Free of charge (one copy) to registered users and available on affordable subscriptions for schools.  Articles about science in real life situations, science research and experiments to try yourself.   Intended to be read by secondary students, catalyst is written in a way that is interesting and easy to read.  I’d recommend signing up with SEP and ordering the next copy when available.  The current issue has articles on DNA testing remains in mass graves from WWII, Cloud seeding, spectroscopy, ant intelligence and many more.

SEP Publications (Mixing colours)

SEP publications are free of charge to registered users of the website and give valuable information and ideas to science teachers.  The current issue appeared in my pigeon hole this week and focuses on mixing colours.  The information is clearly presented and useful (especially useful if you are reading about something outside your subject area), and there are valuable teaching ideas including practical ideas.  You can order issues of previous publications for a reasonable price and also put your name down to receive the next one free of charge.

Update: I received word today that the materials are moving to a new home at the National Stem Centre.  Register now for more info.  Resources and past issues continue to be available from Mindsets.

The intention of this post is to give an introduction to the state of science education in England.  I am interested in how science education works in other countries and was hoping that this could be the first in a series of blog posts comparing science education around the world.

(Since devolution of power to regional assemblies Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have slightly different arrangements).

School education in England is divided into 6 phases – starting with Early Years and Foundation stage (0 – 5 years) and finishing with key stage 5 (16 – 19 years).  A summary of the main phases can be found here.  Science starts off with play based investigations and builds into more open ended projects/topics in the primary phase.    Secondary education builds on this and leads to GCSE qualifications at age 16 then A-levels (needed for university) at 18.

In 1988 we saw the introduction of the National Curriculum.  This gave the minimum curriculum entitlement that every child should receive.  With the prescriptive National Curriculum came a set of assessment criteria divided into ‘National Curriculum levels’ detailing progression in scientific enquiry, biology, chemistry and physics.  This would be used until the end of key stage 3 when examination criteria would be used instead.

The National Curriculum for primary education can be found here and secondary education here (these links seem to change on a regular basis)

The publication of a scheme of work by the QCA (who created the curriculum) and the introduction of high-stakes testing at the end of each key stage polarised the curriculum and put increasing pressure on teachers to be getting good results.  The original curriculum was very content heavy and teachers struggled to cover all the material.   The National Curriculum has been slimmed down several times, and the levels tinkered with repeatedly but the function of the curriculum remains the same.  The latest revision of the curriculum at key stage 3 (11-14) was intended to remove lots of the mandatory content and move to a more skills based approach, with teachers having more flexibility to teach what they want (together with the abolition of statutory testing).  This mirrors a similar approach taken with the key stage 4 curriculum previously (but in this case the examination boards chose most of the examinable content rather than it being specified in the curriculum so there is still little freedom for the science teacher).

More and more secondary schools are choosing to condense key stage 3 into 2 years, and spend an extra year doing examination course (since the exam results are one of the measures used to compile school league tables and judge the effectiveness of schools).  The GCSE exam (taught from 14 – 16) is in the process of being made more rigorous, and course that are perceived to be easy (like the modular multiple choice course) have been discontinued.  There is little content at this level that cannot be taught by any competent science teacher and so many teachers teach across all disciplines of science until A-level where the increased subject depth needs more extensive subject knowledge.

The exact content and style of the science GCSE depends on the examination board the school has chosen to accredit the qualification (there are several to choose between).  With much of the content being selected by the exam boards there can be significant variation between them and schools tend to select courses that suit the skills and ethos of the department.  We are also seeing a shift towards vocational science qualifications for students unlikely to follow science past compulsory education.

Other issues that affect the quality of science education include deteriorating behaviour (which can limit practical work in lessons), large class sizes, staff absence, number of students with special educational needs, shortage of specialist physics teachers not to mention the constant change and interference from politicians into the teaching in our schools.

I would be interested to hear how our system compares with other countries, and answer any questions about the way science is taught in England.

As with the other modules, we’ve released our resources and assignments for others to use or adapt.  We’ve tried to link lessons together and put practical work in to our scheme to make it more interesting/motivating for students of all abilities but if  you have any suggestions or ideas for improving it further please take the time to let us know.  Remember that this scheme is an outline scheme written for our students, and you will/should have to personalise it to suit the needs of your students and departments.

This scheme hasn’t been trialled with students yet – it represents a work in progress.  If you use our scheme and you find any mistakes, please let us know so we can upload corrected versions for all to use.

(You can send me messages and files through the contact me form above).  Copyright information is available here.

Double circulation role play

Aim: To learn how blood flows around the body & sites of oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.

This needs a little preparation/apparatus to make the most of it.  You will need a set of cards and either red/blue counters or the provided oxygen/carbon dioxide cards.

You will also need to select three suitable students to take the role of heart, lungs and body organs.  If you have a large or able group you may want to use multiple students for the body organs, representing multiple organs.  I give the students a card to remind them of their role.

The rest of the class take the role of the red blood cells.  Students have to move from the heart to the lungs and collect an oxygen token.  Students then return to the heart before being directed to a body organ where they exchange their oxygen token for a carbon dioxide token.  The student taking the role of the heart do the directing – selecting a suitable student is essential if this is going to succeed.

Whilst a little chaotic, even the weakest of students was able to participate and gain something from the activity.

Outcomes

• During the follow-up activity and plenary students could:
• describe the journey of oxygen around the body
• say how many times through the heart the blood passes whilst going around the body
• say which blood is oxygenated/deoxygenated at various points around the body
• make good guesses at the structure of the heart
• explain why the sides of the heart aren’t of equal size.

Resources

Role play cards

As with the biology module, we’ve released our resources and assignments for others to use or adapt.  We’ve tried to link lessons together and put practical work in to our scheme to make it more interesting/motivating for students of all abilities but if  you have any suggestions or ideas for improving it further please take the time to let us know.

This scheme hasn’t been trialled with students yet – it represents a work in progress (more of a skeleton scheme that we hope individual teachers will adapt to personalise the leaning experience of their students).

If you use our scheme and you find any mistakes, please let us know so we can upload corrected versions for all to use.

(You can send me messages and files through the contact me form above)

With only one blog (with access controlled by the teacher), articles were written as a group effort, or simply in the last few minutes of the lesson as the plenary drew to a close.  More often than not this ended up being a photograph with a couple of lines of explanation.

The novelty of seeing their own work on the internet soon wore off and the blog stopped having a motivating effect on students.  As students lost interest in the blog, postings dried up and it became little more than a list of links sharing a space with stale content.

With less than 2 hits per day the effort of maintaining the blog didn’t seem worth the effort.  Content was transferred to my science blog several weeks ago (which seems like a more natural place to host the type of content we were generating) and search engines barred from indexing the site.  My school science blog has now been deleted and traffic redirected to point to this blog (at least until the domain name expires later this year).

So what did I learn from this foray into the world of student blogging?

• Students have to have ownership of the material to keep them motivated – this means students generating content.
• Think about purpose of the blog. Is it another writing medium? to showcase student work? to act as a newsletter or information to parents?
• There has to be an audience or purpose to the blogging – commenting on each others blogs, and feedback from the teacher meets this purpose.
• Embed using the blog into routines.  Completing a blog entry could be a homework or a regular plenary slot in lessons.
• Think about access to the blog.  Having one single blog limits interactivity and makes needs a teacher to manage the password.
• If you only want to host links then a Wiki is more appropriate (a wiki can also be a better tool for distilling and developing ideas as a group)
• A managed blog (or multiple blogs built on a single hosting installation) will save admin time in keeping the software up to date.

Have you tried blogging with students? I’d be interested to hear if you have any advice to add to mine for teachers wanting to try blogging in the classroom.

Just to add some more fuel to this fire, National Strategies have released some resources to support the use of APP for assessment for learning (AfL) across primary and secondary phases.

National strategies say the purpose of these materials is to:

• define what is meant by Learning targets
• explain the principles of setting Learning targets
• outline the process of setting Learning targets and how this can be linked explicitly to opportunities for periodic assessment through Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP)
• identify strategies which enable pupils to take responsibility for their own progress and become more independent learners.

As with all National Strategy materials you have to read through it and take the bits out to use that are useful and manageable (whilst National Strategy material is well intentioned, I don’t think they have any appreciation of the workload of the average teacher and if you followed their advice to the letter you’d never have time to teach anything!).  

What this document is useful for is looking at how you can construct some meaningful targets for students to improve from APP materials. It is downloadable from the National Strategies site and is worth a flick through, providing you remember that you won’t be able to follow their advice to the letter.

Remember that Ofsted under the current inspection framework are looking for progress.  I attended a briefing this week at which an experienced Ofsted inspector was talking about the importance of linking targets to grades/levels (in secondary schools).  APP provides a quick and easy way to do this in your lessons, and to build in some meaningful assessment for learning which is one of the cornerstones of good (science) teaching.

For several years I’ve used level assessed tasks as one of my peer assessment tools in science lessons. I’ve used them with a range of students of different abilities from foundation tier GCSE to Entry level and below. Usually I’ve used them part way through a topic to check understanding and highlight opportunities to develop through the rest of the topic.

I was recently contacted by Dr Mark Evans (co-author of Badger APP materials) regarding a post on my blog I had made about APP in science (and why teachers don’t get it). Mark kindly gave me access to his Webquest APP tasks and I decided to try them out with one of my groups as an AfL activity.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with these Webquests, you are given a structured task supported by online reference materials (including updated links to other sites). These materials do not rely on text books, and the materials can be uploaded onto your VLE, making them suitable for homework and cover lessons as well as for use in class.

The lesson I had chosen wasn’t ideal because I had to leave half way through, but that still gave me 40 minutes to start my students off. I had chosen a task titled “Invisibility cloaks” in which students accessed reference materials about how light travels and reflection/refraction of light. Students were then asked to apply this knowledge to describe a model and see if it could be used to explain how to make an invisibility cloak (Harry Potter style).

My students struggled with this task, not because of the task itself, but because of their low literacy and independence levels. Less able students struggled with reading information off of the web sites, and text-to-speech tools aren’t very popular with our students. This is the first barrier to success for my students.

Some students who could access the information struggled with its application to a near identical diagram, and were unable to take in the short presentations on reflection/refraction. Even when an adult sat down with them and explained the content, many students were unable to apply this knowledge and identify which scientific evidence would support their ideas.

All students needed lots of guidance as they worked through the task and none were able to access it independently. This is not a criticism of the Webquests, in fact as I marked the tasks I was impressed by the structured way in which the student worksheet led the students to gather the required information and apply it to a given situation that could be assessed. I would have no hesitation in recommending these activities for use with more able and more literate students than my own (as part of a balanced and varied diet of AfL and APP activities).

An example of a completed activity is given here (page 1, page 2) complete with annotations to help me make sense of the levels before we follow up with a peer assessment/target setting lesson.  Unfotunately it wasn’t possible to capture  the good quality science discussion that also took place in this lesson.

So how could I make this task work better for my students?

• Reduce the literacy requirements of the task still further by using more narrated animations or video so that students could use the web materials as a reference material independently.
• Provide a little more structure to the writing frame to support students with lower literacy, maybe as sub-headings or more diagrammatical work.
• Add level information to each step of the writing frame so that students can more easily check their levels as most were unable to access the level ladder, even when it was presented in pupil speak.
• Use tasks like this more regularly so that students become used to finding things out for themselves and less reliant on an adult feeding them instructions or information (training)
• Refer to APP criteria and next steps more frequently so that students become better at identifying ways forward. Not all APP activities need to be written or recorded, it is possible to use APP criteria in ordinary AfL activities (rather than slotting in off-the-shelf tasks in the way you would do a test).
• Use a task better suited to the topic/material my students were most familiar with rather than use an off the shelf task.

Remember that there isn’t a proper way to use APP.  Tasks like the one above are only one example from a number of ways that APP can be used in schools.  Good AfL is key to good quality science teaching and in turn to embedding APP and making it work.

Have you used APP tasks with students of low ability or with low literacy levels?  What obstacles did you come across and how did you overcome them?

And while you are on the topic of magnetism,  the floating paperclip never fails to engage students of all ability.

I recently attended a weekend ASE event at the CELS centre at Nottingham Trent University.  Hosted by the ever creative Mark Crowley we looked at the importance of practical work in science.

I would advise science teachers from all phases to check out the Getting Practical site which offers some ideas online and access to free CPD for science teachers.

There are many reasons why you might want to include practical activities in a lesson.  Some of the reasons suggested include:

• To develop knowledge and understanding of science (e.g. show relationships between variables)
• Learn how to use apparatus and carry out scientific procedures (e.g. carrying out a titration)
• To learn the process of science enquiry (e.g. plan a strategy, interpret data and come to a conclusion)

The strategy recommends planning to include all of these intended learning outcomes in your schemes of work, and provides audit materials to assist you in this process.

The getting practical strategy is backed by SCORE (Science Community Partnership Supporting Education) and training is provided free of charge.  With many schools currently rewriting their schemes of work it could be worth finding out more about Getting Practical.