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=John's Science Education Blogs=

This wiki will be the new home for my blogs about science education and related issues. As far as possible, blogs will be pasted firstly on this home page and then moved to other pages classified as appropriate. Blogs may move to different pages as the site develops.

//**19 November 2014**//

Diagrams of galvanic cells
I have just spent an interesting morning exploring how diagrams of galvanic cells have developed since Volta invented his pile in 1800, with my colleague Klemens from Berne in Switzerland. We began our project with some diagrams of cells created by Klemens' Gymnasium students and were driven by the thought of how their diagrams compared with those of textbooks and chemists from 1800 to the present day. We expected explanations represented in diagrams to have developed in complexity but we found that there was much (possibly inadvertent) simplification going on leading to incomplete and perhaps incoherent explanations. Of course, we found some incorrect chemistry but our main focus has been to examine the concepts that are being represented as well as those that are not. The text alongside the diagrams hardly helped us to understand the diagrams or why some parts had been omitted. We are puzzled about the use of these diagrams in deepening understanding of cell concepts and their use in learning. We have noticed that the diagrams have hardly changed since the 1960s. Our questions have been to what extent should teachers of chemistry know what we are doing, how much does this study matter, and what level of chemistry is needed to understand a more elaborate explanation than the textbooks provide. We think that these touch on the issues in this discussion. It does take a lot of time to research the evidence, to analyse our data, and then t5o share it with other teacher colleagues. In a sense, galvanic cells are only a context for our investigation but the general nature of our questions is also important. We value collaboration with those teachers who wish to join us in our research. and invite anyone who wises to do so to write to me j.p.oversby@reading.ac.uk Eventually our findings will be published in the academic literature, in professional journals and at workshops. This is not yet and requests in the short term for such details will be regretfully refused.

//**20 November 2014**//

Schools need textbooks: Nick Gibb (Minister for School Reform) and Tim Oates (Cambridge Assessment)


An article on the BBC News web site provoked me today to go to the source which is in the download above. We should first note that Nick Gibb (Conservative) is not the Schools Minister but is the Minister for School Reform. The minister’s responsibilities include (from the government web site) : The Minister of State for Schools is David Laws (Lib Dem) (he also sits in Cabinet) who studied Economics. His responsibilities include: Last year Nick Gibb 'said that the government’s new approach to education policy, designed to foster the autonomy of the teaching profession and sweep away the prescriptive and ideological National Strategies, meant that there is now an important leadership role for educational publishers. And that role is not to pander to the lowest common denominator in the scramble for market share, but to develop in young people the academic knowledge and the scholarship skills that the old curriculum has driven out of too many schools.' and 'This time last year my predecessor Liz Truss issued a call to arms to publishers to introduce high-quality textbooks to support the new national curriculum.' He claimed in a speech today, based on the paper by Tim Oates that I have provided above that 'The research found that it originates not from teachers but from teacher training providers and educational research communities.' You can have your chance to read the paper (above) on which this claim is made, but I can not see the research-base for such a claim. As far as I can see, it is based on selective anecdotes of recollections, none of which were recorded. Only one sentence refers to science textbooks but my criticism of the quality of what is called research, largely targeted at Maths and English as what Gibbs says are core subjects, seems warranted. In science, my experience supports the claim for textbooks that are designed to raise academic grades leads to relatively low quality, yet there are other important issues such as: I have no idea what general line about textbooks teacher training providers and educational research communities are taking (I doubt that there is one). For me, when I was PGCE Course Leader and ever since I became a teacher in 1970, I was surprised by the minimal use made by teachers, often limited to copying some diagrams. The move to two page spreads in the 1970s and 1980s did not provide for 'reading round' the subject. Diagrams appear to be a poor part of science textbooks in general, with the greater focus on the prose used. Availability of other books for extending knowledge, especially in the discipline of chemistry, is also poor. I doubt this is what the government is getting at in this policy announcement (supported by the weak paper by Oates) and feel it is more about getting more sales for publishers. I do want to see textbooks improve, and their use in the classroom improve, but not simply to give publishers a stronger bottom line.
 * qualifications and curriculum reform, including assessment and key stage tests
 * behaviour and attendance
 * reducing bureaucracy
 * the relationship with Ofqual
 * the Standards and Testing Agency
 * overview of all funding, including revenue and capital for schools (with close links to the Minister of State for Schools)
 * pupil premium, raising attainment, narrowing the gap
 * teachers
 * school improvement, accountability, inspection
 * funding
 * admissions
 * raising the participation age and financial support for young people
 * Teaching Agency and National College
 * child poverty and social mobility strategy
 * Ofsted
 * most science textbooks are strongly content orientated (not just in this country but in the countries mentioned in the Oates paper). Market-driven considerations (my anecdotal evidence based on discussions with publishers of text books) suggests strong drivers to pare the content down to the minimum. This minimum may not be enough to deepen understanding when important points are omitted in the quest for a lower cost, itself based on competition. This factor of minimalist content appears to be present in science textbooks all over the world, in my experience.
 * while Gibb and Oates may claim that the government has no desire to impose a pedagogical approach, textbooks have an embedded pedagogy 'excellent textbooks are central to education in Singapore, where they are closely linked to pedagogy' and 'in Shanghai, as we also know from the recent China-England maths teacher exchange, textbooks are used extensively to provide structure to lessons and progression'. We should keep remembering that almost all this polemic comes from the Maths context.
 * textbooks must be correct and comprehensive in content and open to criticism, where appropriate. The speech by Gibbs jumps from giving teachers autonomy to him pressing to use specific textbooks with their implicit ideologies. Of course it was given at a meeting of private publishers, and no doubt he was impressing and making friends with them.

//**21 November 2014**//

//**Maths and Science Achievement**//

Since I gained my O levels in 1960, school science subjects have changed considerably. The 1960s curriculum development was dominated by the Nuffield projects, for the most able in the main. These started in independent schools and grammar schools and were focused on conceptual development. A major part of the change was a move away from mechanical approaches to calculations (in chemistry) such as v1N1 = v2N2 based on the idea of chemical equivalents designed to simplify algebraic relations (the conceptual basis was rather convoluted and somewhat obscure to many of my friends). The revolution to push conceptual development made chemical calculations a little more complex involving moles and now including ratio coefficients from balanced equations, and more difficult. In the factory where I worked on leaving school at 17 after completing my A levels, the old form of normalities and equivalents was used since it made the maths easier. Anyway, enough of the history. In those days, many of the future undergraduate chemists had to study A level Maths to get in, but now university staff are providing remedial courses in maths (so the RSC tell us) to enable their students to understand the chemistry they teach. Jane Fieldsend and I have data that suggests that maths achievement is correlated with ability to answer GCSE science questions, even in biology, where physics graduates outperform biology graduates. However, we have some data that suggests that these graduates answer these questions by remembering routines, rather than concept knowledge. The paper I have provided above is from 2002 and refers to US data on the TIMSS tests. It suggests that there is a strong relationship between maths and science achievements across all sciences, but no gender effects. We think that it is not maths per se but that maths is a proxy for some learning that we are still looking for. Nevertheless, teaching maths does results in both maths learning and this elusive other learning! The DfE has brought a cohort of Chinese maths teachers from Shanghai to lead Master Classes for UK teachers based on their methods. I welcome efforts to improve maths learning and will look at the outcomes of this small scale project with interest (I understand the London IoE is carrying out some research in this area). In the meantime, it seems that better teaching of maths may be a key to science learning. ASE Conference organisers, are you taking this seriously?

//**16 December 2014**//

//**Science for all**//

Climate change long report

It is some time since my last blog but much has happened over the last month.

In his Annual HMCI Report Michael Wilshaw comments that discussion over school structures is now not worthwhile and that we should move on to what goes on in the classroom. While it is true that a major part of learning takes place in individual classrooms, the school ethos, recruitment of teachers, establishment of teams and support for teachers by SLTs play a large part, as he acknowledged in the section criticising school leadership in so many maintained secondary schools. He has been a supporter of the structural changes that have been implemented so it is not surprising that he wishes to suppress any critique. Interestingly, in another report, Prof Brian Cox claimed not to be political, a position also held by many conservative scientists. The maelstrom of change in, particularly, secondary education, continues apace, hardly leaving time for thinking. The absence of comment by the ASE is especially disappointing, after it has spent the past 4 years upsetting its own governance apple carts. Interestingly, the structure of the Annual Conference, split between specialist science lectures, hints and tips sessions, and celebrities focused on the elite, remains much the same.
 * //Structures//**

//**Improving science education**// We are told that primary teaching is making good progress, based on Maths and English results, but with no real data on science. Secondary schools are roundly castigated in general terms. I agree that much leadership is poor, but what to do about it is not clear. In the meantime, there is precious little guidance for science education that deals with everyone.