The Aim of Science Education Worldwide

The aim of science education worldwide is to develop individuals who are literate in science and able to make sound decision related to science in their daily life. In my opinion, International Primary Curriculum (IPC) standard’s is designed to meet this aim as it is very authentic based and it focuses on making science relatable to students. Having the subject science and making it connected to real life, will spark students” interests to learn more.

For students to be scientifically literate, it is important for the students to be surrounded by situations that force them to think about how the world works. Furthermore, IPC makes education relevant to the society by exploring the issue with other subjects, in other word their content are integrated. For example in IPC there is a unit which focuses on “Chocolate". In science, students use the Chocolate unit to look at the energy values in foodstuff and to explore the effects of heating and cooling while in the subject of history, students will explore the discovery of chocolate, the period it was discovered, the motivation for discovery and the changing attitude to chocolate through the ages. Alternative conception is a situation in which students” ideas differ from those of scientists about a concept.

The teacher should assess and evaluate what a child’s concepts are prior to instruction as this is the framework that the child will use to make sense of new ideas and thereby build up new cognitive structures.Most scientific ideas are often counter-intuitive. Not only that, it is also complex and most scientific concepts involve abstractions and abstract thinking is not yet fully developed in children. Children uses the the basic method which is through all their sense to form concepts. The type of reasoning that took place in the scenario above is deductive reasoning. The scenario shows a top-down process in reasoning where from a general statement (the large parachute would fall the slowest), to a specific conclusion that the bigger canopy creates more air resistance was made.

Deductive reasoning is narrow in nature and is concerned with testing or confirming a hypothesis. The experiment was conducted to test whether the specific case (bigger canopy creates more air resistance) can be proven true through the theories and hypothesis.The disadvantages when a teacher only uses teacher centerd strategy is, first of all, it encourages students to work alone and they don’t learn to collaborate with other students. This is crucial for students as they might form individual conceptions about science and not knowing if they have misconceptions. Furthermore most teacher-centered instruction can be boring for students. Their minds may tend to wander, and they may miss important facts and disengage from lesson when they do not find the content related to them.

Lastly in a teacher-centered instruction students passively receive information, emphasis is on acquisition of knowledge, and teacher’s role is to be primary information giver and primary and evaluator. There is no room for student’s personal growth. This doesn’t allow students to express their opinions and direct their own learning.