Improving Science Education: The Contribution of Research

by Robin Millar (Editor), John Leach (Editor), Jonathan Osborne (Editor)

This book takes stock of where we are in science education research, and considers where we ought to be going. With contributions from an international group of science educators, it explores whether the research effort in science education has contributed to improvements in the practice of teaching science and the science curriculum.

Contents:
Researching teaching and learning in science --
Teaching situations --
Why things fall: evidence and warrants for belief in a college astronomy course / Nancy W. Brickhouse, Zoubeida R. Dagher, Harry L. Shipman, William J. Letts --
Designing teaching situations in the secondary school / Andree Tiberghien --
Assessing and evaluating --
Formative assessment and science education: a model and theorizing / Beverley Bell --
National evaluation for the improvement of science teaching / Bjorn Andersson --
Developing science teachers --
Learning to teach science in the primary school / Hilary Asoko --
Managing science teachers' development / Justin Dillon --
Theorizing learning --
Status as the hallmark of conceptual learning / Peter Hewson, John Lemberger --
Analysing discourse in the science classroom / Eduardo Mortimer, Phil Scott --
Reviewing the role and purpose of science in the school curriculum --
Providing suitable content in the science for all curriculum / Peter Fensham --
Interesting all children in science for all / Svein Sjoberg --
Making the nature of science explicit / Richard Duschl --
Science for all: time for a paradigm shift? / Edgar Jenkins --
Science, views about science, and pluralistic science education / Stephen P. Norris, Connie A. Korpan --
Renegotiating the culture of school science / Glen Aikenhead --
Researching science education --
Research programmes and the student science learning literature / Gaalen Erickson --
Goals, methods and achievements of research in science education / Richard Gunstone, Richard White --
Didactics of science: the forgotten dimension in science education research? / Piet Lijnse --
Policy, practice and research: the case of testing and assessment / Paul Black.

366 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Professor Robin Millar is a member of the Department of Education at the University of York, England.

He came to York in 1982, after 8 years teaching physics and general science in schools in the Edinburgh area. Before that he had graduated in Natural Sciences from Cambridge (Part II in Theoretical Physics), done a PhD in Medical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, and trained as a science teacher at Moray House College.

He is Chair of the Departmental Research Committee, and he has directed (or co-directed) several large science education projects, most recently as co-ordinator of the Evidence-based Practice in Science Education Research Network, which was part of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme.

He has been involved in several major curriculum development projects, including Salters Science, Salters Horners Advanced Physics, AS-level Science for Public Understanding and A-level Science in Society. He co-directs the Twenty First Century Science project, which has developed a suite of GCSE courses with a scientific literacy core, designed to provide a more flexible set of options for schools and students.