SCIENCE EDUCATION

Why Teach Science?
In the modern world, some knowledge of science is essential for every-
one. It is the opinion of this committee that science should be as nonnegotiable
a part of basic education as are language arts and mathematics. It is
important to teach science because of the following:
1. Science is a significant part of human culture and represents one of
the pinnacles of human thinking capacity.
2. It provides a laboratory of common experience for development of
language, logic, and problem-solving skills in the classroom.
3. A democracy demands that its citizens make personal and community
decisions about issues in which scientific information plays a fundamental
role, and they hence need a knowledge of science as well as an understanding
of scientific methodology.
4. For some students, it will become a lifelong vocation or avocation.
5. The nation is dependent on the technical and scientific abilities of its
citizens for its economic competitiveness and national needs.

What Should Be the Goals of Elementary and
Middle School Science?
To quote Albert Einstein, the goal of education is “to produce indepen-
dently thinking and acting individuals.” The eventual goal of science education
is to produce individuals capable of understanding and evaluating information
that is, or purports to be, scientific in nature and of making decisions
that incorporate that information appropriately, and, furthermore, to pro-
duce a sufficient number and diversity of skilled and motivated future scien-
tists, engineers, and other science-based professionals.
The science curriculum in the elementary grades, like that for other
subject areas, should be designed for all students to develop critical basic
knowledge and basic skills, interests, and habits of mind that will lead to
productive efforts to learn and understand the subject more deeply in later
grades. If this is done well, then all five of the reasons to teach science will
be well served. It is not necessary in these grades to distinguish between
those who will eventually become scientists and those who will chiefly use
their knowledge of science in making personal and societal choices. A good
elementary science program will provide the basis for either path in later
life.
The specific content of elementary school science has been outlined in
multiple documents, including the National Science Education Standards,the Benchmarks for Science Literacy, and multiple state standards documents.
Teachers are held accountable to particular state and local requirements. It is
not the role of this report to specify a list of content to be taught. However,
it is important to note that what this report says about science learning
always assumes that there is a strong basis of factual knowledge and con-
ceptual development in the science curriculum, and that the goal of any
methodology for teaching is to facilitate student learning and understanding
of this content, as well as developing their skills in, and understanding of,
the methods of scientific observation, experimentation, modeling, and analysis.
It is often said that children are natural scientists. Experts in child devel-
opment have debated this issue, not on the basis of the basic facts of children’s
behavior, but rather on the relation between that behavior and the essential
aspects of scientific thinking (Giere, 1996; Gopnik, 1996; Gopnik and Wellman,
1992; Harris, 1994; Kuhn, 1989; Metz, 1995, 1997; Vosniadou and Brewer,
1992, 1994). Rather than attempting to resolve this debate, we simply acknowledge
the fact that children bring to science class a natural curiosity
and a set of ideas and conceptual frameworks that incorporate their experiences
of the natural world and other information that they have learned.
Since these experiences vary, children at a given age have a wide range in
their skills, knowledge, and conceptual development. A teacher therefore
needs to be able to evaluate each child’s knowledge and conceptual and
skill development, as well as the child’s level of metacognition about his or
her own knowledge, skills, and concepts, in order to provide a learning
environment that moves each child’s development in all these areas. A key
question for instruction is thus how to adapt the instructional goals to the
existing knowledge and skills of the learners, as well as how to choose
instructional techniques that will be most effective.
Each of the views of science articulated above highlights particular modes
of thought that are essential to that view. These views are not mutually
exclusive descriptions of science, but rather each stresses particular aspects.
Since students need to progress in all aspects, it is useful for teachers to have
a clear understanding of each of these components of scientific development,
just as they need a clear understanding of the subject matter, the
specific science content, that they are teaching. It is also useful at times to
focus instruction on development of specific skills, in balance with a focus
on the learning of specific facts or the understanding of a particular concep-
tual framework.
Thus, if one looks from the perspective of science as a process of rea-
soning about evidence, one sees that logical argumentation and problem-
solving skills are important. Certain aspects of metacognition are also high-
lighted, such as the ability to be aware when one’s previously held convictions
are in conflict with an observation. If one looks at science as a process of
theory change, one sees that teachers must recognize the role of students’prior conceptions about a subject and facilitate the necessary processes of
conceptual change and development. Finally, when one looks at science as
a process of participation in the culture of scientific practice, attention is
drawn to the ways in which children’s individual cultural and social backgrounds
can, on one hand, create barriers to science participation and learn-
ing due to possible conflicts of cultural norms or practices with those of
science, and, on the other hand, provide opportunities for contributions,
particularly from students from nonmainstream cultures, that enrich the dis-
course in the science classroom. One also sees a range of practices, such as
model building and data representation, that each in itself is a specific skill
and thus needs to be incorporated and taught in science classrooms.
It is thus clear that multiple strategies are needed, some focused primarily
on key skills or specific knowledge, others on particular conceptual
understanding, and yet others on metacognition. The issues of what children
bring to school and of how teaching can build on it to foster robust
science learning with this rich multiplicity of aspects are the core topics of
this report.