![]()
PART I
Twenty-first-century science education
![]()
1
PROMOTING ENGAGEMENT IN SCIENCE EDUCATION
Wendy Nielsen
The leaky pipeline
Over the past 20 years, there has been a disturbing trend in science in many different countries; declining enrolments in science courses at both high school and university levels (Adamuti-Trache, Bluman & Tiedje, 2013; Goodrum, Druham & Apps, 2012; Rice, Thomas & OāToole, 2009). This is despite the āScience for Allā mantra from 20 years ago (Mutegi, 2011). The āleaky pipelineā means that up to 50% fewer students now undertake senior science subjects in undergraduate and high school science relative to 20 years ago. For example, in Australia, high school participation rates are at their lowest point in 20 years (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2014). The leaky pipeline trend continues into post-doctoral research and tenure-track academic positions (US National Research Council, 2009), which are the main pathways to developing the next generation of researchers, technicians, science discipline academics and, of course, science teachers. The reasons for the trend are many, including length of qualification period, perceived difficulty of science and gender bias, at least in some cultural contexts (HƤndel, Duan, Sutherland & Ziegler, 2014). Davis, Petish and Smithey (2006) blame the commonly used āstand-and-deliverā science teaching methods; most students find the traditional lecture format to be boring and tedious and they become disengaged when asked to memorise and regurgitate vast quantities of information. There is very little excitement and āreal scienceā in this way of learning. Becoming disinterested in high school science leads to lack of engagement with the advanced levels (where, arguably, the more interesting science is encountered), resulting in progressively declining science enrolments. At the university level, in the discipline of science, Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman (2010) noted that while science knowledge continues to grow expansively, university science education has often not utilised contemporary learning or information technologies to become relevant or effective for the twenty-first century. In a similar vein, Professor John Gilbert (2010), in a recorded interview as editor of the International Journal of Science Education, argued that science needs to be made more relevant in order to reflect the inherent interests and curiosities of both learners and the wider population. Thus, science education needs to imagine new ways to teach science and side-step the conservative forces of prescriptive curriculum that maintains āhow we were taughtā.
Science educators in pre-service teacher education, science for non-science majors and the science disciplines all argue that science learning (and teaching) needs to be re-imagined (Feinstein, Allen & Jenkins, 2013; Tytler, 2007; Wieman, 2012). To re-imagine science education means developing new ways to help students engage with science content. These new ways should use contemporary teaching approaches and draw on educational technologies and learning theory to inspire students to learn deeply and develop a genuine interest in science (Swarat, Ortony & Revelle, 2012). They also propose that students engage in authentic science learning through personal research rather than just being consumers of content. Thus, new approaches to teaching and assessing science may help to mitigate the problem of the leaky pipeline in the longer term.
In the shorter term, curriculum reform in many jurisdictions has led to the development of Science, Technology and Society, with Science as a Human Endeavour and scientific literacy as core aims in science education at both the school level (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013; Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2013; National Governors Association Center, 2010; Roberts, 2007; US National Research Council, 2013) and the post-secondary level (Talanquer, 2014). There are also more wide-reaching policy shifts, such as the Common Core Standards or Next Generation Science that include aims for science literacy (e.g. US National Research Council, 2013), the UK subject benchmark statements (e.g. Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2007) or the Tuning Project (2008) in the EU. All of these documents make specific reference to digital literacies and/or communication skills for undergraduate science degree programs.
Science literacy matters for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs and economic productivity (US National Research Council, 1996). Thus, the goals and aims for science education also require attention at primary and junior school levels. At the level of schooling, there is a well-documented problem of teachers with weak science knowledge and who lack confidence to teach science (Appleton, 2006; Scamp, 2012). The point is not to blame primary school teachers; much of the school curriculum is driven by a compulsory focus on literacy and numeracy outcomes at school levels. A predictable result is that science is now among the least-taught subjects in primary classrooms (New South Wales Board of Studies, 2014). In Australia, the state of New South Wales recommends 6ā10% of instructional time in years Kā6 be devoted to Science and Technology, which is the same for Creative Arts and Physical Education. As a point of comparison, Mathematics and English are allocated 20ā35% of classroom time. To be fair, the allocations become more equal as students advance through the year levels, achieving parity for English, Mathematics and Science at years 9 and 10. In the earlier years, attention to literacy and numeracy outcomes is important, however, the low amount of curricular attention to science (at least in terms of time allocated to its teaching) may offer some explanation for why science as a school subject does not capture and maintain interest more broadly. It is also reasonable to ask where the next generation of scientists and technicians will come from if these trends continue. We can also wonder who will become the next generation of science teachers.
Engaging those who will become school teachers is one facet of the bigger problem. Disinterest in science means low motivation generally to develop scientific (or other) literacies that could enable public engagement with societyās big ideas. This is the scientific literacy argument in policy documents and government reports (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2014; US National Research Council, 1996) consistent with Robertsā (2007) definitions of science literacy; students should graduate from high school with basic levels of science knowledge (Vision I) and scientific literacy to enable this public engagement and participation (Vision II). Quality school science is also needed to keep students engaged and to generate a population of students ready and willing to study sciences at the university level. However, traditional didactic teaching approaches still predominate in high school and university, and hence the leaky pipeline represents widespread diminishing engagement with science as a subject area in many countries.
New approaches to science teaching and learning
Aims for teaching and learning in science have shifted over time, often in response to a perceived challenge to national interests, diminishing results on international assessments or as positioning to drive technological or economic innovation. The particular responses vary around the world and, arguably, there is a global agenda for changes to how science is taught. Curriculum projects based in the US have historically permeated science teaching agendas around the world and many were introduced to create a new pool of scientists and technicians (e.g. Bruner, 1960; Bybee, 1977; DeBoer, 2000; Rutherford, 1988).
Beyond a somewhat instrumentalist aim for a strong and relevant science curriculum to drive nationalistic goals or a knowledge economy, more broadly, arguments are compelling in the āScience for Allā policy agenda that science education needs to generate a scientifically literate and well-educated populace (Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1990). More recently, new waves of curricular reform have reacted to sliding standing in international assessments (PISA, TIMSS), particularly in Western democracies (Voogt & Roblin, 2012). Recent national and international reports suggest that science and mathematics teaching and learning need to change, particularly where national rankings have fallen or remain stagnant. Curriculum reform is often introduced to improve student results, national standing and enhance economic outlook.
A perception of degraded economic opportunity drives political rhetoric for reforms, with curricular goals aiming toward supporting the culture of innovation that underpins high-technology industries. The rhetoric calls into question education and, more particularly, science curriculum and teaching as failing to support the agenda. In Australia, as in the US and UK, advanced technologies drive innovation across the spectrum of national industries, including health care, logistics, energy production and distribution, communication, transportation, response to climate change, agriculture and defence. Basic research in many sectors as well as innovation in high technology requires a stream of new scientists and technicians with qualifications and knowledge to turn the science into products and new knowledge. These sectors depend on a science and technology-based workforce and the products generated from them. The high-technology industry has created new ways for people around the world to engage with each other, generate new forms of knowledge and enhance economic activity. Sectors such as ICT lead investment, growth and innovation, including new possibilities for teaching and learning.
Introducing the use of more technology in science classrooms is one way to improve student engagement. Web 2.0 technologies now pervade all aspects of modern life and educators around the world are using contemporary technology tools to engage learners and help them learn content knowledge in new ways. The diffusion of cell phones, computer gaming devices and Internet access (e.g. Brown, 2000; Ito et al., 2010; Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005; PedrĆ³, 2012; Watkins, 2009) means that learners expect to use these sorts of tools to engage with their own learning (Clark, Logan, Luckin, Mee & Oliver, 2009; Kennedy, Judd, Dalgarno & Waycott, 2010), and these expectations drive a changing context for learning across the lifespan. Hand-held mobile personal technologies represent the new frontier for engaging science learners, and science educators must embrace these in meaningful and creative ways. This is the contemporary context for science learning and is one way to address the challenge of declining enrolments.
Engagement and student-generated media
The notion of āengagementā seems straightforward: it is the entry point for learners to learn new things. This assumes that learners will be motivated to engage with learning activity when it is interesting or when the information is presented in interesting and relevant ways. Learners, of course, are likely to have their own reasons or motivations to engage, reasons that may or may not be consistent with science educatorsā expectations for such engagement or studentsā perceptions of the effort required to develop deep understandings. The level of cognitive challenge is relevant here, as is the need to balance novelty and autonomy in terms of task complexity. While engagement may be seen as an indicator of high-quality learning and an expected outcome of classroom or university science content delivery, learners may not be willing to put in the effort to either engage or sustain the types of learning activity that produce the needed depth of understanding (White & Gunstone, 1992).
From a learning sciences perspective, engagement is entangled with motivation and reflects āstudent willingness to invest and exert effort in learning, while employing the necessary cognitive, metacognitive, and volitional strategies that promote learningā (Blumenfeld, Kempler & Krajcik, 2006, p. 475). Learners must be willing to develop and use such strategies and, as instructors, we can consider how to engage learners to use learning strategies at each of the three levels.
The three levels of strategies to which Blumenfeld et al. (2006) refer are how learners engage with content knowledge and the processes of their own learning. Learners use cognitive strategies when they elaborate and organise content information to learn something new. Metacognitive strategies involve goal setting, planning and monitoring, as well as evaluating progress toward learning goals (Flavell, 1979). These strategies underlie learnersā thinking about their own learning and managing the processes accordingly. According to Ann Brown (1987), a learner also needs something to be metacognitive about, which is a role for the instructor in task design. Blumenfeld et al. (2006) argue that volitional strategies are responsible for regulating attention, affect and effort and, when a learner uses these, decision making about the learning activity is focused, productive, responsive and effective. Strategies at these three levels ā cognitive, metacognitive and volitional ā involve complex learning behaviour, which we argue can be promoted when students use various technologies to create digital media to explain or re-represent content or skills.
Keeping in mind these aspects of learner engagement, digital media explanations created by students can be analysed for their potential for promoting student engagement. In designing and making a digital explanation, learners are meaningfully engaged on many levels because digital tools enable interaction with content knowledge in multiple ways. When learners conduct background research and search for information, as in the first step in producing a digital explanation, they engage cognitively with the content. A well-designed task creates a āneed to knowā as part of the task and, ideally, such searches let learners encounter new material and consider what they already know about the topic. This goes beyond memorising or simply reproducing content information (Hoban & Nielsen, 2013) because the learners must re-represent the content to produce a multimodal digital creation. The creations are multimodal because they use a range of modes, such as image, sound, graphics, movement, text and symbols to convey meaning. Deciding which media and mode to use in oneās own creation involves volitional strategies to consider how best to represent and communicate the information to a particular audience, which includes decisions about how to ensure that the modes complement each other.
The decision making also engages learners on a metacognitive level since learners must understand the content well enough to represent it ā thus, recognising their own level of understanding is a prerequisite. The learner must constantly monitor the current state of understanding during the task of creating a digital explanation, which provides a context for metacognitive monitoring. For example, there are many decisions to be made about which modes to use in the product. Learners typically generate a wide range of displays, graphs and simulations as part of a digital explanation, which becomes a ā...
