Science as a Verb

Okay. I have been rummaging through tthe literature for the past few days and have come up with several tidbits of information that speak volumes. What annoys me is that very well funded research was required to come up with these gems. Really though, if you sat and thought for a moment or two, you could have come up with these points and used the grant money for a couple of weeks at your favorite all-inclusive for your whole research group.

Point one. As educators, we dont do very well at preparing our students for international tests like PISA. There could be a number of reasons for this. It could be that we dont teach as much Science. It could be that our teachers are not prepared to teach Science. Maybe, as educators we arent comfortable discussing the finer points of science with our students because our notion, of what science is, lacks. Perhaps its a combination of all these things.
In a study we recently completed, it turns out that all of the above are issues in our district. In addition to this we found other tidbits as well. All were consistent with what the literature indicates as problematic with respect to Science teaching.

Secondly, it turns out that if you want a student to become proficient at Science, you have to let him/her behave like a scientist - to model that kind of behavior. GENIUS! It seems to me that in order to do this you would have to be fairly scientifically literate yourself to promote acceptable modelling by your students.

Lastly and not surprisingly, teachers with Science training, tend to be better Science teachers. The literature is clear on this repeatedly. It only makes sense then that in Ireland, a country who performed as well as our district on PISA, 96% of their science teachers have Science degrees whereas only 8% of our teachers can make the same claim. Perhaps the correlation between a Science Degree and scientific training is weaker than one might imagine.

Our own study, called "the Platypus Precursor" is currently underway to identify the needs of our own Science teachers and to shed light on areas that might be improved upon. We now have reams of data about our own teaching staff and we realize that we cant draw any hard conclusions from it, even though the literature is in agreement. What we need is to cast our net wider. In one week that is exactly what will take place. On September 19, our assessment tool goes out to the entire province. The brass ring here is to identify the set of parammeters that contribute to success on tests like PISA.

Just a word or two about PISA. This test is based on skills and attitudes - as it should be!. Science without skills and attitudes is a mere collecion of facts without context. If this is the case then "Science" is a noun and therefore finite. In reality, Science is dynamic and although done often (verb), it is never completed.