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During my secondary education in England, I was required to take classes in physics and chemistry.

The Nuffield Science Project, with its emphasis on "discovery learning", hoped that students would learn about such principles of classical mechanics as those of acceleration through their own experimentation with trolleys and ticker tape.

My group could not even set up the equipment, let alone draw conclusions from ticker tape, and I am not sure if any of the students in my class accomplished much more than us.

In fact, we were all half aware that the "discovery" element was a fraud. The teacher knew what the "right" results were, and he would show us before the end of the period. We were less student scientists than uninformed, untrained, and totally incompetent laboratory demonstrators.

I was never going to be a great science student, but the regular, contextless sessions of things banging against each other, getting hot, or lighting up on a circuit board failed to capture my interest. Physics bored me.

On the other hand...

#Physics #ScienceTeaching #Education #NuffieldScienceProject

"science is and has always been affected by the dominant culture and its values. To explicitly acknowledge this reality in science teaching, including genetics education, is imperative;" #

#historyofgenetics #scienceteaching

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi8227

"This global mathematics and science education research represents a rich range of learning theories, pedagogies, conceptual and affective outcomes, and purposes. The evidence in this literature overwhelmingly rejects the inquiry/direct instruction binary that underpins the AERO model. Further, the real challenge with learning concepts like force, image formation, probability or fractional operations has less to do with managing memory than with arranging the world to be seen in new ways."
- Russell Tytler

https://blog.aare.edu.au/science-and-writing-why-aeros-narrow-views-are-a-big-mistake/

@edutooters #education #ScienceTeaching #Teaching #Science

This week, my students and I looked and observed at the following things under the microscope: salt, sugar, our own hair, human cheek cells, euglena, spirostomum, and onion epithelium. For the cheek cells, they had a choice of either looking at mine, or making their own slide and seeing their own cells. I love the energy and excitement of microscope week. Next week we finish up with students choosing what they want to observe.

#MiddleschoolScience #microscopes #ScienceTeaching