Opportunities to learn science in primary classrooms

Abstract

This thesis reports on the opportunities students had to learn science over two days in ten, primary classrooms in Wellington. It focuses not only on those parts of the curriculum which the teachers labelled science, but also looks at the events which occurred throughout the school days, and considers the resources and the classroom environments which were available to the children during that time. These events, resources, and environments were analysed to show what opportunities they offered for children to learn science. In most of the classrooms children had far more opportunities to learn science than indicated by periods of the timetable labelled science. In the classrooms as a whole, more opportunities to learn science occurred in non-science than in science sessions. Sometimes these were opportunities for all the children in the class; sometimes for a group; sometimes for individual children. However there was a great deal of variation between the classrooms in the opportunities provided to learn science, and junior classes tended to provide more opportunities than middle and senior. Only a small portion of the variation could be attributed to the timing of the observation, in terms of its coinciding or not coinciding with the teachers' planned science programmes. Most of the variation arose from the way the teachers structured, introduced, and resourced their lessons and their classrooms, with some teachers providing numerous opportunities to learn science in many areas of the curriculum, and others providing few. The teachers' views on what constituted an opportunity to learn science varied, although most believed that a child would need to be given access, in some way, to scientific information or ideas. However while all the teachers believed that opportunities to learn science existed in non-science sessions, none recorded these opportunities as part of the science programme. The results call into question the use of timetabled science as a means of determining the adequacy or relative importance of science in the primary curriculum, or in any specific primary classroom. They also call into question the adequacy or fairness of any assessment of children's understanding of science if that assessment is based solely on the classroom science programme. More fundamentally, the study suggests that the way in which the New Zealand Curriculum Framework and the curriculum statements are being applied to primary schools may need to be rethought. There appear to be both philosophical and practical difficulties in treating science as a separate subject in primary schools. Increasing the opportunities children have to learn science in primary schools may depend on a recognition of these difficulties and on providing teachers with information on how they can increase the opportunities for children to learn science in their classrooms, and with strategies to exploit those opportunities.