At the national summit Science Education: Fit for Purpose, Professor Russell Tytler highlighted the changing purpose of science education, outlining debates around explicit teaching and inquiry learning and how they relate to curriculum design. Taking a historical view, he discussed examples from Australia and New Zealand and research in countries such as Germany and Thailand.
“We should be really wanting to educate students so that they see themselves as interested and as curious and as engaged with science so that it becomes consistent with their own view of themselves.”
Professor Russell Tytler, Deakin University
Prompting questions
- What is the purpose(s) of science education?
- How can science teaching and learning embrace both direct instruction and inquiry approaches?
Transcript
Professor Russell Tytler
What I’m going to be talking about, there’s a little bit of a shift of focus perhaps, but not entirely. A little bit around the, the changing purposes of science education. So I’m going to take the historical view.
And I’m going to also talk about some of the current debates, certainly that are occurring in Australia, and I think here, around how we should teach and what should… Some of the practices that that we advocate in the classroom and how should that, that proceed.
Before I go further though, I would like to acknowledge, as is customary in presentations in Australia, to acknowledge, in my case the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, on whose land, unceded land, most of this work and this presentation was prepared, and to pay respects to their elders, past, present and future. And I’d also like to acknowledge the mana whenua also of the land that we’re on here today.
One of the things that really struck me when I started entering this field, in fact, I was a physics lecturer and then a physics teacher for some years in the way distant past before I became a science educator, mainly primary.
And I went to a conference in the States that… the National Science Teachers Association and one of the keynotes there was arguing that we really needed not just to be doing research on student learning, but to do research on science education policy. Because as he argued at the time, at the stroke of the pen, all of your thinking can go out the window and be replaced by something else. And I thought, well, that’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Well, actually, it’s not.
I think we really need to be working at multiple levels in the science education community to think about not only what empowers our students in the classroom and empowers teachers to enrich their students’ learning, but also attend to the macro politics if you like, and to think about the principles that drive the system. And so maybe to think about that, I just put up this slide. I did a random thought, a thought regurgitation on a slide as to all of the movements that have taken place over the last 20 or so years in science education, and you can see, in fact and it’s reflected in some of the points that have been made this morning and also some of the questions, that in fact it covers a wide range of aspects of science education. It’s not a singular thing that we’re talking about. And so we’ve got inquiry, we’ve got direct instruction debates, we’ve got questions about who we should be educating for, we’ve got questions about whether we focus on conceptual knowledge or values, attitudes, dispositions.
How do we view learning? What do you think, is it about being able to memorise, how much you can store in your long term memory? Or is it about dispositions, is it about creative and critical thinking? Is our best way forward through hands on activities, through representing authentic practices, or is it really about practising the kind of routines of science problem solving?
So in looking at all of that I thought well actually there are three major themes running through all of that. And one is about purposes. And that is, who are we educating for and why are we doing that? And that’s the question that that Chris and Peta raised before. and the big debate is do we educate for future scientists, or do we educate for citizens of the future? And I’ll come back to that in in a minute.
And I don’t see these as necessarily contradictory at all, but we tend to have emphasised the first and in terms of government policy, as you’ve heard, STEM education and the commitment to that from a government perspective is very much about wealth creation and ensuring the operation of the economics that’s necessary to secure our living conditions.
Another big question is around what we mean by learning. And this could be around whether it’s delivery of concepts or, as it has been my view over the last 10 years, induction into the multimodal discourses of science. Does it view science knowledge as truth, or only part of a broad spectrum of knowledges that bear on the things that we really care about? Is it entangled with societal processes and values, or does it stand alone as a pure way of thinking? And what sort of outcomes do we need?
And accompanying that there are questions of pedagogy. What is the role of the teacher? How much do we tell? How much do we encourage? How much do we frame students’ learning and to what extent are we thinking of the classroom as immersion in scientific practices?
For, my sins in the last two rounds of PISA, I’ve been part of the science expert group and been part of the debate at that sort of high-level policy framing, if you like, in terms of the PISA test or assessment. And one of the questions that comes up is what do we mean by ‘scientifically literate citizenry’? What do we want people to emerge from the science education being able to do and know?
And I think the argument, even from the point of view of wealth creation, has shifted from “we need to have more people going into science and becoming scientists” to “we need a population that is attuned to the purposes of science and friendly to the agenda of science.” And that can occur on a number of levels. We need people to be able to engage with science ideas productively. Questions of whether they have vaccinations or not with COVID, or questions about whether they believe climate change to be a plot of some arcane set of scientists over there in the CSIRO in Australia or not. We need policymakers to understand science. In Australia, we have a group of parliamentarians who call themselves the Friends of Science. Why do you need to have a special group of friends of science in Parliament? You know, you can see the issue there. We need business leaders and employees who deal with scientists to make informed decisions. And we need citizens to make decisions about local Council policies or so on. So we really need all of those things of citizens, not for a feel good thing about them liking science, but in order to frame the whole enterprise of science we need, we need that to happen.
This was something I was invited to do some years back out of an Australian Council of Education Research national conference on boosting, in this case, it was boosting science participation. And I was invited to take all of the talks and produce a monograph on ways forward.
During the conference it became very quickly clear that what all of these science education experts and scientists were calling for was a substantial reform, and we chose to call it Reimagining. And in the last session of that, we called, we made the argument and called for a vote from the floor as to who thought science education should be reimagined. There were a whole lot of – a gathering a bit like this, actually, and we got an 80% agreement with that.
The chief scientist at the time, Jim Peacock, was sitting next to me doing the count. So we had a bit of a win there. And he wrote the forward for this where he argued that the way we traditionally taught science in schools didn’t represent what he viewed the nature of science to be from his perspective, that that it was much more open. It was much more dealing with international collaboration and so on.
And so coming out of that was a set of major representations, basically arguing for an opening up of the science curriculum to more varied teaching strategies, to more engagement with the way that scientists work, wider framing of investigative practices, embedding of school community initiatives, again, a lot of the things that we heard this morning and I think are well understood in the profession. So basically that was a call for change. And I think it has been used, certainly in Australia, in framing curriculum purposes. But the question is, following Chris and Peta’s talk this morning, with the polycrisis – new word – that now where we sit, we’re faced with climate change, we’re faced with a really critically changed sense of the futures of work. Work is very different to what it was 20 years ago, that students are heading into. We’re looking at AI and we’re looking at effects of global crises. We’re looking at the fourth industrial revolution.
So coming out of this, now we’ve got reimagining science education but now updated to 2022 and it’s a much more radical questioning and I think that’s where we’re at. I think thinking about where we proceed.
So let’s have a look at some of the thinking around PISA. Peta’s already shown you these slides that really emphasise that a global survey of science teachers saw that science education really needed to be rethought, to some extent, to be fit for the future and that climate change and fake news were two of the really top issues that he thought students should be prepared to.
There was in fact a strategic visioning group that gathered together prior to the science expert group meeting to really frame where we should be going that was different to what was happening now. And these are the areas they suggested we incorporate that were taken up. One was certainly social environmental systems and sustainability, hence agency in the Anthropocene; the development of scientific knowledge and its misuse. One of the things we need citizens to be able to do and to really be critical about, is the way information is capturing and misrepresenting scientific knowledge. And that’s increasingly so with social media: they become kind of little self-supporting groups built around myths.
How do you educate students to be able to recognise what is expertise? What is the nature of agreement around science ideas, and how do we promote that? And we’ve seen some really big picture examples of that, as I mentioned earlier, around the debates with COVID and around the debates with climate change. Also that we need our students not simply to be able to exercise their scientific knowledge in scripted textbook problems; we need them to be able to go out from their education and use this knowledge to make decisions and to take actions. I don’t know how ACER, who are handling the assessment of PISA, is going to do that in a computer test, but it’ll be interesting to see how you measure action in a test. But it certainly, as an intention, it’s really important.
This is the PISA framework. So you’ll see there with the middle competencies frame. And PISA I think has been quite innovative in advancing competencies at the centre of its agenda. The competency is more than a skill. It’s the knowledge and skill together. And it really emphasises that what we want students to be able to do is to use the knowledge and not simply to repeat it in a narrow form. And I’m not saying that the alternative is simply that you regurgitate. I think our education is set up, I think people often misrepresent it as simply learning facts, but I don’t think that’s true at all.
We do a lot of problem solving in our classes now, but we need to do it in a way, that in fact, it can take be taken beyond the classroom and used. And that third competency was coming from that concern about misinformation and the need for us to be critical consumers of what’s put out there in the media and in social media. You notice there too around science identity, that was also a strengthening of this idea that we should be really wanting to educate students so that they see themselves as interested and as curious and as engaged with science so that it becomes kind of consistent with their own view of themselves.
And part of that also is the concept of science capital, which really flags the idea that our different communities, lower socioeconomic for instance, indigenous communities, really need to develop the knowledge and skills of science and we need to take a critical perspective of how those are being disenfranchised at the moment. So there was a lot in that framework.
I’m going to shift now to something that’s been occupying our attention in Australia lately. And I notice in some of the work here, it’s also being canvassed, and that is this question of how we should teach, and the debate between explicit teaching and inquiry.
And I just wanted to unpack some of the misinformation, misinterpretation, but also the silly nature of the debate and try and put some kind of a middle ground in place. This is fairly recent newspaper outputs in Australia [Explicit teaching in NSW public schools; New ‘science of instruction’ academy for teachers seeks to offset ITE failings; ‘Inherent risks’: Academics push back against NSW ed dept’s explicit instruction drive]. NSW has declared that explicit teaching is what they what they are wanting in place in all their schools. Victoria has done so, not so much in all subjects. It’s certainly it’s all bound up with the phonics debate, and language debate as well. And so we’ve been caught up in this, this whole kind of thing about the role of the teacher. In fact, that article there talks about a new Science of Instruction Academy for teachers seeks to offset initial teacher education failings.
So initial teacher education is under attack in Australia as promoting ideologies that aren’t evidence based. A lot of these come from pressure groups. One of our pressure groups is the Centre for Independent Studies, that put out an article last year, I think it was, arguing that initial teacher education faculties were teaching pedagogies that were shown to be non successful. But if you actually unpacked the article, and in fact a colleague from the Academy of Science also unpacked it and just went through all of the misuse of citations and all of the kind of slides in argument that happened there. So in fact, there’s a lot of debate going on that that’s, you know, very tricky territory.
So I just wanted to draw out some of the main lines of the argument there in case it’s useful to you. And we’ve got to get into this debate in Australia because the ground is being taken, I have to say, in a very unhelpful way. I’ve been involved in this. I’ve written articles [Science curriculum needs to do more to engage primary school students; Simplistic advice for teachers on how to teach won’t work]. I get attacked every time I do, trolled; my daughter told me after I’d spent hours trying to answer all these people, “Dad, you do not engage with trolls.” Because they have papers that they quote, but often they’re very partial and they’re very selective. Basically our argument was that the model of brain functioning that was being advanced, and that is to do with the amount of memory space in short term memory and the need to transfer it into long term memory, is very limited and quite outdated.
That the argument that the trouble with our results in maths and science, they’ve actually pulled up a bit in Australia, is due to too much inquiry teaching, which is not our experience at all. Mainly teaching is very fairly teacher centred. And really not inquiry based. And that if you look at in fact in maths, PISA results seem to show that Australian students were 9th in global rankings in memorisation strategies, this is on a questionnaire, and almost bottom in the elaboration strategies needed to solve difficult problems. And so a lot of countries are doing the problem solving much better than Australia.
This is all caught up with the history wars, the reading wars, the maths wars, the climate, the science wars.
You may have had the history wars here, I don’t know, but certainly in Australia under John Howard’s government, they really attacked the curriculum for raising the history of colonisation and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples and it was characterised as a ‘black armband view of history’, and we’re going back to the history of the British Commonwealth that’s most appropriate for our culture.
And in fact, we talked to some of the Australian curriculum people a few years back. Not that they said so, but one got the sense that climate change was off the table in terms of the science curriculum. It’s now on the table and it’s strong at Year 10.
But part of it also is the question of what counts as evidence for teaching practice? So I wanted to go through some of that work. The way it’s characterized is as a binary: student inquiry, minimally guided, versus explicit teaching. And it turns out you get better test results if you teach than if you just ask kids to do things and not help them.
We always have characterised our work as guided inquiry, sort of in between. But I think that’s actually the wrong way of looking at it. I think what we should be looking at is how explicit teaching or direct instruction, which is a kind of a narrower form of explicit teaching, and student exploration are part of a rich and engaging science curriculum, and if we look at all of the ideas that that might take up, we’ve canvassed quite a few today - contemporary science, socio-scientific issues, rich tasks, epistemic fidelity, authentic, authentic science, or the processes of science, meaningful contexts and so on.
I think with that questions of the evidence, the dimensions of the debate tends to be around educational psych trials on volunteer students versus classroom-based research, which we tend to do, and the evidence that comes out of that. That’s a methodological debate. And it’s around the gold standard research debate. Also questions of measures of success. A lot of the work that’s done tends to have fairly narrow measures of success in terms of test outputs, whereas the classroom-based stuff, I think, recognises the richness of teaching and the sort of relational nature of teaching, the complexity of it, the sort of thing.
This is a blog that came out just last week actually, as some of us start to gather together to try and really make sense of this debate, is that that the problem is that apart from misinformation and misrepresentation, the reliance on gold standard research is really a reliance on a causal nature between what you do in the classroom and what the student results is one-on-one, and get rid of all of the kind of complexity around that. Now that’s fine for this narrow aspect of teaching, but when you’re looking at teaching as a complex practice, it can’t be reduced simply to that. And also the other problem is if you’re talking about that causal connection, what are you treating as the result of that? And it tends to have to be also quite narrow if you’re going to get a clean result. And so what you get is clean aspect of teaching, clean result. Problem solved. This is the better way to do it. And you’ve lost all of the stuff that’s around it.
And I think one also needs to question the scientific label that comes to that, because randomised control trials are not the only scientific methodology. In fact, it’s an epidemiological model of science.
I mean, if you think of astronomy. Or if you think of Earth science, where’s your random controlled trials? And so there’s always been a lot of work done in science around multiple methods and multiple forms of evidence.
The other thing is theoretical. I was part of this Science of Learning Centre, Australian Research Council, a big centre. It involves neuroscientists, cog. scientists and educators, and I think it was interesting trying to bring those different disciplines together to get a coherent view about learning. But really if you talk about that view of long-term memory as being the only purpose of education, you’re really losing out.
Within that project there was a question of status raised. I think in the end it was a very rich project, but there were some who viewed… their agenda was to replace what we thought in education by really solid neuroscience ideas. And I would argue that that these are irreducible theoretical systems, really. You cannot reduce all that we know about learning to the movement of neurons, you can learn a lot and you can quote that. And a lot of people have criticised the neuroscience findings for going too far in what they claim coming out of their work. And I think we need to have a sophisticated view about the role of that as well. So I’m raising the question, when you see the word ‘science,’ just put up your critical kind of feelers I think on both those issues.
We’ve got a project, design based research, really based on fairly recent views about science knowledge building, around the multimodal representational forms through which science is expressed. And so by looking at introducing that in schools we’ve done a lot of work with teachers to work out how to get kids to actually produce representations and then use it as a way of gathering their ideas together to reach consensus agreement. And that’s the model that we developed over time out of that.
For instance, here’s an example of the first stage of Grade 1 exploration of what students exploring what lives in our in our school ground. And the teacher takes them out and establishes first what we mean by living and organises preliminary explorations about how we might map it, talking about where we might look, taking them out into the school ground, and using their, what they point out to reframe their ideas.
Then out of the representations of the number of animals they found in sample plots, and then how they represent that – this is their first experience of graphing, by the way, Grade 1– then working with that to actually establish, which of the graphs and what features of graphs are most powerful, and how we might set up and think about how to construct a graph so that it’s maximumly understandable.
Teachers were very surprised when they look at the graphs that resulted, they’re of Grade 4 or 5 standard actually. Really through that, I’m trying to say that a teacher can show their knowledge by much more than telling. And so if you set up an experiment where you tell or where you let students discover, it really doesn’t give recognition of the complex ways that, as experts, we can guide our students and frame their learning and work with them.
Thanks.
[Question on screen: How do you see the role of science education experts like yourself in opening up community understandings of science education beyond generational experiences?]
Certainly one of the difficulties in this area is that there’s a lot of inertia in the system because we tend to kind of default to teaching how we were taught and a lot of, I think, parents would see it that way as well, expect that sort of thing. I think though there are a lot of initiatives that really are fairly high profile, around - for instance - having scientists work with schools and open up and do projects outside the school. I think there’s also with some of our work we’ve tried to organise displays that students produce from their work, for instance, mapping of the school ground, living things. Our original idea was to produce an actual book that would… but we didn’t have the time to do that. But we had big poster displays that the school kept up for the whole year, they were so pleased with them. So I suppose… also I guess writing articles… we’ve actually tried to engage with the profession as much as we can in teachers’ conferences. We’re actually talking quite a bit at, when I say quite a bit where we’ve got a few presentations including Peta is running a panel at CONASTA, the National Science Teachers Association, to really try and chart a future with a number of presentations.
So I guess just putting up examples that will impress and kind of break people out of that traditional mode of looking at how classrooms operate. I would say and we’ve… I mean in, in the schools that we’ve been working with, the primary school I think particularly, the parents I think have been very kind of supportive of them working with us because they get a lot of good activity. I’m not sure I’ve answered very satisfactorily. It’s a big question, yeah.
[Words on screen: Can you expand on the guided learning approach? ]
Really our approach, that I tried to show very quickly, with the teacher framing a problem and having students then investigate and construct, with a fair bit of support actually from the teacher, different representations and then a communal kind of bringing together. I was just thinking that from a particular lens you could see that as explicit teaching, if you think of explicit teaching as the teacher setting up the conditions, but really defining or controlling the general direction, and so rather than direct instruction where you tell and then have them practice, it’s really a teacher having, well, having that direction, but allowing enough room for students to explore, have differences in outcome, but within certain guidelines, I suppose.
So I would say, in fact, there might be an argument for having a line, with one end direct instruction, with one end unguided inquiry; and then the sort of guidance that I was talking about in explicit teaching, there’s some room for manoeuvre there. And I think in a way what we’ve got to do is engage with the debate in a way that we’re not kind of name calling across the boundary, if you see what I mean. Because I suspect, you scratch someone who’s advocating explicit teaching, you might find that there’s a lot of openness in what they’re advocating. And similarly for us, there’s a lot of guidance. So whether we can understand each other in that way, I think would be very helpful.
And I think it depends, too, on the sort of knowledge that you’re trying to impart. Because sometimes your decision as to how much guidance to give has to do with the abstractions and strangeness of the knowledge; at other times, it’s really important, in my view, to have kids arriving at that through practice so that they can see and the teacher can kind of monitor where they’re coming from. You know, a lot of what we know about conceptual change shows that if you tell, the student doesn’t learn necessarily. And for some of those big questions about What is living, for instance, or questions of force and energy, require a shift, an ontological shift really, in the way they view those things. And you can’t just expect to tell. You’ve got to actually work with students. So I think depending on the topic too.
And whether there are kind of ways you can bridge. I mean, to be honest, when we plan these sequences we have to think quite carefully. I think we bring in a lot of expertise to do that, in thinking of ways to kind of introduce students to the need for a new way of thinking or the need for a kind of particular way of thinking. And so I think, you know, teachers can do that, but I think I’d see our role as science educators as probably quite important for developing that those kind of very particular kind of sequences.
[Words on screen: How are we working collaboratively internationally? Is there a difference in responses in the US, England or Asia’s approach to explicit teaching and guided inquiry?]
One of the answers to that is you can’t talk about the US. Every state is different. They’ve all got their own systems. It was interesting, actually. We did a study of exemplary teaching in Grade 3 classrooms in Taiwan, Germany and Australia a few years ago and we went and did a lot of filming. And it was interesting that there were big differences. I mean, the German classrooms we went in were very open inquiry. I think it was partly the selection. I don’t think they’re all like that. But it was very interesting to look at that aspect of German practice. In Taiwan, they were very structured. They had textbooks, a lot of activities and…
I wrote a chapter with Taiwanese and German colleagues about inquiry and what the sort of different models looked, and my initial thinking was the Taiwanese were not very inquiring. But when you actually looked at it, there was a lot of openness for students to have ideas, to suggest, and in fact it was interesting and we got to know the teacher a bit. She was viewing herself as an inquiry teacher. She was getting parent complaints because the students were being given too much latitude, from their perspective, to do that. And so the chapter we wrote in the end tried to bring together what was essential about those three very different-looking styles of classroom, to build a picture of inquiry.
So that’s not at system level. I’m just saying that that I think it’s science education scholars who have projects across different countries, in fact, at the moment our climate change one is between Finland and Taiwan and Australia. I think we learn a lot that, you know, and there are a lot of cross-country comparative things as well. Yeah.
Acknowledgements
Professor Russell Tytler, Deakin University
Science Learning Hub Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao and Royal Society Te Apārangi