifting toward somewhat less activity in the school laboratory and more in the street, the home, industry, and the countryside.
To attract students who now are uninterested in science will not be enough, however. There clearly is danger of superficiality when students engage in real-world problems. The challenge—for curriculum, design, pedagogy, and assessment—will be to build from the initial enticement to develop sustained and serious work by students in arenas hitherto considered unappealing. The particular power of the discipline of scientific inquiry must be made evident in the way that problems are explored. And the extraordinary intellectual heritage of science must emerge for students as the power of its tools and concepts is made evident. Embedded in this purpose is development in students of a sense of wonder, even awe, at the structures and processes to be seen in the natural world. The histories in this chapter have demonstrated that this goal of science education goes back more than 250 years. It is sometimes subdued, but in one form or another seems to arise for each educational generation. It will do so again as the twenty-first century unfolds, perhaps in ways that will be more comprehensible with a knowledge of the history of these aims and challenges in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to George DeBoer and Graham Orpwood, who reviewed this chapter.
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