Uh oh. Science education in British schools is in trouble, say the BBC:'Too few' practical experiments in science lessons
A combination of curriculum pressure and over-assessment is strait-jacketing science teachers and limiting the amount of time spent on vital classroom practicals, according to a survey...96% of the 1,339 science teachers and technicians surveyed said they were in some way hindered from undertaking science practical work.
One answer is that practicals teach you experimental skills that you'll need if you want to do research. That would be good if it were true, but it's not. I went to a good school and we had many practicals, but as far as I can remember not one of them was useful to me when studying science at university or as a researcher. In physics we did stuff with springs and pendulums. None of the physicists I know have touched one since school. In biology, I looked at plenty of yeast down a microscope, and counted a bunch of shells on a beach, but not once did I run a Western blot or do some PCR, basic techniques that almost all biologists actually use in real life.
Maybe practicals serve to "help students to develop skills such as observation", as 82% of the polled science teachers think? If so, they are not very good at it: what usually happened at my school anyway was that most people's experiments wouldn't work for whatever reason, so instead of observing and recording the actual results, people looked up what the answer was meant to be and fudged their data to fit. Even when everything did work this didn't teach us to observe, because we already knew what to expect, so it simply confirmed that we'd done it right.
Perhaps they're there to help us "develop an understanding of scientific enquiry" (80%)? I hope not, because doing real science is almost exactly the opposite of doing a practical. You don't get told what to do, you have to decide what to do in order to answer a question; you don't get told what methods to use; you don't know what the answer should be; and you don't know that your experiment will even work, because no-one has done it before.
In my experience practicals succeed at doing one thing: they make science lessons less boring. They're essentially entertainment. This is not a criticism - anything that keeps kids interested in science is a good thing, and a well-run practical is a lot more interesting than a textbook will ever be. So they're important. But we shouldn't pretend that practicals actually show people how to do science.
For that matter, though, neither does anything else: university practicals ("labs") don't either, although they're more likely to involve useful experimental techniques. Doing science is a skilled activity, like swimming: you can't be taught it in the abstract. A good teacher might help by holding your hand and making sure you don't sink, but ultimately you learn by diving in and actually doing it.
5 comments:
I can remember almost nothing about school "practicals" but I got a hell of a lot out of my university labs. Chemistry lectures, for instance, were terminally boring, but the labs were the real McCoy. You either could or could not get your syntheses to work; you could, or could not, identify the three cations in a mixture, and then assay them quantitatively. And you became familiar with the properties of chemicals: calling Chemistry "stinks" contained a fair bit of truth. Phys Chem lab was less fulfilling - there was far too much of a tendency to accept uncritically whatever numbers came out of the instruments. Though I suppose that that might have been good training for some research labs?
I enjoyed Physics labs too, but got the impression that I might be in a minority - lots of people seemed to have trouble getting the kit to work.
"what usually happened at my school anyway was that most people's experiments wouldn't work for whatever reason, so instead of observing and recording the actual results, people looked up what the answer was meant to be and fudged their data to fit."
How is this not like real science? :)
I kid. Sort of.
At my school, experiments more or less ended in second year (in old money - Year 8 now). After this we did intellectual excercises based on data gained through book-learning.
I have twice had to deal with students (aged ca 20) acting increasingly oddly, later to be diagnosed as schizophrenic. The most peculiar intellectual behaviour that both of them showed was to read a problem that they were required to solve, and then complain about its wording. The complaint would show a preposterous lack of a sense of proportion, but be just about logically defensible. As an invented example - suppose it was a problem about springs (of the sort you mentioned in the context of "practicals"). My mad laddies would say "It doesn't say we are to apply Newtonian mechanics - why shouldn't I use Relativistic mechanics?" So, in general, they were complaining that every commonplace assumption that was implicit in the problem was not explicit. It was no use explaining that if everything were to be made explicit, the problem would be the size of a novel - they felt justified in looking at the problem as posed as some sort of a plot against themselves. Trying to teach those two was most unsettling, especially since they would occassionally find an omission that it was legit to complain about. Poor sods. It was heart-breaking when the penny dropped that they were not merely eccentric, but ill, and getting worse. At least I spotted it more quickly the second time.
A couple of my colleagues were remarking the other day that never again will they do a class practical while their lesson is being formally observed (by inspectors, or by colleagues for perfoemance management). This has nothing to do with safety or with the teachers' views on the value of practical work in science lessons. It is purely and simply because the focus of all lesson observations (in our establishment at least) is to see learning taking place and it is felt that this won't happen during practical work, the observer needs to see pupils in some sort of activity where words are writetn or spoken, or boxes are ticked, to prove that they know something they didn't know half an hour (or less) ago. The issue of whether or not whether or not the new skill or knowledge (not that we have much emphasis on that nowadays) has been retained a month, a week or even a day later, is irrelevant to the box-ticker observing the lesson, who can leave safe in the knowledge that they have done their bit to uphold standards and improve attainment in our schools.
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