ABSTRACT
Pupils do a lot of writing in science lessons; they copy notes from the board, write up experiments, draw and label diagrams and write notes summarising ideas or work carried out in the lesson. It does seem to be the case, however, that a great deal of the writing asked of pupils in science lessons is of a fairly low level and undemanding nature. Osborne and Collins (2000) found that many 11-year-olds in secondary classrooms complained that they spent most of their time in science ‘copying’ from the board or a book, or from photocopied sheets. In our research in primary schools (Wray and Lewis 1992) we found a similarly high use of copying in science and in more general ‘project’ work. We did find many children who seemed to know perfectly well that they were not supposed to copy from books and could tell us that they had to write down the information they found ‘in our own words’. This, unfortunately, often meant nothing more than changing individual words, a strategy which did not seem to push children towards making real sense of information they found and which, occasionally, led to them unwittingly changing the sense of what they wrote. An example of this was found in the work of one boy who read in a book about starfish, ‘Its colour varies from brownish yellow to purple’. He wrote down ‘The colour changes from brown to purple’, and said ‘I used different words so I wasn't copying’.
