Research on Science Education

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Slide 16

What can we do to improve?

Science of learning

Speaker's notes:

The science of learning, which has progressed substantially in the last quarter century, offers the promise of more effective science teaching. In fact, science education is driven by reform efforts that are said to be derived from the science of how people learn. However, how people learn is a research area of great ferment, far from settled at the level of basic research, and hardly offering direct, inevitable paths from the lab to the classroom. Extrapolations from basic research and theory on how people learn to science standards, curricula, and pedagogies are, at their best, testable hypotheses about what works in education. At their worst, they are cartoon versions of the underlying science and its applications, presented uncritically, and offering little more to educators and policy-makers than a license for anything goes.