NAME: Mark David C.

Ferriol DATE: 03/18/2024

PROGRAM & SECTION: BAELS 2-1

ASYNCHRONOUS TASK #1: “What Good is Science Education?”

Science as a Practice and Mode of Thinking

As this is a reflection paper, allow me to begin this essay with a little trivia about myself:
I have a heart for the arts and an eye for science. It is a common misconception that art is all
about feelings and flowery words. In fact, there is more science in art than meets the eye. For
instance, in writing traditional poetry, one should see to it that every line has a certain number
of syllables, each word is stressed in select places, and the poem follows a particular rhyme
scheme (Frog et al., 2021). In painting, on the other hand, there is a set of elements and
principles of design (Daley & Bryant, 2015) that one has to be knowledgeable about in order
to create masterworks like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. All these principles and elements of
design in painting, and metrics, versification, and rhyming patterns in poetry were derived from
an academic and scientific process. Thus in order for one to be an excellent artist, he has to
first be a scientist.

Since I was a child, science has always been my closest companion and confidant.
She knows all things I am curious about and to what extent I am willing to go to find out about
them. Looking back, I used to borrow my father’s phone and look up things on the internet
such as “how to increase my height”—and I knew how to filter the search results. As a young
skeptic, I was already aware of the credibility of information based on the results of peer-
reviewed studies. I did not easily buy into articles founded on mere conjecture and speculation.
As a matter of fact, virtually everything I am ignorant about, I turn to science for enlightenment;
and although superstition and sentiments are quite entertaining, I do not accord them much
trust. As testament to my loyalty to science, this essay was written following English
grammatical conventions discovered through observations of linguistic phenomena and
experimentation (Parker & Riley, 1994). To list all things I have acquired through science
education would render this essay stale and tedious, so to put it simply: Science education
has always been good and beneficial to me both as a practice and mode of thinking.

Science education is a two-way process that involves two actors: The educator and
the learner. In this set-up, the learner cannot learn if the educator lacks the ability to educate.
Likewise, the educator cannot educate if the learner lacks the ability to learn. It is in this
situation that the problem finds itself. Among the country’s current concerns in education is
students’ proficiency in science, with the Philippines ranking third-lowest out of 81 countries in
2022 (Chi, 2023). The factors contributing to this phenomenon include students’ metacognitive
reading strategies, their classroom and school experiences, their motivation, and their family
experiences and home learning resources (Calleja, 2023). From this, it can be inferred that,
instead of immediately focusing on science education, it would be relatively better for the mean
time to concentrate on the needs of the learner and implement more robust educational
policies that address the very roots of the problem. Only after such an overhaul of the system
we can open the table to the topic of empowering science education.

References

Daley, K. & Bryant, H. (2015). A brief history of the elements and principles of design.
https://westoshaart.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-brief-history-of-elements-and.html?m=1

Calleja, M. (2023). Addressing the poor science performance of Filipino learners: Beyond
curricular and instructional interventions.
https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=res_ak
i

Chi, C. (2023). Philippines still lags behind world in math, reading and science — PISA 2022.
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2023/12/06/2316732/philippines-still-lags-behind-
world-math-reading-and-science-pisa-2022

Parker, F. & Riley, K. (1994). Linguistics for non-linguists: A primer with exercises (2nd ed.).
Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0-205-15083-7

Frog, Grünthal, S., Kallio, K., & Niemi, J. (Eds.). (2021). Versification: Metrics in Practice.
Finnish Literature Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2fzkpt4