Misconceptions In Primary Science

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A recent report for the Gatsby Charitable Foundation identified 8 recommendations for schools to increase the quality and quantity of science teachers. [footnote 247] These include: With the enormous potential for misconceptions across the curriculum in science, there are a number of approaches we should adopt around science misconceptions in our day-to-day teaching:

Substantive knowledge is sequenced so that pupils build their knowledge of important concepts such as photosynthesis, magnetism and substance throughout their time at school. Although the precise purposes of science education have been contested for some time, [footnote 4] there is general consensus that it involves pupils learning a body of knowledge relating to the products and practices of science. [footnote 5] By learning about the products of science, such as atoms and cells, pupils are able to explain the material world and ‘develop a sense of excitement and curiosity about natural phenomena’. [footnote 6] By learning about the practices of science, pupils learn how scientific knowledge becomes established through scientific enquiry. By learning this, pupils appreciate the nature and status of scientific knowledge: for example, knowing it is open to revision in the light of new evidence. Clear teacher explanations form an important part of teacher-directed instruction. [footnote 169] Indeed, pupils report that ‘explaining things well’ is the most important thing that science teachers do to help them learn. [footnote 170] In primary schools, there is at least one teacher who specialises in teaching science and science leaders have dedicated leadership time.Knowledge of apparatus and techniques, including measurement. This covers how to carry out specific procedures and protocols safely and with proficiency in the laboratory and field. This is a particularly important area for enabling progression on to science courses beyond GCSE and at university. [footnote 67] It includes the accurate measurement and recording of data. Pupils learn that all measurement involves some error and scientists put steps in place to reduce this. Education Select Committee: primary assessment inquiry, response by the Wellcome Trust’, Wellcome Trust, October 2016. ↩ The national curriculum specifies what disciplinary knowledge pupils will need to know and remember through the ‘working scientifically’ sections of the programmes of study. [footnote 62]

A solution to these problems is to organise the school curriculum so that disciplinary knowledge is embedded within the substantive content of biology, chemistry and physics. This enables pupils to see the important interplay between both categories of knowledge, allowing pupils to: There is strong correlational evidence to show that reading achievement is associated with science achievement generally. [footnote 194] Research suggests that any school approach that improves pupils’ reading will, in turn, help pupils to learn science and vice versa. [footnote 195] Reading well-written scientific texts helps pupils familiarise themselves with key vocabulary and the conceptual relations between these words that form explanations. [footnote 196] Pupils encounter the full range of objects and phenomena they are studying through both laboratory and fieldwork. These encounters should take pupils beyond their everyday experiences to develop a sense of wonder and curiosity about the material world. There are now some studies showing the success of this approach in science classrooms. [footnote 210] They show that young children benefit from guided retrieval practice. [footnote 211] For example, adding knowledge to partially completed concept maps was more effective than free recall. The review draws on a range of sources, including our ‘Education inspection framework: overview of research’ and our 3 phases of curriculum research. [footnote 2]Some substantive concepts are more difficult to learn because the scientific knowledge conflicts with everyday knowledge. [footnote 114] Often, these concepts are from subject areas rich with sensory experiences that pupils encounter outside of the classroom. For example, Newtonian mechanics and heat and temperature are concepts where, despite careful instruction, pupils frequently maintain their misconceptions. For example, many pupils (and adults) think that objects require a force to keep moving or that insulating cold items will warm them up. [footnote 115] The first problematic curriculum model treats science as only a body of substantive knowledge. Here, pupils learn substantive facts but are unaware of how this knowledge developed and became accepted. This leads to pupils developing a naive understanding of the status of scientific knowledge. [footnote 75] For example, they may think Darwin’s theory of evolution is simply a good guess or that ‘science is complete’. A focus on only substantive knowledge may also lead to misconceptions. Pupils may, for example, think a picture of a scientific model of an atom inside a textbook is what an atom is, rather than seeing it as a representation. By viewing science as complete, pupils are also unable to respond intelligently to scientific information in the real world, [footnote 76] which often involves contradictory claims being made from the same data. Teachers and pupils are clear on the purpose of assessment. There is clarity about what is being assessed.