ABSTRACT
There is an uneasy relationship between science and the public in many Western cultures. We are drawn to its amazing discoveries – black holes, the human genome – and appreciate the many benefits which science and technology provide in our everyday lives, but the public are often turned off by its seemingly cold logic and impersonal nature. With its insistence on evidence and rational thought, science seems to try and explain away all the mystery in our universe. Many are distrustful of its lack of human emotion, and tend to blame scientists for many of the things that have gone wrong in our world: pollution, nuclear weapons, ‘Frankenstein foods’, ‘super bugs’, etc. Arguably, if they had allowed emotions and morality to intrude when they were splitting the atom or engineering the genes of our crops, some of these unintended consequences would have been less severe. Of course, this is a gross caricature of science and scientists, but unfortunately it seems to be the view that many have come away with from school science education and subsequent exposure to the media. Working with successive cohorts of primary student teachers, it is not uncommon to encounter negative attitudes towards science, many of which stem directly from students’ experience from their own science education. Typically, they tend not to remember very much about their primary school science (unfortunately!) but often have vivid tales of crushing experiences in secondary science laboratories, where they have received the impression that science is hard, boring and irrelevant to their lives. Despite recent changes to secondary science curricula to make them more authentic and relevant to pupils’ lives, there is evidence stretching back over several years (Reay and Wiliam 1999; Alexander and Flutter 2009) of a decline in pupil attitudes towards science with age, related to the types of science courses they experience and the science self-concept they develop as part of these courses (George 2000). However, this book isn’t about secondary science education. Surely primary science can’t be associated with public antipathy and dwindling numbers of pupils going on to study science at university? After all, primary science can be great fun! It is relevant and
authentic; it engages children’s emotions and could even be described as ‘magic’ – not in the supernatural ‘Harry Potter-ish’ sense – but in the same way that a conjuring trick is magic; it engages our curiosity and we want to know how it works. There are so many exciting activities or ‘performances’ using science that can appear to be magic, e.g. holding a balloon full of water over a flame without it bursting! Since its emergence from nature study in the middle years of the twentieth century and its incorporation into the statutory curricula of many countries around two decades ago, primary science has developed significantly in its pedagogy and international status (Harlen 2013). According to the 4th Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2007) children at fourth grade (9-10 year olds) had an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards science, with an average of 77 per cent responding at the highest of three levels of the index of Positive Affect Toward Science (PATS) across 36 countries (Martin et al. 2008); though this had declined to 53 per cent claiming to ‘like learning science’ in the fifth study (Martin et al. 2012: 344). Both TIMSS 2007 and 2011 show a steady upward trend in children’s attainment in science across the majority of participating countries, as measured by the standardised TIMSS assessment. For example, scores for participating 10 year olds in Portugal, which lies 19th out of 50 countries in TIMSS 2011, show a 15.5 per cent increase since 1995, whilst those in the top-performing country Singapore have increased by 11.5 per cent. Generally, TIMSS shows improvement at 4th grade ahead of the equivalent 8th grade (14-15 year olds) assessment, lending further weight to the impression that primary science is doing better than its secondary counterpart. It also appeared to be outperforming the other ‘core’ primary curriculum subjects in England – mathematics and English – before the abolition of testing in 2010, showing a 15 percentage-point rise of children reaching the benchmark Level 4 at age 11 between 1995 and 2007. This led the Cambridge Primary Review to conclude that ‘primary science represents something of a success story for England’ (Whetton et al. 2007: 19). However, there are some disturbing signs that not everything is rosy in the primary science garden. Hidden within the generally encouraging statistics are some worrying indicators, particularly for England and New Zealand, the countries from which the examples in this book primarily draw. Only 59 per cent of 10 year olds in English schools responded at the top level of PATS in 2007, considerably below the average and 13 per cent down from 1995 levels, though interestingly the UK-based Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) Project shows 11 year olds’ attitudes to science to be remarkably stable and quite positive over time (Tymms et al. 2008). In New Zealand, results from the National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) show a slight but steady decline between 1999 and 2007 in the percentage of Year 4 children (age 8-9) reporting that they enjoyed doing science in school (Crooks et al. 2008). If it is true that children are not enjoying primary science as much as they used to, does it matter as long as they are still achieving well? TIMSS is unequivocal that ‘students with positive attitudes toward science have higher achievement’ (Martin et al. 2012: 339) and finds, unsurprisingly, a positive association between level of self-confidence in learning science and science achievement. England slipped from 7th to 15th between TIMSS 2007 and 2011, with a 2.4 per cent decline in average score, whilst New Zealand has slipped below the scale centrepoint for the first time, subsiding to 31st out of 50 with a decline of 4.4 per cent. We could of course argue that such tests don’t comprehensively measure children’s understanding of scientific concepts. With this in mind Shayer et al. (2007) have used one of Piaget’s standard tasks to compare 11 year old British children’s developmental
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understanding of the scientific concepts of mass and volume over a period of 30 years, together with other scientific ideas such as the period of a pendulum or meniscus of a liquid. They found that the performance of both boys and girls on the Piagetian Volume and Heaviness Task had declined significantly from 1976 to 2002, using this to suggest that since the introduction of science as a ‘core’ subject in the primary National Curriculum, its teaching had become more formulaic and beyond the developmental level of many pupils (Shayer et al. 2007). These findings are echoed by those of Murphy et al. (2011) who suggest that activities are becoming more teacher-led and prescribed, skewing pupils’ experience and perceptions of the nature of science (NoS). Many primary teachers in England would no doubt blame the decline in children’s enjoyment and achievement in science on national testing at age 11 up until 2010. Wynne Harlen, in her review of primary science education in England, claims that there is unequivocal research evidence that testing in science has had a detrimental impact on learning and teaching (Harlen 2008). However, New Zealand does not have national testing at age 11 and has suffered worse drops in science attainment, whilst the only country of 36 to rank lower than England in terms of 10 year old children’s attitudes towards science in TIMSS 2007 was Denmark, which is known for its liberal approach to education with minimal testing. Perhaps we need to look beyond the tests to the root of some of the problems primary science seems to be experiencing. One obvious issue is the decreased amount of science children are actually doing in primary classrooms. Science curriculum time in English primary schools reduced from around 20 per cent to 10 per cent over the 1990s (Ofsted 1999) and the introduction of National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies further relegated it to an ‘afternoon’ subject in many schools (Boyle and Bragg 2005; Blank 2008). By 2007 science represented just 7 per cent of curriculum time in England (lower after 2010 with the abolition of testing), whilst in New Zealand the figure was a paltry 5 per cent, well below even the modest international average of 8 per cent (Martin et al. 2008). According to NEMP, most Year 4 children in New Zealand wanted to do more science than they were currently experiencing (Crooks et al. 2008). With its dwindling curriculum time, diminished curriculum status and challenging pedagogy, science appears to be disappearing from primary classrooms – but does this matter if the net impact of national curriculum entitlement has been to set children back conceptually as Shayer et al. (2007) claim? We believe that it does matter how much science children experience at primary school, for reasons outlined in the following section. However, we also believe that it matters what kind of science teaching they experience. Here again the TIMSS 2007 results suggest that there may be a problem: fourth grade pupils reported that their most frequent science investigation activities were writing or giving an explanation for something being studied and watching the teacher do a science experiment (Martin et al. 2008). This kind of passive observation with an emphasis on recording in a written form does not seem to fit with what we know about effective teaching: engaging learners in hands-on activities and stressing the relevance of science through issues-based experiences (Koballa and Glynn 2007) or being involved in dramatising their ideas and thinking in a whole-body sense (McGregor 2012). Whether because of a restrictive curriculum, national testing or low teacher confidence, primary science doesn’t seem to inspire many children. What can be done to make it more exciting and appropriately thoughtprovoking? Are teaching more creatively or injecting more creative learning opportunities the answers to the problem? These are the questions which we hope to address in this
book, but before we consider the arguments for creativity in primary science we need briefly to re-visit the justification for including science in the primary curriculum in the first place.
