Aims: High hopes for teaching Science

Amis are the higheat expectation or general purposes you have for yourself, your students your school ,
and your community. The often are very broad and philosophical, and may never be fully achieved. Amis
tend to ask such broad question as:

What are the purposes of the public schools and science education?

What is it that we want our students to become?

How should the ways children develop and learn influence what and how we teach in science?

How your answer these broad question and others like them helps shape how you view science
teaching. They are your philosophy of science teaching, or your aims. Because these aims are so broad,
some may take more time to achieve than the years you have the children in your elementary “desired
states” or aims of science education from the National Science Teachers Association’s Porject Synthesis:

1. Science can help children to meet their personal needs-help them maintain healthy bodies,
make “smart” consumer decisions, and use a variety of skills to gather knowledge for personal
use.
2. Science can help children to become informed citizens prepared to deal responsibly with social
issues- prepared to vote intelligently on science-related concern such as energy and the
enviroment , to participate in responsible community action and to recongnize that solving one
problem can create new problems.
3. Science can provide children with the opportunity to learn scientific ideas and processes from a
wide variety to interesting topic selected from the life , physical , and earth science . It can help
them develop skill in gathering, categorizing , quantifying , and interpreting infromation.
4. Finally , science can help children to make informed decisions about careers related to science
and technology-help them get a “feel” for jobs in these fields, become familiar with
qualifications for entry , and recognize the role of sceintific and technological careets in society
and how their lives are affected by persons in these careers.

You may find aims for your science teaching in publication from national science tecaher
organzation (i.e NSTA , AAAS,etc), your state education departement or local school board, or a
science text book. They can provide you with a broad general direction for your science teaching.
After that beginning, you will need to make your planning more specifically geared tp your
philosophy, to the philosophy of the school and community, where you tecah, and aspecially to the
needs interests and abilites of the students you have in your class room. More specific goals and
objects to meets these criteria.
Goals: Can Your Students Achieve Them This
year?
Two of the criteria for identifying and usig goals in your science teaching should be the to this
question.

Using textbooks effectively

You may think it unusual to have a section on using textbooks but textbooks are central to science
teaching. In spite of some common myths, textbooks in and of themselves or not bad, most good
teachers use textbooks, and textbooks can be used to enhance learning.

The majority of teachers use textbooks. In a 1985 survay, Iris Weiss found that 93 percent of science
teaching in grades 7-12 used a published textbooks. Interestingly , the majority o science teachers
did not consider textbooks quality to be a significant problem in their schhols. The most highly rated
aspects of science textbooks were their organizations, clartity , and reading level. We should not
here that a number of individuals and groups do see problems with quality and useablitily of
textbooks.

Since the 1980s the prevailing wisdom in science education was that programe should be
activitybased abd not textbooks dominated. Research shows that the oppostie in case-teachers are
using fewer activities and relying more on the textbooks . Use of textbooks is necessitated by the
need for science teacher to plan for several subjects, the reduction of budgets , and the scheduling
of scienec classes in nonlaboratory rooms.

Our purposes in this section is to assits you in becoming and intelligent users of the textbooks. That
is, to help you recognize the potentials and limitations of textbooks , and to use them in enhence
learning.
The section relies heavily on the research and writing of “Kathleen Roth and Charles Anderson “ of the
institute on Research for theaching and leraning , Michigan State University.

Science teachers use textbooks in several ways . Textbooks help teacher make decisions about the
curriculum. Questions about topics , activities of coverages , depth, sequence , and emphasis are
answerd by reference to the textbooks. Although the textbooks, helps teachers with the efficiency of
decision, they do not necessarily help to makes the best decisions for students. Teachers must carefully
mediate those decisions.

Textbooks helps teachers select teaching strategies. Again this use of textbooks has both advantages
and disadvantage. The clear advantage is efficiency. It takes considerable effort to manage in
activitybased program. It is much easier to have students read the textbooks . The disadvantage is that
reading the textbook may not facilitate students leraning. We will discuss this in greater detail later.

Textbooks provide scientific explanations. Descriptions of key concepts and infromation are usually
straightforward and succinct in textbooks. Providing students with good description of scientific ideas is
difficult; It is especially difficult when teachers are teaching out of their discipline. So textbooks can be
useful resource for the scientific explanations.

You can see that textbooks are quite helpful. Given the function of textbooks. It is easy to see why the
majority of teachers rely on them. What do science teachers need to understand in order to use
textbooks more effectively? First in importance is to understand how students use textbooks.

Several times we have pointed out that students have prior knowledge about science. Often this
knowledge is inadequate or incomplete whwn compared to scientific knowledge, thus the label
misconceptions. Students prior knowledge is important to understand when considering students
reading strategies. What happens when students are asked to read a text that has explanations about
phenomena.