Presentation
Current directions in science education:
Challenges and opportunities
All societies are demanding more of their education systems. The ability to recall
a large body of knowledge is now insufficient. Education, in addition, must prepare
students to think critically and analytically and reason with the knowledge they are
acquiring. Such demands are reflected in the innovative US Next Generation Science
Standards (NGSS) and the 2015 PISA framework for Scientific Literacy, both of which
I was involved in producing. The US standards present science as a set of disciplinary
core ideas, eight scientific practices and seven cross-cutting concepts. The major
innovation is the focus on a set of eight scientific practices where argumentation is a
core feature. Both the NGSS and PISA define the outcomes of an education in terms of
a set of competence-based expectations of what students should be able to do as the
outcome of their learning experiences which represents a major challenge for school
science. In addition, digital technologies offer a range of affordances which school science has yet to exploit not least
the ready availability of information and educational experiences which pose a challenge to traditional means of
instruction and assessment. In this talk, I shall explore these issues and their implications.
Professor Jonathan Osborne is a visiting Professor to the University of Waikato. He holds the
Kamalachari Chair in Science Education at the Graduate School of Education, Stanford University.
Previously he held the Chair in Science Education at King’s College London. He was a co-author of
the report Beyond 2000: Science Education for the Future, a member of the US National Academies
Panel that produced the Framework for K-12 Science Education that is the basis for the new Next
Generation Science Standards, and he currently chairs the expert group that produced the framework
for the science assessments conducted by the OECD Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA) in 2015 and 2018. His research interests are particularly in the role of argumentation in science
and improving the teaching of literacy in science.
DATE/TIME: Wednesday 9 December, 2015: 11.00-12 noon
VENUE: Meeting Rooms A&B, Faculty of Education, Hamilton, University of Waikato
RSVP:
To [email protected]