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GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)

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I mean something very specific by the term “nature of science”, as the following points will
hopefully illustrate:
 it’s about the philosophical and practical understanding of the processes and reasoning of
science, including its nature as a very human endeavour
 it’s knowing what the difference is between hypotheses, laws and theories (and how most
science textbooks get this wrong) and what the characteristics of a good hypothesis are
 it’s about how the structures and processes of science are the way they are, in large part, to
account for our cognitive biases, and that unique subjective experience is not foundational in
science as it is in other areas of knowledge
 it’s about knowing that there is no one scientific method, but that there are many scientific
methodologies and that what makes an idea scientific is the goal of maximum explanatory and
predictive power combined with exquisite falsifiability
 it’s understanding that solid scientific ideas have many defined parameters – the more the better -
and that this is what separates them from pseudoscience, where goalposts are constantly shifted
(ever seen a psychic renege on a promise to read minds because the presence of a sceptic is
“disrupting the energy”?)
 it’s being able to explain the difference between induction and deduction, to characterise and
instantiate the types of inferential reasoning that are acceptable in science and what problems and
opportunities this presents in public understanding
 it’s realising that the search for certainty in much of science is a fool’s game, but to ignore levels
of confidence makes you a bigger fool.
 All the above and much more can be articulated and taught alongside traditional science content
but hardly ever is. The pressure of content-driven standards, in which factual content is pegged
out to signpost progress and the learning of which is the key indicator of success, is
overwhelming and simply crowds out what are seen as less quantifiable aspects of science.
 Even experimental work is all too often prescribed via worksheets that lay out methods to follow
and hypotheses for testing that leave little room for serious reflection, imagination or
understanding.
 Some (many) even contain phrases such as “has the hypothesis been proved?”, which shows a
miserable understanding of the nature of experimentation.
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 So discussion in classrooms about the nature of science is scarce because:
1) the nature of science is not well understood by science teachers or even scientists
2) the clear implication that without content knowledge in the nature of science there can be no
pedagogical content knowledge
3) science curricula rarely articulate exactly what skills or knowledge are constituent of an
understanding of the nature of science.
The Australian Curriculum has developed what it calls General Capabilities (GCs) in Critical and
Creative Thinking, which are quite well presented but in very general terms. How they link to
what is a very ordinary content-based structure is indicated by an icon – and that’s it. There is no
detail given and no guidance for developing PCK outlined, and no sense of how these GCs are to
be understood or delivered. Teachers need assistance to ask and answer pointed questions. How
do you teach about the nature of science? What are the techniques, strategies, opportunities,
unique mental processes to be aware of and best examples to do this within a curriculum that
does not acknowledge its importance, as many do not? This is a difficult challenge, and an
important one, as it is very often these themes that students find engaging and which provide a
narrative to their experience of science. It is almost farcical that these are seldom explicitly
outlined in programs of work. Knowledge of the nature of science is as least as important in
creating scientifically literate citizens as factual content knowledge – perhaps more so. Few of us
can claim a deep knowledge of all the scientific knowledge relevant, indeed critical, to our lives.
But at least through knowing something of the nature of science we can appreciate the epistemic
credibility of what comes out of scientific inquiry. The Health of Australian Science report
laments that students are bored with, and do not see the relevance of, science. Conversation
revolves around availability of teachers and delivery of standard courses, and curriculum design
remains driven by factual content. Meanwhile, the potential to create more engaged,
scientifically literate students who themselves might be more inclined to teach and communicate
science sits relatively untapped.
References:
https://theconversation.com/teaching-the-nature-of-science-and-keeping-students-engaged-7278
GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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Malik is a history teacher. He wants to teach his students about the Dust Bowl and isn't quite sure
about the best way to approach it. He's heard that constructivist teaching can help him, but he's
not sure what it is or how he can use it in his classroom.
Constructivism allows students to construct their own learning. Constructivist teaching is about
making good learners as opposed to simply giving students information. In a constructivist
classroom, Malik will want to have his students explore concepts in an organic way. His focus
will be on teaching students how to learn, instead of just giving them facts about history.
This all sounds pretty good to Malik, but he's not sure how to use constructivism in his
classroom. To help him out, let's look at the five major principles of constructivist learning and
how they can be used in the classroom.
Constructivist teaching is built upon five major principles, which explain how constructivist
classrooms are different from traditional classrooms.
These principles are:
1. Teachers Seek and Value Students' Points of View
Unlike traditional teaching, where students are expected to provide the one right answer the
teacher is looking for, in a constructivist classroom students are encouraged to elaborate on their
ideas and use evidence to bolster their opinions. Through supportive questioning, teachers can
get students to communicate what they're thinking and why.
2. Classroom Activities Challenge Student Assumptions
Through constructivism, students are encouraged to explore an aspect of something that they
haven't tried or thought about before. Whether that's a new product (such as writing a screenplay
instead of an essay) or a new point of view, constructivist teaching is about challenging and
broadening student views.
3. Teachers Pose Problems of Relevance
Constructivism is about exploring complex, real-world problems that allow students to engage
with the material. Tying learning to ideas or problems that relate to the students' lives and
interests can help bolster their motivation to learn and deepen their understanding of material.
4. Teachers Build Lessons Around Big Ideas
There are certain essential concepts that students need to learn, such as understanding cause and
effect, critically analyzing documents, or inquiry-based exploration. Lessons in constructivist
classrooms are built to encourage mastery of these essential concepts or big ideas.
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5. Teachers Assess Learning in the Context of Daily Teaching
Traditionally, teachers give information for a certain amount of time and then hand out a test to
see if students learned the content. In constructivist teaching, assessment is about spending time
every day focusing on what still needs to happen for student success. Assessments are often
authentic and in-the-moment, such as discussion questions or collaborative projects.
Science teaching is a complex activity that lies at the heart of the vision of science education
presented in the Standards. The teaching standards provide criteria for making judgments about
progress toward the vision; they describe what teachers of science at all grade levels should
understand and be able to do.
To highlight the importance of teachers in science education, these standards are presented first.
However, to attain the vision of science education described in the Standards, change is needed
in the entire system. Teachers are central to education, but they must not be placed in the
position of being solely responsible for reform. Teachers will need to work within a collegial,
organizational, and policy context that is supportive of good science teaching. In addition,
students must accept and share responsibility for their own learning.
In the vision of science education portrayed by the Standards, effective teachers of science create
an environment in which they and students work together as active learners. While students are
engaged in learning about the natural world and the scientific principles needed to understand it,
teachers are working with their colleagues to expand their knowledge about science teaching. To
teach science as portrayed by the Standards, teachers must have theoretical and practical
knowledge and abilities about science, learning, and science teaching.
The standards for science teaching are grounded in five assumptions.
 The vision of science education described by the Standards requires changes
throughout the entire system.
 What students learn is greatly influenced by how they are taught.
 The actions of teachers are deeply influenced by their perceptions of science as an
enterprise and as a subject to be taught and learned.
 Student understanding is actively constructed through individual and social
processes.
 Actions of teachers are deeply influenced by their understanding of and
relationships with students.
GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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THE VISION OF SCIENCE EDUCATION DESCRIBED BY THE STANDARDS
REQUIRES CHANGES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SYSTEM. The educational system
must act to sustain effective teaching. The routines, rewards, structures, and expectations of the
system must endorse the vision of science teaching portrayed by the Standards. Teachers must be
provided with resources, time, and opportunities to make change as described in the program and
system standards. They must work within a framework that encourages their efforts.
The changes required in the educational system to support quality science teaching are major
ones. Each component of the system will change at a different pace, and most changes will be
incremental. Nonetheless, changes in teaching must begin before all of the systemic problems are
solved.
WHAT STUDENTS LEARN IS GREATLY INFLUENCED BY HOW THEY ARE
TAUGHT. The decisions about content and activities that teachers make, their interactions with
students, the selection of assessments, the habits of mind that teacher demonstrate and nurture
among their students, and the attitudes conveyed wittingly and unwittingly all affect the
knowledge, understanding, abilities, and attitudes that students develop.
THE ACTIONS OF TEACHERS ARE DEEPLY INFLUENCED BY THEIR
PERCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE AS AN ENTERPRISE AND AS A SUBJECT TO BE
TAUGHT AND LEARNED. All teachers of science have implicit and explicit beliefs about
science, learning, and teaching. Teachers can be effective guides for students learning science
only if they have the opportunity to examine their own beliefs, as well as to develop an
understanding of the tenets on which the Standards are based.
References:
https://www.nap.edu/read/4962/chapter/5#30

Instructional materials can be classified by type, including print, visual, and audiovisual, among
others:

Print Textbooks, pamphlets, handouts, study guides, manuals

Audio Cassettes, microphone, podcast


GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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Visual Charts, real objects, photographs, transparencies

Audiovisual Slides, tapes, films, filmstrips, television, video, multimedia

Electronic Interactive Computers, graphing calculators, tablets

Instructional materials are the content or information conveyed within a course. These include
the lectures, readings, textbooks, multimedia components, and other resources in a course. These
materials can be used in both face-to-face and online classrooms; however, some must be
modified or redesigned to be effective for the online environment. The best instructional
materials are aligned with all other elements in the course, including the learning objectives,
assessments, and activities.
Instructional materials provide the core information that students will experience, learn, and
apply during a course. They hold the power to either engage or demotivate students. This is
especially true for online courses, which rely on a thoughtful and complete collection of
instructional materials that students will access, explore, absorb, and reference as they proceed in
a course.
Therefore, such materials must be carefully planned, selected, organized, refined, and used in a
course for the maximum effect. The planning and selection of instructional materials should take
into consideration both the breadth and depth of content so that student learning is optimized.
Instructors and/or instructional designers should cast a wide net and aim for a variety of
materials to include in their course. At the same time, they should be deliberate with these
choices so that the course has the appropriate combination of instructional materials. Below are
just a few categories of instructional content to include in an online course.
Lectures that resemble traditional instruction are acceptable in the online classroom; however,
the instructor should ensure that they serve a unique purpose among the other types of
instructional materials. Lectures, whether they are video- or text-based, should not be so lengthy
as to monopolize the learner’s time spent in the online classroom, and they should complement
the other instructional materials. In fact, instructors are advised to “chunk” or organize shorter
segments of lecture material logically throughout the course.
Tips on developing lectures:
GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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 Consider the appropriate scope and coverage of the content to convey; exclude irrelevant or
unnecessary information.
 Break up or group content into smaller, logical segments so students experience it more
efficiently.
 Pacing is very important during lecture recordings.
 Invite guest speakers to add variety.
 Integrate interactivity and opportunity for engagement wherever possible.
 Make sure lectures are accessible by providing transcripts and captions for all video content.
 Avoid long video lectures, as most students don’t finish watching them; mini-lectures from
five to ten minutes are more engaging.
Digital media encompasses all of the audio, video, and visual content including lectures that
instructors might want to put in their course. This type of instructional material engages multiple
learner senses, including sight, sound, and in some instances touch, where the media is
interactive.
Selecting digital media for a course requires that instructors consider certain aspects such as
technical feasibility for both the creator and the audience of the media. Other aspects to consider
include how to provide accessible content and whether to find existing materials or create
content (and the associated time-cost-benefit analysis).
Types of digital media:
 Images or screencaptures
 Videos or computer screencasts to demonstrate math, business processes, or art techniques
 Narrated PowerPoint presentations or other mini-lecture recordings using computer software
to record video and audio
 Movie clips to provide examples of concepts or metaphors for discussion
 Audio recordings of instructor explanations (i.e., podcasts)
 Videos or audio recordings of guest expert presentations or interviews
 On-location videos to demonstrate real-world settings or processes
 Learner-created video or audio materials
Per university, state, and federal policies and laws, all instructional content must be accessible to
all students. Most critically this includes all students with disabilities that could be visual,
auditory, physical, and cognitive in nature. Fortunately, accessible design that is implemented in
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the pursuit of such mandates has a secondary benefit of helping all students to learn on a more
equal footing.
This secondary benefit is the idea behind Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which assumes
that good design is inherently beneficial for all learners regardless of ability or background. To
this end, there are simple steps that online instructors can take that have a major impact on the
accessible design of their courses.
Tips for designing accessibility into online courses:
 Use templates provided by campus learning management systems (LMS) such as
Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Canvas as they have already been developed for accessibility.
 Carefully follow all directions in the LMS and include all requested information; e.g., image
descriptions for blind or visually impaired students using screen readers.
 Use tools such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word that can make tagged PDFs.
 Save and use original digital documents rather than using scans of documents whenever
possible, as they are not intelligible to screen reader software. If necessary, contact
the McBurney Center’s Document Conversion Service.
 Provide alternative means of access to all multimedia content in a course such as transcripts
and captions. If necessary, contact the McBurney Center’s Media Captioning Service.
 Include accessibility statements (or a statement to the effect that none could be found) for all
technologies required in a course.
 Select textbooks early – and ask about accessibility options for purchasers – to allow time for
conversion when accessible versions aren’t available.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructional_materials

The role of governments is key in mitigating the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
on education delivery and outcomes. Effective response guidelines for governments stress the
need to plan for long-term disruptions and strategic adaptation, and to coordinate, communicate
with and support the education workforce, including and especially the head teachers and
teachers. Much like the health response to the pandemic, an effective education response requires
planning for phases. At the onset of the emergency, most countries mounted a rapid response by
GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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leveraging technology to start home-schooling mechanisms that can help cope with lost
instructional time. The second phase requires policy planning for managing continuity of
instruction when schools reopen, including ensuring children return to schools, instruction takes
account of potential learning losses during time away from schools, and teachers and school
leaders are fully supported as they work to realise these goals.
In this blog I consider what these guidelines mean for Pakistan’s large, diverse, federated
education system. I argue that given the scale of operations and the nature of entrenched
inequities, the key guiding principles should be to address inequalities and to strengthen
decentralised governance and service delivery. Existing data, vulnerability assessments and rapid
evaluations can help inform policy for more effective COVID-19 response.
Multidimensional inequalities define the shape of the challenges faced by education systems
today
As a result of global school closures, it has become immediately clear that the children at risk of
dropping out and those who are likely to experience the most significant learning losses are the
ones from marginalised backgrounds. Poverty, gender and location are intersecting to entrench
exclusion for already-marginalised children. Existing data sources help establish the scale and
scope of the challenge.
Federal and provincial governments in Pakistan have moved quickly to start airing curricular
content for K-12 via television channels. This is the correct strategy, given televisions are much
more widely owned than radios: according to DHS 2017, 62.5% of the sampled households had a
TV compared with 11% who own a radio. However, these averages hide stark inequalities. For
example, in Punjab children in households in the poorest homes (only 17% of whom have TVs in
their homes) are much less likely to be able to benefit from this policy initiative than children in
the richest households (95% of whom have access to television). The numbers for Sindh are
similar: 96% of households in the top quartile have televisions, 20% in the bottom quartile have
televisions.
Accessing these opportunities and initiatives becomes more complex and unequal if priced
technologies such as cable channels or internet and smart phones are used: Less than 1% of the
poorest households sampled for Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) 2017 owned a
computer, and while 82% of them owned a cell phone, only 4% had access to internet. District
officials in Punjab share that internet and cable infrastructure is common and reliable in urban
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areas. Children further away from cities are much less likely to have access to instructional
content sent through smart phones and aired on cable channels. Officials distinguish between
parents who own smart phones and those who do not, a divide that is significant because many
government school teachers in Punjab are relying on WhatsApp for communicating with parents.
Parental occupations directly impact the opportunities children can take advantage of; during the
crop-cutting season, many in rural areas are likely to be helping their parents harvest crops
The gendered experience of exclusion from access to technology and the increased burden of
care on girls is a key dimension of inequality during this disruption. A recent blog about access
to digital learning demonstrates that girls are much less likely to have regular access to any form
of technology. Inequalities in access worsen for girls in rural areas and those in the poorest
households. The increased burden of care in the households during the pandemic is much more
likely to have hit girls the hardest, making it much more likely that they are effectively excluded
from accessing COVID-response measures around education. Globally, women and girls carry
out three times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work than men and boys, and this load is
likely to have increased during periods of school closures and lockdowns. As COVID-associated
health and economic shocks threaten to push millions into extreme poverty, girls are more at risk
of dropping out of schools.
Learning losses are likely to be unequal also
Being in school matters for learning. Research on teaching and learning in government schools
in rural Pakistan shows 10% learning gains after a year of regular schooling for children in
grades 3, 4 and 5. These gains are threatened by school closures for reasons listed above.
The World Bank has outlined three scenarios of learning losses that governments should prepare
for when schools reopen:
i. there is a loss of learning for all students due to school disruptions;
ii. the lowest performing children fall further behind while the well-performing children move
ahead – this is predicted based on the ability of the families to support children in keeping up
with reading and writing and access to assets such as televisions and a good internet or cable
connection;
iii. there is a sudden and large increase in numbers of children for whom learning falls because of an
increase in numbers of drop outs.
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Government schools in Pakistan are likely to find themselves facing the second or the third
scenario. Furthermore, provinces stand at various levels of capability for testing and also
delivering learning gains. Pre-pandemic learning data show much less variation in children’s
ability to read in local languages in the early grades across provinces (between 72 and 80% in
grade 1 were able read letters); there is much higher variation in skills in higher grades (68%
children in rural Punjab could read a story in local language, while only 40% in Sindh could do
so) (ASER, 2018). This is true for Maths and English literacy as well.
It will be imperative to assess children when they return to school to establish learning losses,
which are likely to vary for children given differential access to home support, technologies and
differential exposure to health and economic shocks.
Achieving the tasks set out above require very large education systems to be able to plan,
repurpose and implement fairly quickly. It becomes clear in conversations with various
stakeholders involved with government response to COVID-19 that provinces will be benefiting
now from reform efforts undertaken in the past couple of decades. Effective response to
emergencies is contingent on repurposing of existing structures that reach schools, teachers and
communities, and are responsive to local contexts and problems. In so far as this is true,
decentralised structures are better primed for the job. At the provincial and district level, this
requires:
 capacity for data collection and utilisation (including data on at-risk children, teaching and
learning);
 staffed structures in place that link higher tiers of governance with small clusters of schools;
 capacity to deliver on-site, continuous teacher training and support programs;
 flexible financing for schools.
Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have made the most progress so far on reducing teacher
shortages, building system infrastructure for on-site teacher training, putting in place the human
resource and technical capacity of education departments at the district level to support teachers
and head teachers, collecting teaching and learning data and utilising data for policy planning,
and making financing available to schools. Punjab and KP have added this depth to their district
level delivery and governance structures over the past decade: the tier of Assistant Education
Officers (AEOs) in both provinces are managing between 10 and 40 schools. In Sindh in
contrast, Talukka officers are managing up to 100 schools. Sindh and Balochistan may need to
GENERAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOL (8638)
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invest simultaneously in building these systems while planning for coping and continuance
strategies. All provinces will need to empower teachers and head teachers as key actors in their
response plans.
References:
https://www.coe.int/en/web/education/covid-19

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