ABSTRACT
Two years after the publication of the HMI Primary Survey (see Chapter 4), reporting that few of their sample of primary schools in England had effective programmes for the teaching of science, the first survey of science performance of 10/11-year-olds was carried out on behalf of the APU. It could hardly be expected that much would have changed in these two years, so the results of the survey might well make rather depressing, and familiar, reading. The picture was not entirely gloomy, however. The children were assessed in a range of skills, some relating to the general process of enquiry which can take place in any area of the curriculum and some constituting the process skills of science, and there was an important difference in the performance in these two groups of skills.
