ABSTRACT
Current innovations in the science curriculum for primary schools reflect a long history of debate and controversy. A considerable body of research has been conducted in the field of science education with a specific focus on how children learn. Typically this has concentrated on children’s difficulties in acquiring scientific conceptual understanding to explain phenomena in the physical world—the traditional objective of science education. This research has revealed the intimate relationship between children’s knowledge structures and cognitive processing. Another significant outcome of the research was the attention focused on the nature of science learning which came to be seen as a process of initiation into the ways of seeing, thinking and acting practised by the scientific community. Central to this was the view of knowledge as a tool. In this view, what children need to learn are both the concepts of science and an understanding of how and when to use them. This type of learning is therefore dependent on understanding both the purposes and tasks that scientists engage in and the processes by which they come to know and see the world. This view of the nature of science learning opened up debate about the nature of science and the practices of scientists. At issue here were the implications of this perspective for what children should learn and how they should learn it.
