Teaching, Learning and Assessing Science 5 - 12

Wynne Harlen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781446245453
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement primaire

`Professor Harlen has, once again, provided the leading text on primary science. This eminently readable book sets out a clear account of our understanding of learning, teaching and assessment and, through the skilful use of examples, explores the implications of this for science teachers of pupils aged five to 12. By emphasizing the importance of research evidence and the way in which it should underpin practice, this new edition challenges everyone involved in science education to reflect again on whether we are providing the most appropriate learning opportunities for our pupils. It is certainly a book which will be highly recommended, referred to on many occasions and used extensively? - Dr Derek Bell, Chief Executive, The Association for Science Education

This thoroughly revised and completely up-to-date new edition provides an excellent theoretical framework for teaching science that is firmly grounded in classroom practice and covers all stages of education for students aged five to 12 years.

The author details a constructivist view of learning, which recognizes that children already have ideas about the world in which they live, and gives advice on how teachers can help children to develop their understanding and change their perception to a more scientific view. A particular feature is the focus on formative assessment as a framework for discussion on how to help students develop their understanding, enquiry skills and positive attitudes to scientific investigation.

The wide range of topics covered include:

The nature of students? learning in science

The goals of science education

Gathering and interpreting information about students? ?s ideas

Helping development of scientific ideas

Gathering and interpreting evidence of students? enquiry skills and attitudes

Strategies for helping development of students? qnquiry skills and attitudes

The learner?s role in learning

Summarising and reporting learning

Motivating learning

Teachers and children?s questions

Resources for learning science

Managing science in the school

Each chapter features useful summaries, points for reflection and further reading, making this acclaimed book indispensable reading for all primary and practitioners and students who want a book that will authoritatively inform, inspire and instruct their science teaching.

Part I

ABOUT LEARNING IN SCIENCE

Chapter 1

Learning in science

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INTRODUCTION

The case of teaching science from the very start of children’s education is now universally accepted. But while we no longer need to justify teaching science at the primary level, it is still necessary to examine reasons for teaching it in certain ways rather than others. Within the constraints of school policies and national guidelines, teachers teach in ways that they believe lead to learning. Thus their view of what it means to learn is a key factor in their classroom decisions. For this reason, this opening chapter discusses different views of learning and how they influence these decisions. It provides a rationale for taking the view that effective learning results from active involvement of learners in constructing their understanding of the world around them.

Learning theorists distinguish individual constructivism from socio-cultural constructivism. Here we take the view that both ideas generated in social interaction with others and individual sense-making of investigations of the environment are important in learning science.

The chapter ends with a brief outline of some implications of taking a constructivist view of learning, with reference to where these matters are taken up in more detail later. Thus it acts as an introduction to other parts of the book.

DIFFERENT VIEWS OF LEARNING

What do we mean when we talk of children ‘learning’? This is an important question because the answer has a strong impact on how we go about helping children to learn. Without going into details of theories of learning or neuroscience, it is worth reflecting on what we understand to be happening in learning. There are three dominant views of what it means:

• Adding more knowledge and skills as a result of being taught.
• Making sense of new experience by the learners themselves.
• Making sense of new experience by learners in collaboration with others.

The first of these views embodies a rather passive role for the learner, who is considered to take in information from others including, but not only, the teacher. The second gives the learner a more active role in using existing knowledge to build new knowledge. The teacher’s role is to create a learning environment that nurtures this gradual extension of ideas and skills and to help the learner to link new experiences to previous ones. The third view gives weight to the social aspect of learning; understanding is created not by individual learners alone but through expressing ideas to others and receiving ideas from others. Of course, one can hold a view of learning that is a mixture of these, depending on what we hope is being learned. However, a general disposition towards embracing one or other of these does affect decisions about the roles of the teachers, the learning materials and how assessment is used. The relationship is illustrated by the two teachers reported in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1: A tale of two teachers

These two teachers, both in their early 30s, taught 10- and 11-year-olds in very similar conditions. Teacher A had the children sitting in rows, all facing the blackboard, working in silence, mainly from books. In discussion she explained why:

Well, you see, the main thing is – I can’t stand any noise. I don’t allow them to talk in the classroom … I mean they go out at playtime, they go out at dinnertime and so on. But actually in the classroom I like them sitting in their places where I can see them. And I teach from lesson to lesson. There’s no children all doing different things. You know, it’s formal … and of course I like it that way, I believe in it that way.

Asked about the use of materials other than books Teacher A confirmed that all the learning was from books, the blackboard or from her because ‘that’s the way they learn’.

By contrast, Teacher B, who taught the same age group (10- to 11-year-olds), and had a similar number of children in the class (32) had the desks in the classroom arranged in rather irregular groups. She spent most of her time moving round the groups and allowed the children to talk while they worked on a variety of activities. She explained:

I hate to see children in rows and I hate to see them regimented. At the same time, you know, I often get annoyed when people think that absolute chaos reigns, because it doesn’t. Every child knows exactly what they have to do … it’s much more – you could say informal – but it’s a much more friendly, less pressing way of working and you find the children do … it’s nice for them to be able to chat with a friend about what they are doing … I mean, adults do when they work. As long I get the end result that’s suited to that particular child I don’t mind, you know. Obviously if a child’s not achieving then I do go mad because at nine, ten and eleven, they should know they’ve got a certain amount of work to do and the standard one expects of them.

Both of these teachers could have arranged and managed their classes differently. However, what they chose to do was influenced by their understanding that ‘this is the way children learn’. Decisions about matters such as whether the children work in groups, whether these are friendship groups or based on ability, whether low-level noise is permitted in the class, whether children can move round the class without asking permission, whether they have materials to explore or learn from books – these decisions are justified in terms of supporting learning of the kind that the teacher values. Where this is not the case, and teachers have to adopt procedures decided by someone else, they may be dissatisfied that they are not able to achieve the learning that they value. Also, teachers may perceive that externally imposed conditions, such as pressure to get children to pass tests, requires them to teach in certain ways. This is a matter we take up later in the book (Chapter 13).

SOME FEATURES OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Since the understanding we have of learning is so influential, it is important to consider what is known about learning that would suggest which view is to be embraced. There is a good deal of research on this matter, too, which we will refer to throughout this book. Included in this are studies reviewed by Black and Wiliam (1998a) and by Harlen and Deakin Crick (2003) to show that when children are helped, for instance:

• to see how to improve their work, by feedback that is non-judgemental,
• to try to explain things rather than just describe them,
• to take some responsibility for assessing their own work, finding the errors in their own or a partner’s work,
• to talk about and explain their reasoning,
• to understand the goals and the quality of work they should be aiming for,

then their attainment exceeds that of children not given these opportunities. In other words, children learn better under conditions reflecting a view of learning in which the learner takes an active rather than a passive part.

Reflecting on experience

Research evidence based in unfamiliar contexts might not be as convincing as reflecting on one’s own experience. Consider for a moment an occasion when you could say that effective learning was taking place. Reflect on the features that made you think that really good learning was happening. Box 1.2 provides two examples of what teachers have recalled.

Some features of the vignettes in Box 1.2 are likely to be found in many ‘learning events’. The judgement that learning was taking place was indicated by the links that the children made between what they were doing and previous experience: Benny, in recognising that heating and cooling were part of the same kind of change; Mary and Jon, in realising that the light from the bulb was the result of heating the filament. Both these ideas, though obvious to an adult, are not so to children, who often, as we will see in Chapter 10, have different explanations for different manifestations of the same process. The children were also actively developing their own understanding, without prompting by the teacher, but with the spur of communication with others. Teachers’ reflections of learning events often include the way in which children help each other’s thinking by expressing their own ideas, leading to children questioning each other, asking for justification and monitoring the meaning that is being made.

Box 1.2: Learning events

Benny

When Benny, aged 10, wanted to show to a younger child that air expands when heated, his first idea was to take a glass jar with a screw-on lid and heat it to a high temperature and then screw on the lid. When it cooled he expected to hear hissing as air was sucked in. The other child said this might be dangerous, so Benny then suggested working ‘in reverse’, by putting the jar in a fridge and when the air inside cooled, screwing on the lid and bringing it out into a warm room. When it had warmed up he expected to hear hissing when the lid was unscrewed due to air under pressure escaping.

Mary and Jon

When Mary and Jon made a bulb light up in a simple circuit they used a hand lens to look at the filament in the bulb. Mary said it was ‘like a little furnace in there’. Jon joined in: ‘it’s like an electric bar fire. So what makes the fire hot is the same as what makes the light in the bulb’. In their drawings of the circuit they were careful to show the connections to the bulb indicating that current passed through the filament. But they had also made connections in their minds between this and their earlier experience that would help them understand energy transfer.

Learning with and without understanding

Recalled instances of effective learning rarely include recitation of facts or straight recall of information, such as the names of ...