How much science education do kids need? Here’s a useful idea: ”I think every kid in primary school should know approximately how all the things in his house work,” says Barry Marshall, an Australian who won the Nobel Prize for science in 2005. Professor Marshall said he experimented with magnets, batteries and as a child. “A lot of kids just don’t get that exposure in the home, so it has to be done at school,” he said.
An outline of Australia’s new K-12 science curriculum was released this week “calling for a curriculum that was not ‘knowledge-heavy’ or too dependent on ‘pencil and paper testing,’” the newspaper The West Australian reports. Professor Marshall tells the paper “the testing of science skills needs to be part of it and not downgraded just to keep everybody with this false level of confidence that they know it when in fact they don’t.”
“I’m not one of these people who think it’s a strain on kids to be testing them,” he said. “I think there has to be some testing otherwise there’s no objective way of measuring whether some kids are good at science or not,” said Marshall.
I agree! Kids don’t get enough science education and VERY little of that comes from the home. This makes it all the more important for teachers to make sure our kids are exposed to science.
An excellent way to do that is to sign up for Steve Spangler’s Experiment of the Week. You’ll get – absolutely FREE – an experiment, every detail explained in both words and video.
I signed up for it last spring and it’s been AWESOME. Teachers AND parents would be able to use it.
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment-of-the-week.html?source=blog
Consider for a second what would happen if a student knowingly ingested an infected water sample in science lab on your watch. He’d become violently ill, and you’d likely never teach in the public school system again. Not coincidentally, that’s one strategy Barry Marshall used to win a continuation grant: When antacid producers tried to undermine his ulcer research, he induced a stomach ulcer in himself with H. pylori bacteria to show that it wasn’t caused by stress. This sort of bravado labels one a troublemaker in most major research institutions, let alone K-12 schools, so I doubt that Marshall will gain much traction with this one.
That’s a great story, Ms. Miller. And your point is well-taken. I’m not sure Marshall is advocating that level of hands-on science instruction, however. That said, I had a number of misadventures doing hands-on science at home and survived. Barely. I clearly remember learning about the difference between alternating and direct current with the aid of a battery, a wall socket and a butter knife. That quickly turned into a hands-off experiment. Way off.
“Hands-on” doesn’t mean “check your common sense at the door”. Certainly there is plenty of latitude to allow kids to explore the world around them while still keeping them reasonably safe.
Recently, I tried to recall what topics my elementary & middle school science classes had covered to help me in planning my daughter’s homeschool curriculum. The ONLY thing I could remember was a unit we did at a nearby pond for a month in 5th grade. I can also recall hands-on science stuff I did with my Brownie troop or with my family. But all the textbook stuff has been long forgotten (which is why I always do so lousy on the science portion of “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” despite the fact that I studied Human Biology at Stanford)
Agree Crimson Wife. I always wonder why there is so much emphasis on hands-on in elementary school vs middle school? Get a solid foundation in elementary school and then go wild with hands-on in middle school.