ABSTRACT
Students in science practical classes in high schools are confronted with a range of sources of authority. Perhaps most obviously, there is always the personal authority of the teacher. Students set to work on practical activities in a spirit of inquiry but know that at any time the teacher may arrive, hover over the bench, ask a pointed question or explain what they are really supposed to see or do in the activity. Students also work in the shadow of the authority of the textbook and the test. Whatever they might see, draw, measure or conclude from a practical activity they know that what they are supposed to learn about a topic has been established and recorded in the textbook and will be measured by tests that reflect the knowledge of the textbook. At its most extreme, the authority of the textbook leads some students to play by ‘Fatima’s rules’ (Jegede and Aikenhead, 1999; Larson, 1995), attending only to the boxed, emboldened words and phrases that they predict will turn up in the test. Alongside these powerful sources of authority, there is a much weaker pull towards the ‘authority of experience’ (Munby and Russell, 1994), to trusting their own capacity to observe and interpret the physical world through the lens of the science practical.
