Monash Design and Rationale

This Science Continuum P-10 was developed by a team of science education researchers at Monash University. The team has long experience into learning and teaching in science; all team members have had extensive classroom teaching experience.

The Science Continuum P-10 Project

“This project has been developed to provide advice to teachers on the VELS Science Continuum. This advice is intended to be different in nature from conventional science curriculum resources as it makes links between research and practice. In providing this advice we have taken what we know, as science education researchers, to areas of science that are problematic for students to understand and/or for teachers to teach for understanding. We have drawn on a number of years of classroom practice research and have been conscious that students bring many ideas and sometimes alternative views and conceptions to their studies in science. We have tried to acknowledge this in the advice as well as present “age appropriate” acceptable views of science to guide teachers. Our descriptions of acceptable science have been framed by our understandings of issues that arise from student learning. We have tried to give indications about what might be appropriate science at different levels of the Continuum and how this might play out in a classroom. In this advice we have made no attempt to cover the entire Continuum, but rather focus on providing exemplars of the students’ thinking and pedagogies that have proved to be useful when working from students’ perspectives.

We are also conscious that the readership of this advice is diverse: generalist and science teachers and primary and secondary teachers, with a wide range of expertise in content knowledge and pedagogical approaches. In response to this, the language has been designed to be easily accessible for teachers generally, with technical terms introduced as appropriate. We have provided a glossary of technical terms to further support teachers in their understanding and use of such terms for teaching purposes.

We have not designed units of work, but have focused on some ‘big ideas’ in science and developed clusters of focus ideas within these. We made decisions about the focus ideas based on research that illuminates difficulties in learning and teaching of science in areas that may appear unproblematic. You will notice that we have not privileged either of the domains of ‘Science Knowledge and Understanding’ or ‘Science at Work’ in the Science Continuum, but rather have embedded them within each of the focus ideas, as this is more representative of how students will learn in these areas.

The focus ideas within each cluster are not intended to be sequential or complete, but are highly interlinked both vertically (i.e. between Levels 3-6) and horizontally (i.e. across traditional domains of science such as physics, chemistry and biology). Each focus idea is written with a similar format starting with student everyday experiences, an age appropriate scientific view, a list of the critical teaching ideas followed by some explanation of these to assist teachers, and finally some appropriate activities that help to draw out students’ existing ideas and challenge them to move towards the accepted age appropriate scientific view. In formulating this structure we wanted teachers to engage with the focus ideas as a sequenced whole and not just look at segments (such as the teaching activities or the accepted scientific view). In this way, we are encouraging teachers to think about their own understanding of science, what their students’ understandings of science are, what an accepted view at this particular level would be and how teachers could assist or challenge their students to adopt such an accepted view within their understanding of science.

In creating this structure we have had to make some assumptions which are outlined below in order for teachers to know why this advice on the VELS Science Continuum looks they way it does and how they might be able to use it.

Some of the assumptions we have made:

1. Everyday experience – it is important to know what student’s prior conceptions are as research from the 1980s clearly demonstrated that students (and adults) already have quite firm views about scientific concepts based on their experiences. It is reasonable to explore why students hold these views and this is what this section aims to clarify. While some may say the research is dated (1980s), it is important to recognise that this is when a great deal of research was undertaken to identify what students’ conceptions were– some of which were alternate. This research is still highly relevant and remains valid today.
2. It is also important to focus on the everyday experiences of science as this is an important reminder of how science is culturally embedded – there are reasons why people think the way they do. Science is constructed by humans in order to explain the natural world. Because it is a human construction, it is biased towards how the humans who construct it think. Much of the science taught in Australian schools has a bias towards a ‘Western’ view of science. Australian aboriginal indigenous science has a different view of how to explain the natural world and is perfectly valid within that culture.
3. Science is tentative – the scientific views presented in this advice are representations of currently accepted explanations of the natural world. They are neither correct nor incorrect, but are the best explanations scientists have agreed on for explaining phenomena at this point in time. A review of historical ideas can often highlight how such scientific views change in the light of new evidence. The current accepted view is the consensus view reached by scientists and important advances have been made because of individuals who have refused to accept the prevailing consensus.
4. We have written the scientists’ view in terms of what is appropriate for particular ages. While many ideas could be developed with greater sophistication, we have avoided elaborations and qualifications that may not be helpful for students when learning these ideas. These decisions are age dependent.
5. We have not separated scientific understanding from scientific skills. The pedagogical approaches we highlight here reflect what we believe are some of the important characteristics of science: proposing possible explanations, testing competing ideas, refining explanations, looking for consistency across a range of situations, and recognising that simple scientific explanations or classifications may not account for all phenomena (such as the concept of dead/alive). ‘The Scientific Method’ often represented in school science is an attempt to describe how science is done does not reflect the multi-stepped, often tentative and gradual development of better explanations.”

The Monash team

Team Leaders:

• Deborah Corrigan
• Greg Lancaster
• Ian Mitchell

Team:

• Amanda Berry
• Marilyn Fleer
• Dick Gunstone
• Beverley Jane
• John Loughran
• David Lumb
• Helen McDonald
• Pam Mulhall
• Sarah North
• Jill Robbins
• Kathy Smith