Barend Vlaardingerbroek: School science – where we’ve gone wrong and what we need to do to get it right

It was one fine day in 1963 and Mrs Morgan, the teacher of my Standard 3 class, was in a particularly foul mood. She was an expert at wielding the strap and required little enough reason to do so at the best of times, and we were filled with trepidation. She told us with an angry leer that the education authorities had decreed that ‘science’ was to be taught from now on, and shared with us her considered professional opinion that this was ‘nonsense’. She ordered us to copy and memorise (the ‘or else’ needed no voicing) a passage she wrote on the blackboard. I remember it to this day – it was about the solar system and she underlined the new words such as ‘orbit’ and ‘axis’ (without explanations as to their meaning – indeed she told us not to ask questions).

A few days later she informed us triumphantly that there would be no more of this ‘science nonsense’ and that she would forget about testing us on that passage, which was just as well as none of us could make heads or tails of it. And that, dear reader, is a true and accurate record of my primary school exposure to science.

We did do Nature Study, of course. I recall Miss Tambourini getting very excited in 1962 when a pupa had burst and a caterpillar had emerged in the terrarium we had set up.

Nowadays, we are told that science is a very important subject at all levels from KG up. Trainee primary teachers take courses in the teaching of science. Goodness knows most of them need to do a lot of catching up to come up to scratch with regard to their own scientific knowledge and understanding, but take a good look at those courses and you’ll usually find between little and no actual science content there. It’s all about teaching methods, couched in fashionable educational psychobabble. Stoodents (99% of the bullshit is of American origin so I’ll write it as they say it - to an English speaker, that should be ‘pupils’ of course) are supposed to ‘construct’ knowledge and engage in ‘inquiry’ - a nebulous process frequently alluded to but seldom if ever fleshed out into hands-on practice, and ambiguous to a speaker of proper English as we have the words ‘enquiry’ and ‘inquiry’ while the Yanks have only the one – and ‘think like scientists’ to devise research activities that will lead them to answers.

Amazingly, the role of the school laboratory has been downgraded in this ‘inquiry’ schema. That’s just as well at primary level as there are no science labs in primary schools (although there are in intermediates), but the new dogma applies to secondary schooling as well. Twenty years ago I applied for and was turned down for a job in secondary teacher education at an Australian university. I rang them to asked why. The voice at the other end of the line told me, “Because you clearly don’t know enough about science education – what you said about labs being important at the interview is way out of date.” Phooey! I believed then that science education without labs is like a flying school without planes or a cookery school without stoves – and I still do.

‘Thinking like scientists’ means what? For one thing, it means having a vast knowledge base to draw on. Science works by extending existing knowledge, and scientists have a lot of that between their ears, invariably acquired through old-fashioned means of transmission such as lectures and textbooks. That knowledge base includes procedures used in labs to investigate and solve problems. But note that the overwhelming majority of ‘professional’ science labs are not pure research labs. They are places such as industrial labs and environmental monitoring labs, forensic labs and labs associated with food processing – labs in which well-qualified people carry out established tests to determine properties of the specimens being tested. The ‘inquiry’ lot mockingly refer to school labs run according to set procedures as ‘cookbook science’. Yes, so it is, and so it should be! It makes me wonder how many of them have any idea of what professional science involves where deviating a fraction from an established textbook routine invalidates the test.

Most school kids do not have a vast body of knowledge to draw on, don’t have the cognitive capacity for scientific reasoning, and can’t be expected to devise lab investigations because they don’t know the equipment or the procedures (we won’t mention the legal consequences of letting a bunch of kids loose to do what they like in a school lab and injury resulting). So we use labs to verify theory taught on the board and through the book – a verification function, just like most professional science labs which use tests to verify whether something is present or absent and/or how much of it there is.

The old way can, admittedly, become too didactic in its approach. Science is not a set of beliefs but a reasoning process (an epistemology) and the knowledge base is constantly added to (or sometimes may have things removed from it when those are shown to have been wrong). I remember writing up labs at school beginning with the words “Aim – To prove that…..”. This is epistemologically wrong as modern science is more concerned with disproving (Popper’s falsifiability criterion) than with ‘proving’ which reveals a 17th-century mindset that sees science as an extension of maths. Lab activities at school should include an element of uncertainty so that kids make a genuine ‘discovery’ when they carry out an investigation.

Many practitioners and academics are unhappy about what is conventionally taught in so-called ‘General Science’ between Forms 1 and 5. Why do we do it at all? Standard responses include, “So that we can understand how modern technology works.” Utter rubbish. My dear old Mum didn’t know an electron from an electrode and wasn’t the least interested in doing so, but managed to work electrical and electronic appliances nonetheless. In order to explain it to someone like her, you would have to introduce some basic physics concepts first. But the relationship between those concepts and science in action through technology is a tenuous one. This is where the problem of perceived relevance arises. It’s all very well a Chemistry teacher telling school kids that they need to know the Periodic Table to understand chemistry, but at the same time they are all using chemicals effectively every day without even having hitherto heard of the Periodic Table; and, when first presented, the Table bears zero relevance to those daily uses of chemistry.

But try we must. Most people take into adulthood the science they acquired at school, and no more. They become voters who have to evaluate scientific claims made by political parties. ‘Science for democracy’ should aim to produce citizens who know the basics of modern science and know what scientific reasoning involves. The General Science curriculum needs to reflect this goal. Curriculum developers need to identify a core of scientific content that all youngsters should learn. This core would include such things as basic ecosystem dynamics, Newtonian physics, and types of common chemical reactions.

As well as ‘science for democracy’, we need science courses that dovetail with tertiary programmes leading to careers in science and technology. These tend to kick in around Form 6 (Year 12) and are taken by pupils who have ability in science (judging by their middle school science record) and are likely candidates for university programmes leading to science-related careers. Junior secondary science programmes have an important filtering function in this regard as schools tend to base their selection procedures for sought-after upper secondary learners on their performance at the lower level.

The science taught to the cream of Forms 6 and 7 (Y12/13) is intended to get them into university science-based programmes. But we also need ‘softer’ science courses for those who will not be going into science-based career training at varsity. Something I am committed to is the extension of the junior secondary ‘General Science’ programme to the upper secondary level to cater for those pupils. These do exist in many systems but tend to be watered-down ‘hard’ science courses. That’s not very helpful. Curriculum developers need to take a good look at this area of need and come up with courses that are low on abstract theory and high on application.

Science teachers need to know their stuff. Most NZ science teachers are biology graduates and are quite strong in chemistry and have some background in earth sciences but are often weak in physics. Pre-service training programmes should provide mandatory top-up courses where disciplinary weaknesses are evident.

Teachers at upper secondary level need to be well academically qualified in their subject. In the European systems, lower and upper secondary schooling is institutionally separate and teacher profiles are quite different between the two levels – upper secondary teachers typically hold a Master’s degree in the teaching subject. Here in NZ almost all secondary schooling is under one roof but I would like to see a rule to the effect that the ‘hard’ science courses in Years 12 and 13 be taught by academically strong discipline-specific graduates, preferably at Honours level or above. They also need to be well trained in teaching practical science. Unfortunately, the BS ideology underpinning much teacher initial training nowadays may have little regard for this aspect. In my edited volume ‘Teacher Quality in Upper Secondary Science Education: International Perspectives’ (Palgrave-Macmillan 2016; with Neil Taylor), I make the point that many systems are producing teachers who are ‘lab shy’. That may be the fashionable thing to do, but I suggest we revisit the assumptions underlying it!

The lab aspect of science teaching makes science teaching particularly hard work. Preparing a lab for a class takes a surprising amount of time, and conscientious science teachers find themselves giving up lunchtimes and staying in after the last bell has rung to prepare labs (and tidy up after them). These are issues teachers of other subjects simply do not have. A point I make in my book is that science teachers need lab assistants to do their jobs properly. This currently depends largely on the school. One of the easiest jobs I had as a science teacher many moons ago was at a rural high school in Australia. The Principal was a history graduate but was very supportive of his science staff and we had one full-time and one part-time assistant. All we had to do was leave instructions the day before, and all would be ready when we came in with the class to conduct a lab activity.

I will conclude by throwing in my sixpence worth to the discussions we have been enjoying on this website about how to improve the education system with specific reference to science.

- Science education needs to be recognised as a particularly important contributor to NZ’s human capital base. School science is where the training of tomorrow’s scientists, science-based professionals, and technologists begins. It strengthens democracy by producing a citizenry well informed in matters of modern science and technology.

- Forget about primary school science. It’s a waste of time and money and most primary teachers aren’t up to it.

- Lower secondary science needs to cover all science disciplines and be relevant to ordinary life. Upper secondary science should include ‘hard’, largely theoretical courses meshing with university programmes leading to science-related careers and ‘softer’, more applied ‘Science for the Citizen’ courses for pupils who are not destined for university science programmes.

- All science curricula need to focus on both science content and science reasoning. History has seen an overcorrection from too much content and not enough process to an overriding emphasis on the latter in the absence of an adequate basic knowledge base. There should be a core of fundamental theoretical science written into the General Science curriculum that all pupils should be exposed to.

- Secondary school science teachers need to be science graduates and upper secondary science teachers should be able to present academically strong transcripts in their specialised field. Teacher education providers should provide top-up courses for teachers whose degree profiles are deficient in certain areas of science e.g. physics for many a bio graduate.

- Initial teacher education for science needs to jettison at least 90% of the psychobabble and concentrate on producing teachers who can teach science rather than teachers who can talk about teaching science. This would include a major focus on the school lab and how to use it to maximum effect through hands-on investigative activities.

- Budgets for school labs need to include the provision of adequate and competent technical assistance.

We used to have a world-class science education system in NZ. We could do even better.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a retired academic who spent over 30 years at universities in PNG, Botswana and Lebanon. Readers interested in a heretical view of modern science educational dogma might like to have a look at my 2018 paper “What kind of laboratory is a school science laboratory? An ‘inquiry’ sceptic’s view”, School Science Review 99(369), 63-65. For his take on including Maori myth and magic in science, see “Navigating by the stars isn’t science”, Breaking Views March 6 2023. Feedback welcome at bv_54@hotmail.com