YEARS 7–12 IDEAS FOR THE CLASSROOM
Year 7 Practical Skills for Inquiry Learning
By Dr Jennifer Jones
– telling students (often inadvertently) what should happen;
We all want our students to be enthusiastic learners of science, to
be willing participants in science lessons and to want to work things
out for themselves. An underlying need for students to develop
and maintain an interest in science is that they each acquire a real
understanding of the concepts and ideas they meet – they need to
see the patterns and work these out for themselves. The students
must undertake the ‘meaning making’ from the activities they do.
So, from the very beginning, we must help our students develop
the practical skills, the thinking skills, the questioning skills, the
confidence and the competence to work in a student-centred way.
Teachers too may need to look at new ways of working with their
students.
...... all of these prevent the students from having the
opportunities to become confident and competent
experimenters in science and limit the development of their
thinking and practical skills.
• The burgeoning use of the internet and YouTube to find activities
seems to be trending towards fewer actual experiments being
done and more simulations taking their place – even when the
apparatus for doing the experiments is available in schools.
• Visiting practicum teachers in schools over many years and
watching classes, talking to teachers at schools, conferences
and workshops suggest these practices still occur in many
schools in all 3 sectors of education.
• Science is a practical subject. New science knowledge and
ideas are only accepted by the scientific community if they
are based on empirical (practical) research. Such empirical
research has to be verified by other scientists and critiqued
by peer review of papers detailing the research methodology
and results and published in recognised scientific journals.
Hands-on experimental science activities are immensely
important in effective learning and teaching of science, and
are not always effectively replaced by simulations.
• I have not seen this ‘scaffolding’ approach result in the increase
of practical skills, confidence or competence in students as
they progress through Year 7 into Year 8, Year 9 and Year 10.
Check what happens with your students! It is a concern that a
similar four-stages approach to Inquiry Learning is advocated
by some research papers, which will perpetuate the use of
‘recipe practicals’ etc. There has to be a better way but it
involves teaching the students the relevant skills from the
beginning.
• For many years a suggested method for teaching practical
and experimental skills has been based around scaffolding
the students’ practical learning from the ‘teacher gives all
the information’ through stages of ‘lessening control’ until
the students are in ‘full control’ of designing and carrying
out experiments. However, teachers often find it difficult to
cede control, and anecdotal evidence suggests this does not
always happen. Throughout all years 7-10 practices occur
which indicate that control is not often given to the students:
For many students, science experiments can be fun – smells,
bangs, colour … but the reasons behind what happens, why it
happens and why they are doing a particular experiment are
often a complete mystery. The result is that many science ideas
are seen as ‘boring’ or ‘too hard’ and are simply rote-learned – if
they are learned at all. We therefore need to explore approaches
to designing and carrying out experiments which will provide the
evidence from which students can work out many of the relevant
science ideas. This means the students do most of the thinking
work and hence develop a deeper understanding of the science
involved with a resulting increase in motivation.
– recipe practicals are still common;
– handouts, copying instructions from the ‘board’ or from the
internet and following a text book are regular occurrences;
– giving such detailed instructions that the result of the
experiment is given away;
– over-emphasis on reams of safety instructions;
– experiment sheets where tables for results are drawn;
– questions leading students from the results to the ‘right’
conclusion;
– giving details of observations to make and how to deal with
results;
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SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 68 NO 1