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erm This has a knock-on effect insofar as if they've once given up the physical sciences, then it means that they've given up all hopes, when they leave school, of following a, a job or a profession, of courses in further or higher education, in technological, engineering subjects.
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And we are moving into an age, I think it must be recognised, where some of the traditional jobs for girls, for example, secretaries, shops, things of this sort, are actually being decreased because of the technological revolution, so bearing in mind that something like seventy per cent of women are actually in employment, it's very important that a girl, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, does not decide to cut herself off from the possibility of employment in these technological, engineering fields.
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So one thing that I'm sure we'll want to do is to support the work of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review.
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This is one of the projects that we've inherited, incidentally run by another member of Sussex University, Dr. Dick West, which is recommending, and it's getting a lot of strong support for this, that all children should have a balanced science education, including the physical sciences, up to the age of sixteen, and so that erm issue of choice will just not arise.
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It must be very difficult to be objective so far as the curriculum and level of knowledge of certain subjects are concerned.
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I would imagine that almost the easiest subject to start with is something like mathematics.
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Am I right in thinking you can define more readily whether you know something or don't know something in mathematics?
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Well, yes, mathematics is a nice, tidy, logical subject, and erm is a subject which erm terrifies a lot of children, and I think here particularly of the situation in primary schools.
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About erm eighteen months, two years ago a report was published, the Cockroft Report, this is the same Sir Wilfred Cockroft who's chairing the Examination erm Council, which looked into the teaching of mathematics at all level in the country and it was an extremely good report and a lot has followed from it.
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One thing that has not been taken up very thoroughly at this stage is the question of teaching of mathematics in primary schools, and this is a field that erm we decided at our last meeting that we must erm look into.
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So many children can be put off mathematics at the primary level, and it's important this doesn't happen.
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It's also important that erm children at primary level do learn something of calculators and the technology of mathematics.
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They see them at home, it's all around them, but the use of calculators for example has not really been built yet widely into the curriculum for primary schools, so that is an area that we shall be having a look at.
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And you're not worried that the use of calculators at too early a stage would make a child quite incapable of understanding what addition and multiplication and so forth is
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Well of course there, there is this worry, and, and they have to be used erm properly and in a helpful way.
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I think erm certainly for a child to rely entirely on a calculator for all mathematical operations would be a disastrous thing.
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On the other hand, used aright, it can help very much in the understanding of mathematical operations, because far more many and widespread examples can be dealt with very quickly, and they can for example erm get a feel of the result of multiplying or dividing or whatever it, it is, numbers of quite different sizes.
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So I think there is a lot of work to be done there, but as you rightly say, it has to be done carefully and one mustn't get the dependency on calculators which one does see around one.
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I've seen this in shops when somebody has to add a twenty p to seventy-three p and out comes the calculator
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Yes.
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and this is terrible.
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What about the skills which are very important but don't come as a formal part of any subject, the so-called communication skills?
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Are you thinking about those at all?
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Yes.
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I, I'm sorry to keep saying ‘Yes’ to everything that you're, you're suggesting, but yes, we are thinking about communication skills, particularly the encouraging and helping children to learn to write properly, I don't mean calligraphy, I mean actually write and express themselves on paper, oral communication, and things of this kind are things that we do want to pay attention to.
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I should perhaps explain in the context of your various questions when I say that erm we do want to become involved in these things, that, at this stage, and we've only held two meetings, we have just identified themes and general areas in which we want to work, and not precise projects or activities.
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That will be the next stage we shall be working on over the next half-year or so, and what we do want to do is to seek the help of all the local authorities and teachers in this work, because one should perhaps put things into context, we're a committee of twenty-two people, we have a staff, which when they're all fully employed they'll be about fifty, we have a budget of two million, but we have got to communicate with something like four hundred to five hundred thousand teachers, something like erm five thousand secondary schools and twenty-six thousand primary schools.
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So it is a major problem, this communication, and so we do have to work with local authorities, with teacher organisations, anyone who can help us in this task.
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Are you going to set up lots of projects?
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Well, we shall certainly be setting up some projects, but we would hope to use small-scale projects which are perhaps already underway in different local authorities.
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And we have also inherited a number of projects from the Schools Council.
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I've mentioned already the Secondary Science Curriculum Review.
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erm I won't list them all, but there are one or two interesting ones, for example, there is a project dealing with the relation between education and industry, the Schools Council Industry Project, which we wish to support.
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This is a project which is to help children at school understand something of industry and of the industrial world in which they're going to work, and also conversely to bring industrialists into involvement with schools themselves and with developing the curriculum.
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Lastly, Roger, your committee, it's a small committee, twenty-two members
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mhm
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tackling an immense task.
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Are you open to suggestions from the educational field as a whole as to what you should do and what's important and so on?
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Oh, indeed.
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I said earlier that we want to involve all aspects of the educational system, and for example we have already written to every local authority in the country, telling them about the general themes that we have identified as important, asking for their comments, for their suggestions of other matters that we should perhaps look into, and also asking for their help and involvement.
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So yes, we're very much open to suggestion.
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erm We shall have our own ideas, of course, and these are expressed at this stage in terms of these general themes, but we surely will respond when, if there are any suggestions coming.
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Roger, thank you very much, and good luck in this enormous project you're undertaking.
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That's all that we have time for today.
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Next Sunday we shall be looking at another live education issue.
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Until next week then, good-bye.
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Hello.
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Science is thought of as a subject that is difficult both to teach and to learn.
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The folklore in school terms is that you have to be a relatively ancient teenager to appreciate physics and chemistry and biology.
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Is this true?
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Today I have with me Dr Mike King, who's made a study of science teaching in schools.
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Mike, how early can science be taught to children?
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Well I think that rather depends on saying fairly concisely what it is we mean by science.
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If in a sense it means how early can you teach children facts and contents and very straightforward knowledge, then I think the answer is not very early at all because it may be fairly meaningless that you could teach a child to repeat Newton's law, perhaps the same way as you could teach him to repeat the eleven times table, but without a good concept of number or what Newton meant.
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It's probably something they could learn off parrot fashion, but doesn't have any actual meaning for them.
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But if you look at science as a way of exploring their world, a world they can structure their curiosity about aspects of the physical world, about aspects of the environment, then I think we can do it very early indeed, probably from the time children can come to school at the age of five and from reception classes onwards.
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In fact, we do run a project which looks at the ways science can be taught in the first school, which has been very surprising to me and many of my colleagues by what can actually be done with children in the ages of five to seven.
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For most young children in that age group, the world's a magic place and we traditionally like to teach them nature study and flowers and cuddly hamsters and rabbits in school, and that's the nature table syndrome, and that's great and I'm not knocking that at all.
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There is so much opportunity for children to look at the nature of the physical world around them which isn't taken advantage of, and which could be, and I think that may have something to do with the attitude of teachers as much as the attitude of children.
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But erm they're tremendously curious about the nature of the world around them and they're certainly capable of, if not understanding why, exploring what.
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I took my godson, Dominic Robinson, round my laboratory the other day, which is a physics laboratory, and he enjoyed it immensely and asked a number of questions, and was absolutely intrigued and fascinated by the various bits of wires and plugs and so on like that, and he asked me the sort of questions that I don't think I would expect sometimes my undergraduates to ask.
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They were perhaps stemmed from innocence, but they were very searching and very real questions, and he was obviously very excited to ask them and to listen to some of the answers.
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Do you think we perhaps put kids off an interest in science by our sort of insistence that they have to have a solid understanding of Newton's laws and all sorts of principles, and we lose the magic too early?
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Yes, I'm sure we do, and I think that's to do with our notions of what science is.
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There's a mystique which has built up about it.
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Anybody who's worked in graduate or postgraduate level in science likes almost to continue that mystique.
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Yes, we do put children off by being rigid because a child, I am sure, doesn't see the world in a rigid way.
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What's out there is all out there.
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Bits of his universe are to do with art and colour and drawing.
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I mean if you watch a child, and I have a seven year old boy, playing stacking cards or dominoes is the current thing in our house, watching them stack them and then knocking them off and watching them fall and the way they fall, the amount of work which is involved there in structures and forces and the nature of gravity and the way things behave under gravity fascinate them.
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The problem, of course, is most of us couldn't give a sensible reply to the very searching questions they ask, so we tend to say something like ‘that's a fascinating questions, but you'll have to wait till you're older and ask a scientist’.
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That's not the children's mistake, that's ours, because we couldn't actually for the best part respond in a meaningful way.
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And in another sense what we don't do often is to actually recognize the significance of the child's question because of the language he puts it in.
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He asks something which, you know, I mean the way they do, what is life, and you wouldn't know — unless you're perhaps trained or awake to the significance of what the child is actually asking — you wouldn't know how to respond to that, so you tend to put it off.
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You mentioned that schools are quite good at biology, that they have guinea pigs and they have growing plants and so forth, and I think you hinted at the fact that they perhaps are not quite so good at maybe the harder sciences, we might call them, of physics and chemistry.
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Is that the case and, if so, what can we do about it at an early stage?
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I believe that is the case, and I believe that again is a reflection of us as adults erm and not an indictment of teachers.
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They show great pedagogic skills in almost every aspect of school life.
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Most of us, as people who live in this world, are interested in our environment, and even if not young we certainly grow to appreciate it and to learn a bit about flowers and the way animals live and work in our garden and watching David Attenborough on television and erm we have a genuine interest because as part of this world we know it and come to understand it, and probably feel, therefore, if even if you're not a biology specialist, which you certainly don't have to be by any means, when a child asks a question about, you know, ‘where do the flies go in winter?’ and ‘why's the hamster gone to sleep for three months?’we feel more capable of answering it because we're closer to it ourselves and those are the sorts of questions that people told us.
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When a child asks a question about something dropping from a height — does it get faster and it falls for longer and longer?— that probably is a question that most teachers who are not trained in the physical sciences just cannot answer.
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What can we do about it?
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I think at the end it must come down to two things; one basically a change in attitude — we have to come to recognise that we live in a very, very technological society, that most of us were born before man walked on the moon, but the kids in school were born in an age when man had walked on the moon ten years ago and they live in a world which is very scientific, and we have to recognise that — and the other one is practical sense, I think, where we really have to look seriously to in-service training of teachers, a) and b) we have to look carefully at the way we train teachers now.
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In many institutions which train primary and first school teachers, the teachers themselves have an option as to whether they can do a science course or not and then even if they do it it's usually very biologically biased erm towards the natural sciences.
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At Sussex we actually make a third of the time they spend on the university component of their courses compulsory work in science — that is to say every student does it — so we can actually do something about it practically by looking at our processes of initial training and coming to realise what an important section of the world this is and training teachers accordingly, and not to leave it at that but to continue with erm progressive and planned in-service training of teachers.
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Our own experience from several of the projects that we've been looking at which are in-service type projects, is that when we do train teachers and when we do put an investment in it, we see the pay-off in the schools that physical science does get done in schools, it is fun and it is exciting.
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It's when the teachers think this is a boring, mundane, difficult thing to do, then that tends to be put over to the children and of course the disaster is that the children will believe it, and it if the children will believe it then we grow up in a highly technological society producing very few technologists or scientists.
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What you describe does sound a little bit like a chicken and egg situation from the point of view that I think you were saying that erm many teachers are ill-equipped, actually, to teach erm physics, perhaps, and chemistry, whereas they are a little bit better able to get across fundamental ideas in biology, and in a sense because of this they are going to produce another generation who perhaps have very ill-founded ideas of these basic sciences and so on and so forth, and somehow one's got to cut into this cycle and actually improve it, improve the output somehow.
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Yes, the chicken and egg syndrome is interesting because and I agree it is a viscious circle, but in fact you don't make new omelettes unless you do break some eggs, and I think the time has come to break some eggs and I think that's what I'm advocating is that it will come from the teacher because the teacher is the guiding light of what happens in the classroom, and if the teacher has it in the back of their mind there will be no science, then there will be no science.
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If, on the other hand, the teacher has it in the back of their mind always to be aware of the possibility of bringing into the work that's going on in the classroom and bringing all they're usually very excellent pedagogic skills to bear on it, aspects of the physical sciences, so that the children can get an early and meaningful introduction to it, then it will happen.
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The question is how do you break into the cycle and make that happen, and I think the answer is, as I said, in two ways — one by making teachers more aware during their period of initial training, either at college or at university or polytechnic, and secondly by looking very carefully at the amount and type of in-service training erm that goes on for teachers once they've left college and are in the schools.
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Essentially what you're saying is that a teacher who's actually teaching you ought to be able to say to that teacher ‘look, here's a package, if you like, that you can insert into your range of skills, and these are of things that you can do with children which are worthwhile doing and fairly easily for you to acquire skills yourself, and they will be very good and helpful for the children’.
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Well I'd only say that initially erm because then what you end up with is a sort of lucky dip which every now and then somebody will remember the bag of science tricks that somebody's taught them and dip into.
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Now I think that's better than nothing, but I think one has to take it a stage further than that and say that erm the concepts and the processes in science do build logically one upon the other, in a coherent and meaningful way, and that's important for teachers to appreciate what that meaningful sequence is and that, you know, the lucky dip idea is, as I have said, better than nothing, but it's so much inferior to the notion that teachers should be aware that there is a progression in science and that they can teach children progressively from a very early age onwards and build meaningful knowledge upon meaningful knowledge.
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Is there anything that parents can do?
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Christmas is coming up and there are chemistry sets in the shops.
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Do these make good gifts from a scientific point of view?
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Well they're a lot of fun and kids love them.
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As I commented a little earlier to somebody, I still haven't quite forgiven my mother-in-law for the chemistry set she bought my seven-year-old.
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He is absolutely amazed by it and spends lots of time in a garage at the back, which actually means that I spend an awful lot of time in that garage in the cold too!
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Yes, they are good sets and they do they are exciting for children.
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