Understanding Primary Science

Martin Wenham, Peter Ovens

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446246528
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Now in its Third Edition, this text provides the background knowledge primary teachers need to plan effective programmes of work and answer children?s questions with confidence. The new edition links explanations of scientific concepts with children?s everyday experiences to help teachers and trainees foresee how they will present the subject knowledge to their pupils.

Shaped by the National Curriculum, this text explains key scientific theories and concepts which pupils at primary level, including very able children, need in order to understand the observations and investigations they undertake. A CD ROM of 200 science investigations for young students is included with the new edition, allowing teachers to explore the practical application of topics covered in the book.

This is an essential book for teachers, student teachers and anyone interested in the roots and growth of science education.

PART 1

DEVELOPING SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

The title of this book, Understanding Primary Science, indicates that it is partly about the conceptual knowledge that scientists have developed: the ideas about plants, animals, materials, energy and so on. However, the book is also about understanding science itself, and how this relates to young children who are learning to become scientific. Helping children to become scientific is a much more interesting and enjoyable part of being a primary school teacher than just teaching them scientific conceptual knowledge. It is about inducting children into one of the most significant ways of thinking and learning in our cultural heritage.

This book is a vital resource for primary teachers teaching science, and this is its most important chapter. It explains how teachers can harness a wide range of young children’s investigative learning experiences (which are provided in the rest of the book and the CD-ROM) as sources of evidence from which to learn about the ideas of science by becoming scientific.

This section sets out what you need to know and understand in order to teach Sc1.

1	HELPING CHILDREN TO BECOME SCIENTIFIC

1.1 BECOMING SCIENTIFIC

This phrase is meant to convey a particular way of thinking about learning science which involves the whole person of the learner, what s/he thinks, feels and does. It acknowledges the parts played by learners’ personal interests, their previous experiences and how they perceive themselves as learners. Becoming scientific involves many things, including learning about what scientists know and think, how they have come to believe in their sometimes strange ideas, and why they do science. Young children can best learn this by developing scientific knowledge and thinking at their own level of understanding, using increasingly complex scientific ways of finding out, following their own purposes and interests and learning about the purposes and interests of scientists. When children are becoming scientific, they playfully explore new experiences, think about previous ideas and develop new ones to extend their knowledge. They progress by focusing their curiosity more sharply and making their ideas and evidence more scientific through critical discussion and deeper investigations.

Scientific knowledge on its own is not science, any more than a collection of paintings and sculpture is art. To know facts and concepts in biology, chemistry and physics is not to be scientifically educated, any more than to know the names of monarchs and the dates of their reign is to be historically educated. Being scientific is a way of knowing, doing and thinking which is distinct from being artistic or being historical. It involves thinking about one’s own ideas, how they are tested against experience in scientific ways and comparing them with scientists’ ideas and evidence.

1.1.1 The National Curriculum perspective

The Science National Curriculum programme of study in science has the following statement about knowledge, skills and understanding: ‘Teaching should ensure that scientific enquiry is taught through contexts taken from the sections on life processes and living things, materials and their properties and physical processes’ (emphasis added). This underlines the central importance of Attainment Target 1 (or Sc1 for short) which is then specified under two headings:

1. Ideas and evidence in science
2. Investigative skills

This means that whatever ideas we are teaching from the other Attainment Targets in the National Curriculum (Sc2, Sc3 or Sc4) whether they are to do with seeds, magnetism or rusting, then how we teach them should involve learners in thinking about the ideas in relation to evidence, in the investigatively skilful ways that are specified by Sc1. This should apply to all learning of science. The other Attainment Targets specify what is to be learned, while Sc1 specifies how the science is to be learned. This chapter is about understanding why Sc1 is so important in learning science.

The phrase ‘Ideas and evidence’ is meant to convey that at the heart of science itself there is an expectation that when we are thinking scientifically, the ideas we use to try to understand or explain what we experience about the world need evidence in the form of observations and measurements to enable us to decide if the ideas are valid. Equally, when observing closely or measuring carefully, we need good ideas to explain or understand or apply to our thinking. It is these kinds of interactions of ideas and evidence that we can look for in children’s thinking that we call scientific.

It may be helpful to compare the relationship between Sc1 and the other Attainment Targets in the science national curriculum, with the relationship between the official curriculum and the hidden curriculum. The official curriculum is what we intend to teach. We may define this as subjects such as English, mathematics, history, etc., or as cross-curricular topics such as The school’s environment. But, how we intend to teach such subjects or topics should include consideration of our hidden curriculum: our values and beliefs about how we want children to learn them. In science, what we teach in Sc2, Sc3 and Sc4, provides the context for how we help children to gain what we value in being scientific. This includes developing the skills, attitudes and ways of working that express our scientific values such as curiosity, collaboration, scepticism, imagination, questioning, tolerance to uncertainty, etc.

1.1.2 Wider educational perspectives

The Sc1 part of the Science National Curriculum also implies that a teacher needs to be aware of how their teaching of science is related to wider perspectives. This includes what we are aiming for in children’s education, and what we understand about how children learn.

To be clear about our aims, we need to deepen our understanding of what it means to be scientific. Some argue it is a quality that is fundamental to what it means to be human. Frank Smith, a Canadian professor of education, says that being scientific is also a fundamental quality of how we learn.

In some areas of research it has become customary to talk of ‘the child as an experimenter’ or ‘the child as scientist’. But I do not think that these analogies do sufficient credit to children. They suggest that children are precocious, and raise the question of where children might get the specialised skill which among adults seems to be largely restricted to scientists. I think the analogy should go the other way. When scientists are conducting experiments they are behaving like children. Scientists, in the discipline of their professional activities, do deliberately and consciously what children do naturally, instinctively and effortlessly. The ‘scientific method’ is the natural way to learn displayed by us all in our early years. The problem as we get older is that we give up the basic requirement for learning by experiment – tentativeness. As we get older we become dogmatic about what we think (I tentatively propose). But in childhood the very basis of our learning is a willingness to look for evidence that might lead us to change our minds. (Smith, 1978: 91–2, emphasis added.)

We are all born with a capacity to become scientific which we can develop.

If our teaching of science is to contribute to the achievement of wider aims of education, then we need to bear in mind that science is a human endeavour that is an increasingly important part of the cultural inheritances that we are handing on to the next generation. Scientific learning is one of the most recent aspects of our civilization to develop, historically. More and more people use existing scientific knowledge and engage in scientific ways of finding out new knowledge as part of their working lives. Teachers need to have a modern image of science and its place in society and this should inform how we understand and use Sc1 in our teaching. A Victorian image of science, for example, which regarded science knowledge as fixed and certain truth, would be consistent with a didactic method of teaching, with little need for learners to engage in genuine, whole investigations of their own. But a modern image of science, as described briefly here, is consistent with constructivist approaches which involve learners in whole, real investigations. Teaching is better when it is guided by a thoughtful understanding of how children learn in different ways and how a teacher enables their best learning. Theories of learning are helpful in guiding our teaching of children’s thinking abilities and attitudes that are important to their achievement of Sc1. For example, behaviourist approaches to the teaching and learning of Sc2, Sc3 and Sc4 may match the limited intentions of teaching to the test in a Y6 class preparing for SATs, but constructivist approaches are more helpful to a teacher who is aiming for children to develop their thinking about scientific ideas through investigative activity.

1.2 THINKING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND INVESTIGATION

Science is a way of exploring and investigating our world. The aim is to learn more about and understand better, the objects, materials, living things and phenomena we experience. Science combines the ability to investigate scientifically with the growth of knowledge and understanding. They are like the opposite sides of a coin: in looking at one or the other we mustn’t forget the whole thing. Science is not only a way of knowing: it is also a way of doing, and each shapes the other. Understanding the nature of science helps us as teachers to understand not only what scientists do, but also to understand and encourage children’s investigations much better.

In a modern view of science, the facts, concepts and theories which make up scientific knowledge are neither permanent nor beyond dispute. They are much more like a report on progress so far, which future investigators will modify and even, maybe, contradict. Any scientific theory is, to put it simply, the best agreed explanation which scientists have produced up to the present. Theories are not final, and certainly not true with a capital T: they are provisional, and are used until something is observed which contradicts them or which they cannot explain. When that happens to an important and influential theory, something rather like a scientific revolution occurs: an old theory may be discarded and a new one is invented, tested, discussed, negotiated, refined and eventually accepted, or rejected, by the scientific community. Large-scale scientific theories such as the theory of evolution can never be proved true beyond all doubt. Older views of the nature of science held that the strength and reliability of scientific knowledge and its claim to be highly regarded were based on its certainty; on the way it had been tested and proved true. It was as if the ‘scientific method’ could infallibly find a way to know for sure. Newer ideas take almost exactly the reverse view.

Today, the strength of science can be thought to lie in its openness to criticism and correction. Science is regarded as a powerful and influential activity precisely because the truth of scientific knowledge cannot be taken for granted and because it is always open to question. Like other human activities, science is fallible. This does not mean that science is simply guesswork or that ‘anything goes’. On the contrary: whether in the research laboratory or the primary school, no observation, idea or theory should be accepted until it has been tested in as fair and as thorough a way as possible (1.10), while remembering that testing ideas and theories cannot prove that they are true. Testing may be essential, but it can do no more than help us to decide whether our answers and explanations are good enough to accept for the time being, until they obviously need correction or a better idea emerges.

How then can there be any measure of the reliability of scientific knowledge? Because when it is used in research, technology or everyday affairs, it is constantly being tested against experience and what can be observed in the world. Of course all this is not necessarily directly applicable to our teaching in the sense that we tell children about all these ideas explicitly (although we can, in some situations) but indirectly, an appreciation of the uncertainty of science is helpful to teaching science investigatively because we can reassure ourselves, as teachers, that tolerance to uncertainty in our own and our children’s learning is a feature of science itself.

1.3 THREE KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE

Becoming scientific includes developing three kinds of knowledge, which have been called knowledge ‘that’, knowledge ‘why’ and knowledge ‘how to’.

1.3.1 Knowing ‘that’

Knowing ‘that’ is the knowing of facts, events and changes. It is the kind of knowing which grows out of, and enables us to answer, factual questions beginning with what, where, when and how. Becoming scientific involves learning more scientific facts. Examples of knowledge ‘that’ are that muscles only pull and do not push (3.5), that if steam is cooled it condenses into liquid water (6.2.2) and that steel is a magnetic material, but brass is not (12.3). Knowing ‘that’ is important because it gives us an account of how the world is thought to be, and helps to frame our expectations about what we may see or what may happen in the future. For example, if a child knows that when sugar dissolves in water, it does not disappear but mixes with the water, she is likely to expect the solution to taste sweet, whereas if she does not have this knowledge the sweetness is likely to come as a surprise. Surprises are particularly important in both scientific research and education. We feel surprise when we experience things that do not happen as we expect. What we expect has grown out of what we know and understand. A surprise may signify that the new evidence is challenging our existing personal theory. This means that surprises should always call for investigation both in what we know (knowledge ‘that’) and in our understanding of it (knowledge ‘why’).

1.3.2 Knowing ‘why’

Knowing ‘why’ is concerned with identifying causes for what has been observed (1.3) by seeking explanations and by gaining understanding rather than gaining factual knowledge. It is the kind of knowing which grows out of, and enables us to answer, questions beginning with ‘Why … ?’, and which can be summed up in statements beginning with ‘Because … ’. Knowledge ‘why’ is usually more complex than knowledge ‘that’, because it starts with the facts and seeks to explain them. Becoming scientific involves learning explanations and understanding. Most established scientific theories are highly developed and tested examples of knowledge ‘why’. For example, why does the Sun seem to move across the sky during the day? It seems to move because the Earth is spinning and we are carried round with it, so the angle from which we see the Sun changes through the day. This is an explanation which grows out of the theory that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System and the Earth is in orbit round it (14.2.1). The nature of knowledge ‘why’ is explored further in section 1.7, in relation to the making of hypotheses.

Scientific knowledge is commonly thought of as knowing ‘that’ and knowing ‘why’, but the third kind of knowledge, knowing ‘how to’, is just as important. S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 Developing Scientific Knowledge
• Part 2 Life Processes and Living Things
• Part 3 Materials and their Properties
• Part 4 Physical Processes
• Index