Reforming school science education
Posted by Richard Pike on Fri 28 Nov 2008Categories: Education , RSC in the media | [3] Comments
Hello, I’m Richard Pike, chief executive of the RSC. I’ve decided that my inaugural blog post will explain our campaign to reverse the appalling decline in school science exam standards.
I’m very concerned about the disappearance of problem-solving, critical thinking and mathematical manipulation from school science examinations, and am campaigning to raise awareness of, and ultimately reverse, this unacceptable trend.
In June 2008, we launched a competition - The Five Decade Challenge – to test school pupils’ ability to answer chemistry questions from the 1960s to the present day. As it happens, the older questions involve a number of steps for their solution, although the individual steps might be quite simple. The real challenge was to get pupils to think logically. This contrasts with current questions that are often single-step, and have clues to the solution (eg what is the metal in sodium benzoate? – with Na given in the formula).
The results showed a serious deficiency in the problem-solving and mathematical abilities amongst pupils in UK schools. This adds to a growing body of evidence that dedicated teachers are working under a system which encourages teaching to the test and which fails to meaningfully differentiate pupils’ performance.
I have set up an electronic petition on the 10 Downing Street website to demand that the government reverse the decline in standards of school science examinations.
The report and the exam challenge it is based on are contentious issues, and have attracted much praise and criticism. Below I’ve decided to post some of the feedback as comments to this post – both the good and the bad.
Fri 28 Nov 2008 at 15:23
A Head of Chemistry emailed me this comment:
“Thank you for the report on The Five Decade Challenge, which is interesting reading. I certainly find GCSE teaching far less satisfying than I did when I started teaching. There is no doubt that the content is now quite superficial.
We are now becoming concerned about the ability of our AS students to cope with much of the AS syllabus, with the calculations proving particularly challenging for many of them. This is partcularly noticeable this year, with the first cohort from the new GCSE and is despite the fact that many of them are studying AS maths in this high-performing girls’ grammar school.
I wish you success with this vitally important campaign.”
Fri 28 Nov 2008 at 15:32
A comment I received by email:
“I have just retired after 34 years teaching chemistry in UK. When I started, A grades at A-level were like gold-dust. To get a B grade you had to have knowledge and understanding and an ability to use them to process new situations. Nowadays, teaching is like turning a handle and watching the A grades pouring out.”
Mon 15 Dec 2008 at 17:14
I’m a science education consultant working internationally and I see regularly the consequences of countries that still operate examination systems (and set papers) that are – thanks to our past global influence – identical to what we were doing pre-GCSE.
The widespread complaint (from universities and employers) is that while their school leavers may obtain high marks in the chemistry examinations, they cant DO chemistry. Another (associated) complaint is lack of the kind of techological flexibility that modern economies demand because the education system promotes learning without real understanding and problem solving simply by the application of standard algorithms.
(Incidentally, the great book – A New Certificate Chemistry – by Holdernes and Lambert, which supported (excellently), this kind of chemistry is still in print (Heinemann). It was written in the late forties I think. It still serves these countries well.)
The second problem faced by the countries I work with is their increasingly high failure rates. This they attribute to poor teaching. But there is another reason – the expansion of the system to admit a much wider range of students into secondary education. Had we stood still in the sixties the same would have happened here.
So while I share your view (and have always held it since I fist taught GCSE in the mid eighties) that the high fliers are not being pushed hard enough, particularly in quantitative work, it is important to realise that the primary objective of the system and its examinations is no longer to make young chemists but to create balanced flexible individuals able to serve well, and benefit from, the knowledge economy.
And in this I think we are probably beginning to do quite well. I note with interest that in the recently released 2007 TIMSS comparison, England has the highest scores in Grade 4 and 8 (in both mathematics and science) among those countries that have chosen a largely non-selective educational path. (You may argue that we should still have a selective system like Singapore, the TIMSS number 1, but that is a different debate.)
One final point – I think in your analysis of why results were getting better you missed the main and most obvious one – we (ie the schools, the teachers, the book writers, etc) are simply getting better at it. This is a pattern that you see universally in the decades following a curriculum change. First a slight dip and then a steady rise. You always see it.
I sympathise very much with your efforts but I would sympathise much more if your analysis had greater depth, if you had looked at our system in a more international context, had recognised (and reported on) the immense progress made in creating chemistry literate school-leavers generally over the last 30 years, and had your ‘Way forward’ included some discussion on how the the chemistry sector might better adjust to the demand by the economy for a broader and more flexible science foundation in schools.