National Science Curriculum 'Lacking in "Real Science"’

The Australian, 17 March 2009

The Australian Council of Deans of Science (ACDS) has expressed concern that the national science curriculum would be beyond the skills of most science teachers and would fail to provide students with a grounding in ‘real science’.

In their submission to the National Curriculum Board (NCB), the ACDS argued that a national science curriculum needed to maintain, at its core, the traditional disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. ACDS also criticised the NCB’s proposal to teach science up to Year 10 by focusing on ‘big issues’, which would teach scientific thinking and process, and which revealed the underlying disciplines to students.

The ACDS argued that this approach ‘requires far greater discipline expertise’ and that it ‘runs a very high risk of failure’ given the shortage of mathematics and science teachers in Australia with the appropriate scientific understanding and knowledge.

The Executive Director of ACDS, Professor John Rice, argued that ‘in theory,…[the NCB] approach to curriculum should deliver superior educational outcomes. In practice, in an education system not prepared for it, it may well deliver poorer outcomes, with real science, as embodied in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, downgraded.’

Professor Rice agreed that science education should move away from a ‘transmission’ model in which teachers pass on formulae for students to learn. However, he recommended that the science curriculum should be built around some of the ‘key phenomena in the universe’.

He stated that ‘within the myriad phenomena that you see...there are a few that give you insight in how to understand all the rest. It might be good to get students to look at what are the basic phenomena of all science and how they work. That would be a good underlying, organising principle for the curriculum.’ Professor Rice also argued that focusing on issues such as climate change may increase student engagement, but would not give students a sufficient grounding in the scope and depth of the traditional scientific disciplines.

 

 

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