sarah.boyd's blog

By Rose Hipkins

This is the seventh in a series of posts about making progress in science. If you haven’t been following the series it might help to know that I’m responding to a dilemma many science leaders in New Zealand are facing. At both primary and secondary levels teachers are being put under pressure to report their students’ progress against curriculum levels. Middle leaders are then required to report this progress to their senior leaders/ the school Board of Trustees.

By Rose Hipkins

This is the sixth in a series of posts about making progress in science. Last week I turned my attention to science at the primary school level. I drew on processes developed for NMSSA, which assesses achievement at year 4 and year 8. My focus was the challenge of equating a specific assessment measures with levels in the curriculum.

Rose Hipkins

By Rose Hipkins

When I reflect on educational aims at the school level, I think of the key competencies in the curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). And these key competencies (thinking; using language, symbols and texts; managing self; relating to others; and, participating and contributing) all seem to be subsumed under thinking if thinking is interpreted broadly. (Begg, 2016)

By Rose Hipkins

In the first blog in this series I questioned the educational value of cobbling together reports of students’ progress in science from measures that lack coherence, such as a string of ‘unit’ tests. Instead, I suggested, we should think carefully about the sort of progress the curriculum indicates as important, and then ponder how we might measure that with at least some validity.

Thank you for coming back to our science blog. You get a tag-team handover this week - I am Rose Hipkins and I’m picking up from my colleague Ally Bull. My plan is to build on her thoughts and questions while turning the focus to an issue that I know is worrying a lot of teachers right now. I’ll be musing about how we might determine if – and how - students are making progress in their science learning.

This is the focus of A Nation of Curious Minds: He Whenua Hihiri i te Mahara – the national strategic plan for science in society. So to what extent does science learning at school support this goal? Before we can answer that we need to be clear about what supports the development of innovators. According to Tony Wagner the answer is play, passion and purpose. He says that in his interviews with highly innovative young people, their parents, teachers and mentors,  “passion” was the most frequently occurring word.

School science fairs get a bad rap. They are often criticised for not promoting real learning, being overly-competitive, advantaging students from already privileged backgrounds, putting extra stress on children, teachers and families, not representing science as it really is, and so on. Despite this though, some people do leave school with very positive memories of science fairs.

In the second in her series on the place of science in a future-focused curriculum, Ally Bull explores the idea of science and certainty.

Science is science regardless of how you approach it. That’s kind of the nice thing about science – it’s true regardless of how you feel about it.

There is always a right answer. English and the arts were a bit airy fairy for me. I really liked having an answer. It’s really satisfying.

I liked chemistry and maths because in those subjects you found the answer.