Overview
Pupils As Scientists will involve teachers and pupils from four Sussex primary schools to promote investigative skills and the use of scientific method to find real answers to real scientific questions: for example, why do leaves change colour in the autumn. This is an important feature of science education, which is currently not being addressed.
This pilot project, from March 2006 – January 2007, will build on students’ innate inquisitiveness about their environment and their prior knowledge. They observe, and start to ask questions. They then hypothesise answers to these questions, and find evidence for these answers (whether for or against), all the while evaluating and discussing their findings with their teachers, peers and subject experts. Finally they form conclusions.
The use of IKIT (Institute for Knowledge Innovation) software will enable pupils to record and track their own learning. This is a visible record of their knowledge building, and allows them to refer back and remove hypotheses that are disproved.
The research, being conducted by Gerard Macdonald and John Parry, aims to investigate whether:This pilot project, from March 2006 – January 2007, will build on students’ innate inquisitiveness about their environment and their prior knowledge. They observe, and start to ask questions. They then hypothesise answers to these questions, and find evidence for these answers (whether for or against), all the while evaluating and discussing their findings with their teachers, peers and subject experts. Finally they form conclusions.
The use of IKIT (Institute for Knowledge Innovation) software will enable pupils to record and track their own learning. This is a visible record of their knowledge building, and allows them to refer back and remove hypotheses that are disproved.
- the pupils involved are noticeably readier to approach problems and questions (across the curriculum, not just in science lessons) in a scientific manner – to hypothesise a solution, and to seek evidence for and against that hypothesis;
- pupils generate knowledge which is new – at least new to their working group;
- pupils show greater understanding of scientific processes and the provisionality of scientific knowledge, rather than rote learning scientific ‘facts’;
- pupils understand that there are, in science, no unchallengeable facts;
- pupils demonstrate increased understanding of research methods – seeking and evaluating information both from data networks (notably the web) and directly from experts in relevant disciplines;
- other teachers and schools wish to adopt this approach to knowledge building in science.