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Readership: primary

EVIDENCE-BASED TEACHING IN PRIMARY SCHOOL SCIENCE:

THE NOTTINGHAM EBT PROJECT
Peter Ovens reports on a project in which a small group of primary teachers did action research to improve aspects of their own practice which were significant to their teaching, including: helping young children ask more investigable1 types of questions; encouraging them to have a greater sense of ownership over their learning; improving childrens approach to the recording of their learning; and exploring teacher assessment in the context of preparing Year 6 pupils for endof-key-stage National Curriculum tests. As well as making progress with their individual projects, with the support of a university researcher, the teachers also reflected on their use of evidence in their action research. This led to the articulation of a particular approach to evidence-based teaching.
the pressure to raise end-of-key-stage National Curriculum test scores. Then there are some long-standing and fairly fundamental teaching dilemmas, such as the tensions between different learning aims. For example: how do I teach children to be good scientific inquirers and also teach them the knowledge and understanding of science? Or, to put it more formally, how can teaching integrate Sc1 (achieving the National Curriculum aims for childrens scientific investigative learning abilities) with Sc2, Sc3 and Sc4 (the aims for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge)? From my experience of doing and supporting others action research (see (1)), I felt confident that worthwhile progress with these kinds of practical professional problems could be made by teachers, with appropriate kinds of support. So in establishing the EBT Project, a series of aims was determined by the teachers own priorities in improving their teaching. Part One of this report is about their collaborative research projects. And across these projects, the overall aim of the EBT Project is to evaluate ideas about evidence-based teaching as an approach to improvement and raising educational standards. This is considered in Part Two. There is currently much interest in evidence-based practice. One significant approach assumes that effective practice can be formulated in generalised terms through research on education by specialist researchers as outside experts, so that the next step is to get teachers to apply researchers evidence to their teaching . There are manifestations of this in national strategies for teaching literacy and numeracy. A second, and in some senses, opposite approach is for teachers themselves collaboratively to research their practice. This implies that in gathering evidence and improving their own practice, they are concurrently developing their understanding and thereby doing educational research (as distinct from research on education) and developing the expert within (see (2)). Assuming that the first approach would receive much attention and considerable central funding, there was (and is) a need for the second approach to be tried out and studied. With the support of the Nottingham Trent Universitys research enhancement fund, EBT began.

INTRODUCTION: WHY THIS PROJECT NOW?

At the beginning of the new millennium, primary school science has considerable difficulties. Through my role as a university tutor in science education and my work over a long period with primary school teachers on the improvement of the teaching, learning and assessment of science, I am aware of a range of practical professional problems which they experience. These problems are not reflected in the declared priorities of national policy or the main research interests of science educationists in the UK. Nor do they match the images conveyed by rising end-of-key-stage National Curriculum test scores and favourable international comparisons, which could be taken as indicators of the success of science in the primary school in the UK. But, from teachers perspectives, science is squeezed from outside by the increased attention to be given to teaching literacy and numeracy, the overcrowded character of the curriculum, and the rigidity of state-sanctioned procedures for rationalist curriculum planning and accountability. Further difficulties arise within science, from

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PART ONE: THE TEACHERS, THEIR FOCUSES AND THEIR DEVELOPMENTS 1. How can I enable my Year 5 children to take more ownership of their science learning in a context of planning and assessment which, as it operates at the moment, appears to constrain this?
her personal theorising about ownership is rooted in her attempts to help her pupils achieve it, and it is shaped by the responses they make. This is a kind of professional learning which develops theory and practice interdependently. Therefore notions of putting theory into practice or of applying theory are not relevant. Eleanor chose one of her usual kind of science sessions to begin the gathering of evidence about the extent to which she was providing opportunities for ownership. This included taping what she said to the children at significant points in the session, in task setting, and so on, and also taping the talk of a small group of children within her Year 4 class, when carrying out the task. This evidence was used to gain a better knowledge of the childrens perspective and to reflect on the appropriateness of her own practice in this episode. She fed this into discussion with critical friends (the rest of the EBT group) to help decide what to try out for improvement during the next episode. For example, when she focused her monitoring on certain children who had seemed not to show much ownership of their learning, she found several gratifying examples of their independent and self-possessed approach to their science work and the authenticity and freshness of their thinking. This suggested that she may have been carrying over to science her assumptions about the childrens lower achievements in other areas of the curriculum. Noting this as an assumption to avoid, Eleanor turned attention to the preplanned aspects of science sessions, which are part of the schools expectations of its staff and which seemed to cut across the things she thought would foster childrens ownership of their learning. The intention was to harmonise in practice her own aim of encouraging childrens ownership with her obligations to follow the schools policies and procedures for planning. During a session about reflection of light in mirrors, she analysed evidence of interactions to do with the quality of opportunity that children found to exercise their ownership. In this situation, it seemed that the social interactions of the children and their personalities were playing a larger part than had been anticipated. This led Eleanor to focus more on the group membership aspects and, simultaneously, to ameliorate the rigidity of the schools planning procedures during some teaching about electricity. She felt that with the evidence of her own teaching of these children, she had justifications to adjust some aspects of what the schools scheme expected her to do. In her reading, Eleanor found that somewhat scant attention has been given to learning theories in the writing of science educationists, with notable exceptions of Patricia Murphy (3) and Joan Solomon (4). Eleanor used their ideas to examine more closely the issues of promoting positive attitudes to learning and towards each other in her pupils, and her own attitudes towards their alternative conceptions to the scientifically conventional ones. She feels that she has made progress in enabling a more fully autonomous kind of learning in which ownership is sensed by the children in ways that strengthens their learning.

This was the practical professional problem initially selected by Eleanor, one of the five local teachers who joined the EBT project, as her particular focus for her own development in science teaching and learning. Her previous action research had focused on ways of enabling children to exercise more ownership over their science learning. She had originally seen this as a need which they exhibited at the time when her own main concerns were about beginning to implement the science National Curriculum. This earlier study had been put on one side in her mind, as she had thought about selecting a different focus for her project. But then she began to consider more carefully whether the gains she felt she had made in developing her practice during her first piece of action research in the previous school context had borne as much fruit in her present Year 5 classroom as she had assumed. She described a recent classroom episode in which she felt that there might have been ways in which, without intending to do so, the session had limited the extent to which the children showed a sense of their ownership of their learning. They had seemed less interested and less able to show their independent thinking than she felt to be appropriate and desirable during those activities. So what emerged as a deeper focus for her project was Eleanors wish to realise more fully her beliefs and values about childrens ownership of their learning by re-examining those aspects of her practice which seemed to be unintended limitations and barriers to ownership (real and/or imagined). A prime suspect for this was the standardised approach to planning. It is worth making a general point here from the EBT project as a whole, that great care is needed at this stage of using action research for personal professional development when settling on the focus of a study. It needs to be grounded in the regularities of the teachers current classroom experiences and also linked to her beliefs, values and vision for the best qualities of learning. So the research aims for improvements in practice which are guided by an ideal, and which itself is open to further thinking that is prompted by attempts to realise it in action. For Eleanor, ownership denotes a fairly explicit concept which had been linked to constructivist learning theories she had read about. But separately from this, Eleanor had already developed a personal meaning of ownership to refer to the special qualities she had tacitly come to recognise as the kinds of learning that she valued strongly in her day-to-day teaching. Therefore, Eleanors concept of ownership has theoretical and practical dimensions, and it is rooted in her personal valuation of a quality of learning which may not be precisely predictable at the planning stage, but is recognisable as it emerges in the childrens responses. When this happens, situated manifestations of ownership are created in Eleanors thinking and used to assess learning and evaluate teaching. In this way,

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2. How can my Year 2 childrens science learning be enhanced through recording it, overcoming the present tendency for them to dislike recording tasks and see them as pointless? 3. How can I enable more of the boys in my Year 6 class to achieve as much in end-ofkey-stage National Curriculum tests as many of the girls, while also enabling more of the girls to develop the good investigative work achieved by many of the boys?

At the end of the previous school year, with a Year 3 class, many of Karens children had expressed a strong disaffection for science, because of the written form of recording. Now with Year 2, she felt even more concerned about the pressures on her teaching for more teacher direction and worksheets to drive the childrens learning. This approach also placed the emphasis of assessment on childrens recall of information. Karen described how her children found the tasks she was setting for them to record science to be laborious. When she talked about this with them, the children asked her why the tasks were necessary! This increased Karens desire to question the educational value of the set tasks and the constraints she perceived on her practice. Her focus became to find ways of improving the contribution of childrens recording to their learning. Karen felt that the receptiveness of the younger children would make it easy for her to gather fresh evidence of their attitudes. The National Curriculum for science at key stage 1 has requirements for childrens recording of their science activity. In some schools these tasks may become distorted by fulfilling the professional purposes of providing hard evidence for the assessment of childrens conceptual learning outcomes, rather than the scientific purposes of communicating scientific thinking with a relevant community. In short, do we get children to record science to try to prove that they know a particular thing, or to help them to develop the ability to communicate their own scientific thinking to others through their record making? In an episode of Karens teaching about materials, she noticed that the children tended to complete a standard worksheet about applying knowledge of the characteristics of materials to appropriate uses in an unthinking way. She felt that she was being drawn into spoonfeeding the pupils to get them to produce a satisfactory written record, rather than stimulating them to think for themselves about the scientific knowledge involved and how to record it. As an action step in her research, Karen asked them to create their own record of how they had classified a collection of interesting objects made out of a suitably limited range of different materials. She explained that the purpose of the record would be as an individual aid to remembering the result of their own classification after they returned from the imminent half-term break. The childrens responses were rewarding and opened up further questions for study. Surprisingly, it seemed that for some children at least, there had been an element of fear of failure in the pupils perceptions of the teacher expectation in the more structured task, which was reduced when they could determine how to represent their own thinking for themselves with a tacit grasp of their own criteria. There was evidence of imaginative and logical thinking by children about how to record what they knew, and when they compared each others diverse kinds of records, there was a spontaneous and self-critical awareness of the relative advantages of the different methods of recording that had been used. Karen felt that she had learned about how to avoid the unhelpful pressures on scientific recording, and about how to encourage it to be done in ways that enhanced childrens scientific thinking.

This was the starting-point for Stuarts extensive exploration of many contexts in which he compared different kinds of assessment of childrens scientific learning. He initially wanted more of the girls to be adventurous in their inquiry work, and also for more of the boys to be attentive in responding to test forms of assessment. But his perception of these gender differences was overtaken by his growing concern about the differences between informal, teacher assessment situations such as observation of childrens participation in inquiry learning and their responses to formal tests, particularly endof-key-stage National Curriculum tests. He became particularly interested in the importance of the context in which children reveal their science thinking, and accumulated evidence of how childrens use of question answering strategies can distort their ways of answering. For example, when the children were doing practical science investigations which they had designed and carried out themselves, their grasp of cause-and-effect relationships and of concepts was communicated relatively easily and straightforwardly. But then, in paper-based tests with questions about the same concepts and involving the same kinds of cause-and-effect patterns as the children had just been investigating, the responses were lower in qualities of accuracy and understanding. This was particularly noticeable during work on materials, when investigating the effect of wrapping a scarf around melting ice-cubes. Here the situation was complicated further by the counter-intuitive idea that a scarf would slow down rather than speed up the melting. Stuarts evidence showed that even those children who could use this idea to explain their observations and measurements in a practical context would revert to their intuitive view when answering questions on paper. Similar work across other topic areas, and with increasing attention to items in the QCA end-of-key-stage 2 National Curriculum tests, led Stuart to claim that written items in such tests are a much less valid and reliable way to assess childrens science abilities than teacher assessment of what a child says, taking account of the learning context. He also noted that the pressure on teachers for their Year 6 classes to get the highest possible National Curriculum test scores has strongly encouraged science lessons to become little more than endof-key-stage test practice. Therefore the teaching of science moves towards the greater use of behaviouristic approaches for strengthening the accurate recall of facts and away from construction of personal understanding. The important role of language in all of this is brought out in Stuarts study. After the publication in Primary Science Review of an article about part of Stuarts research (5), a defence of the QCA by its Principal Officer for science was published in a following issue. This article has, in turn, been criticised (6) as part of the ongoing debate.

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4. How can I help my Year 23 children to improve their ability to use their imaginative and lively curiosity about things and to propose and follow through investigations in a more scientific way, that is with more realistic plans and a better sense of how to realise their own investigative aim?
qualities. For example, the children would offer little toys to the guinea-pigs, hoping that they would play with them. At one point, a child wrote about the guinea-pigs: They are not like us. It was as if children were able to use the open-ended investigative opportunities provided by this way of working intuitively , to develop and achieve their own learning objectives ones which were unlikely to have been anticipated by the teacher, but which were of demonstrable significance to their understanding of living things. It seemed to have been a hard but important lesson that these children taught themselves, through several contributory but unplanned and apparently incidental experiences, to learn that they are not like us. This raised many issues about the limitations of the statesanctioned use of objectives in planning teaching. In its pure form, the objectives model of curriculum, and its tacit links with behaviourist assumptions about learning, tends to put blinkers on the teachers expectations of the learners achievements; it nudges them farther towards transmission ways of teaching, and objectivist methods of assessment. Some of Pauls professional dilemmas are between this planning orthodoxy, the National Curriculum and his search for more open kinds of planning and teaching, which he finds do enable the children to realise the kinds of science learning that he values. He has developed small group and individual forms of written science inquiry planning which give the children more responsibility and control, so that they are increasingly clear about what they will do, observe and measure in their investigation to get a valid answer to the question they have set themselves. Attempts to summarise action research projects are always somewhat unsatisfactory. Findings are amalgamations of personal theory with forms of practice that represent as much the teachers tacit know-how as the more explicit knowing that which can be presented here. Claims for improvement cannot be fully validated in a summary. When claims seem to be rather oversimplified, this can be because of loss of vividness due to the lack of detail. (Readers wishing to know more are cordially invited to contact Project members through the author of this account of EBT (contact details below). We would be happy to send detailed reports about any of the studies summarised here and/or to answer questions.)

When starting a new topic, Paul noticed how young childrens questions usually show their imaginative and playful ways of thinking. But, for him, a difficulty occurs when he tries to translate this interest into kinds of learning which are more specifically and more fully scientific. He wanted to get the children to be more realistic about what to aim for and to show a more structured quality in planning what to do, and to find things out for themselves. The main purpose of these investigations was for them to learn to be better inquirers. The factual learning and concept development which would, of course, also be taking place was less important, though treated with care. During a topic about living things, Pauls children were observing and discussing the guinea-pigs brought into the classroom. At first, the children did not raise many investigable questions, maybe because for many of them, this was their first direct contact with these animals and their preoccupation was to watch them closely. But with encouragement of various kinds, questions began to flow, such as: What is their favourite food? How far can they smell? What is their favourite kind of surface to be on? Which is the fastest guinea-pig? (7). It was this last question and the childrens proposed method of finding out: theyll have a race to the basket, eat the carrots, then eat the lettuce and then race back to the start, which provoked some of the most illuminating dilemmas for Paul. One of these was: should he disappoint their enthusiasm to make a racetrack with a finishing-line, by stopping this inquiry and simply saying it wouldnt work or should he permit them to go ahead and find their own disappointment that the guineapigs could not, even when a carrot was dangled under their noses, be enticed to race? He chose the latter. These events and others pointed unexpectedly to a growing awareness that many children think that the guinea-pigs possess some human
Which is the fastest guinea-pig?

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PART TWO: PARTNERSHIP RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
In EBT there is a partnership between a university tutor and several teachers. The broad unifying concern for all of us is the enrichment of young childrens learning to be more fully scientific in their thinking, and in their knowledge and understanding of the world. This concern has taken different but overlapping focuses for each teacher. As we supported each others individual projects, we tried to notice how we were using evidence of various kinds to achieve the improvements in childrens learning and our own professional developments, and also, latterly, how we could convey some of our own gains to others. So the Project fosters professional exchange at several levels within the group of Project teachers themselves; between Project teachers and their peers in their own schools; and between teachers from different schools, including here the use of the World Wide Web. Project funding releases all participants from small parts of their teaching duties to make it possible for us to meet at Nottingham Trent University to share evidence and discuss possible action steps in each others projects. Other ways of using the release time include observational visits to each others classrooms, and opportunities to read, write and reflect. My own role, as the university person, has been to facilitate, support and coordinate these developments for all Project members, while pursuing most closely the second aim of the Project to do with evaluating evidence-based teaching. It is important to compare the above account with other operational meanings of partnership in the many projects which currently include teachers and university researchers or policy-makers. Most of them involve teachers in restricted roles, and making intellectually minor contributions. This is consistent with a prevailing attitude, which teachers tend to perceive as a lack of trust in them by others. Having eliminated teachers influence over formal curriculum aims, content and assessment, policy-makers seem increasingly reluctant to leave teachers with control of pedagogy. And for their part, researchers are inclined to permit teachers to be partners in projects only as subordinates, for example, as little more than data gatherers (after training them in research methods), or as mere technical operatives in the classroom charged with the relatively uncritical adoption or application of theoretical developments and curricula from on high. From time to time, in doing their action research, the Project members examine the relevance and significance to the development of their practice of evidence of various kinds. The aim is to evaluate the idea in action , and mainly from the perspectives of teachers, of evidence-based teaching. A key question has been whether engaging teachers with evidence also entails engaging them in doing research. If so, does this mean that teachers need to become better users of others research or better able to be researchers themselves, or both?

The teacher members of EBT have demonstrated their desire and their capacities: 1. to respond energetically and imaginatively to challenges, both to change their teaching and to raise their personal, professional standards of practice, so as to improve the childrens learning of science in significant ways

when: 2. the context for change is sufficiently supportive to them in exercising a fair degree of control over such changes the stimulus and starting-point is a critical self-evaluation of their own practice within their current professional situation (rather than a decontextualised criticism arising from a deficiency model of teachers practice in general) the changes are ones which relate to their own central values as teachers, especially if the improvements identified lead to a reconsideration of these values the methods of working involve, firstly and mainly, the collaborative reflection on evidence gathered themselves of their own practice, together with constructively critical examination of the evidence and thinking of relevant others

3.

4.

5.

and what they can offer to their professional colleagues from this work is: 6. integrated, holistic accounts of their teaching improvements, which encompass: their aims and values, the significant particularities of their own professional context, their planning and pedagogical approaches, their evidence of classroom actions and of the learning gains of their pupils, as well as: personal embodiment of an inquiring approach to their own collaborative, reflective professional development (see (1)), in which evidence is harnessed to develop contextualised personal theory and practice that raises personal professional standards.

7.

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The EBT Project suggests that teachers can play a pivotal role in the raising of standards in action, not just on paper. To do this, as a first step , they should engage in seeking and using their own research evidence for developing themselves rather than be expected to be developed by having others research evidence presented to them. Furthermore, I suspect that it is only in the context provided by the former that activities such as the latter are likely to lead to development which enhances rather than diminishes the professionalism of teachers, and which therefore will lead to lasting and meaningful improvements in childrens learning. In the words of other teacher researchers, cited by Marion Dadds (8): We do not conduct action research simply to discover how better to implement a predetermined agenda. Rather we conduct it, first and foremost, to discover what we already value, what we ought to come to value and what we can, through improved practices, learn to value.

References
1 2 OVENS, P. (2000). Reflective Teacher Development in Primary Science. London: Falmer Press. DADDS, M. (1997). Continuing professional development: nurturing the expert within, British Journal of In-Service Education, 23, 1, 318. MURPHY, P. (1997). Constructivism and primary science, Primary Science Review, 49, 1, 279. SOLOMON, J. (1997). Is how we teach more important than what we teach?, Primary Science Review, 49, 1, 35. HARRISON, S. (2001). SATs and the QCA standards report, Primary Science Review, 68, 1, 289. HARRISON, S. and OVENS, P. (2002). The debate about SATs and the QCA standards report: a reply to Martin Hollins, Primary Science Review, 71, 32. WARING THOMAS, P. (2001). Becoming more scientific with guinea pigs, Primary Science Review, 66, 1, 214. DADDS, M. (1999). Teachers values and the literacy hour, Cambridge Journal of Education, 29, 1, 9.

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Investigable questions are those kinds of question for which answers can be reasonably sought by children through them carrying out relatively simple practical investigations of a scientific kind. This is in contrast to questions which are better (or only) answered by reading a book or asking an expert.

Weblink
The EBT Projects website can be visited at: http://education.ntu.ac.uk/Research/ebt/index.html

About the author

Peter Ovens is Principal Lecturer in Professional and Curriculum Development at Faculty of Education, Ada Byron King Building, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK. Tel: 0115 848 6757. E-mail: peter.ovens@ntu.ac.uk

Copying Permitted
The NFER grants to educational institutions and interested bodies permission to reproduce this item in the interests of wider dissemination.

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