The risk to ‘progressive’ school science education under the influence of COVID-19

[尽管在课堂教学和在线教学之间进行转换有潜在的优势，而不仅是局限性，但全球COVID-19大流行意味着对许多学习者而言，这种转变是突然的（有时是反复的），因此这在学校水平上尤其令人担忧，因为大多数学习者缺乏大学生所期望的元认知技巧，因此在很大程度上依赖于老师提供的支持和结构来指导学习。在我的贡献中，我将重点介绍两个领域，对当前的流行病采取必要的应对措施有可能严重损害学生的学习。一个是与教学法有关的，特别是诊断和形成性评估在教学科学中的关键作用，这是通过对学习者的替代概念的广泛研究而得知的。另一个问题涉及课程中关于科学“自然”的教学之间的平衡–它的过程，其相互联系的性质，其在社会中的作用，其局限性-以及教授特定的科学“内容”（即，诸如模型和理论之类的特定科学“产品”）。这两个要素都可以被视为渐进式（或在某些国家环境下称为“改革”）科学教学的关键部分，并且在“ COVID-19的影响下”都可能被破坏。]

Presentation:

I would like to thank the Chinese Academy of Sciences for inviting me to take part in this panel. There is clearly much that can be said about the problems and implications of science education under the influence of COVID-19, and in the time allotted to me I wish to focus on the theme of the threat posed by the pandemic to what I will refer to as ‘progressive’ science education, particularly at school level. By progressive science education I mean aspects of what is sometimes termed ‘reform’ education – that is, attempts to modernise and improve traditional approaches to teaching science. I will focus on two examples, one related to pedagogy, and one concerning curriculum.

Schools, colleges, and universities around the world have been disrupted by the pandemic and employment has also been disrupted in many contexts, and so with it forms of technical and professional education such as apprenticeships. But my main focus will be on school science.

Disruption of school learning

The extent of disruption has varied considerably. In some cases teaching has been moved on line for wholes classes, who continue to be taught by their usual teachers. The technology is available to offer some powerful affordances. But, of course, effective teaching relies upon all involved having access to the hardware, and a quiet and safe place to use it, and good internet connections. In some parts of the world, that is little more than fantasy. There is also a considerable distinction between planning a course to be taught on line, with the preparation and training involved; and a sudden need to change mode of teaching in response to circumstances. We know that even when powerful digital tools are available to teachers, they often do not utilise them, through lack of training, lack of knowledge, and lack of opportunities to find how to best make use of the technology.

Worse, sometimes learners and teachers have been switched back and forth between face to face and on-line classes with little warning; and sometimes there is not the continuity of whole classes continuing to work with their usual teachers, as individuals or groups may be self-isolating whilst others in the class are still attending normal lessons.

This is an emergency, and teachers are doing their best to keep education going as well as they can under challenging, and quickly changing, circumstances. Teachers are making the best of a bad situation.
In such a context, it is perhaps inevitable that teaching will be far from ideal, and we should all be grateful to teachers who are working very hard to cope with a very stressful situation. In such circumstances, some things of value will be lost. I suspect that what is most likely to be lost is what is most progressive in science teaching, as that is what goes beyond the basic teaching competences that are common across teachers and education systems.

I will highlight two features of progressive or reform science teaching that have been increasingly adopted around the world in recent decades.

Constructivist teaching

The first of these relates to pedagogy and what has been learnt from the extensive research and scholarship undertaken under the label of ‘constructivism’. At one time, it was reasonable to assume that young children were ignorant of science and so science education was understood as a process of filling a conceptual vacuum with a knowledge of canonical scientific ideas. Any science topic could be broken down into its component parts, and carefully and clearly explained, and built up in a logical order by a competent teacher. This is something that, arguably, can be done on line as well as in person.
Yet, there is now extensive research showing students usually come to classes with informal ideas about most science topics, and that many of these ideas are at odds with canonical science. Often, if not always, these ideas act as learning impediments, and lead to misunderstanding of teaching. Constructivist teaching schemes, involve taking learners ideas into account. The teacher is not filling a conceptual vacuum, but looking to mould and reshape learners’ existing conceptions, and to channel intuitions which would often spontaneously lead to ideas contrary to scientific principles. Simply ignoring learners’ ideas makes for ineffective teaching, as many studies have shown.

To teach in response to this body of research means using diagnostic assessment at the outset of topic to find out what students currently think, as their existing ideas act as the resources they have to make sense of teaching; and formative assessment to check how teaching is being understood. The most effective method is for the teacher to maintain a dialogue during teaching that is constantly posing questions and seeking learners’ responses, and being able to adapt teaching in real time in response to how learners are making sense of the lesson. Of course, this is not just verbal – monitoring learners’ expressions tells the teacher a lot. In principle, with plenty of practice, perhaps such techniques could be built into on-line teaching – but it is clearly much easier for the teacher to interact with a class of learners when in the room with them. Much of this interactivity will be lost and the tendency will be to focus back on simply communicating ideas from the teacher to the students – which research tells us is often ineffective.

Reform curriculum

My other example is related more directly to curriculum. The traditional science curriculum has focused extensively on covering a lot of science. Science teachers have tended to be conservative in wishing to hold on to as many topics as possible, even when new material is added.

For students however, this has often made the experience of the science curriculum seem as a kind of assault course where each new topic offers a discrete challenge, appearing largely unconnected with what has come before. Students get a survey of the sciences, without a feel for science. They are taught the products of science completely decontextualised from the problems they were meant to respond to. Students are taught answers to obscure questions that they have never formed, and explanations for phenomena they have often never experienced.

Now, some of this may be unavoidable, but such a science education does little to engage enthusiasm for science, or prepare young people to be research scientists. Nor does it show the vast majority the role of science in society, and how science can be used to face current threats such as habitat loss and climate change. Nor does it help young people appreciate science as a valued part of their culture.

Reform curricula seek to offer more of a balance between the products of science, the theories, models, principles and so forth, and the nature of science. In the last century there has been extensive scholarship to understand how science works. There is now a common core understanding of the aspects of the nature of science that should be part of the school curriculum. Teachers are asked to teach science in context, to help learners understand more about the processes and the nature of scientific knowledge (powerful, but never finalised) and how such knowledge is generated, and validated, and yet always open to re-examination.

Such reform is challenging. Science teachers themselves are often less sure of this aspect of the curriculum than the science content. They often feel that the recommended approaches to teaching about the nature of science are less familiar and may be outside their comfort zone.

COVID as a context for teaching about science

When teachers are “making do” as best they can, it is almost inevitable that progressive reforms will suffer. It is easier to focus on teaching the prescribed science knowledge, than the more nuanced material about how science comes to know, which in many ways is more valuable for future scientists and indeed all citizens.

The COVID situation itself offers a good example here. People are seeing science in action: how knowledge is developed slowly, with different ideas under consideration, and different results slowly building up towards a canonical account of the virus, its means of transmission, and how best to respond to it. School science that simply represents the final outcomes of research offers limited basis for appreciating how science actually works in a real live context – indeed, here, a life and death context.

[During the panel responses to questions I highlighted, as an example, the charts and data reporting the numbers of cases and deaths for COVID, sometimes including clearly non-feasible results due to artefacts relating to how numbers are collected and processed (such as reporting negative numbers of new cases , as a context for exploring scientific measurement and errors in data.

Read about 'Lies, damned lies, and COVID-19 statistics?'

Conclusion

So, my conclusion is that on top of all the more obvious effects of students missing school and having lessons disrupted, science provision will tend to revert to more traditional teaching. The research-informed gains in pedagogy and curriculum that have slowly spread around the world are likely to be victims of COVID as teachers focus on what can be done easily in the most difficult circumstances.