Research in Science Education in Europe: Retrospect and Prospect

Research in Science Education in Europe: Retrospect and Prospect[1]

Edgar W.Jenkins, Centre for Studies in Science and Mathematics Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.

INTRODUCTION

I want to begin by expressing my thanks, first, to the European Science Education Research Association for the invitation to give this lecture and, secondly, to those colleagues, many of whom are present in this room, who responded so generously to my request for assistance about developments in science education in individual European countries or regions. I am grateful for all the suggestions and correspondence which I received in response to that request. I must, of course, make it clear that I, alone, am responsible for any interpretations that I place upon the documents sent to me and for any tentative conclusions that I might base upon them.

I want also to make clear at the outset that I do not intend to review research in science education in Europe with a breadth and thoroughness that might satisfy a professional historian. I am not competent to undertake a review of that kind which would, in any event, perhaps be both inappropriate in the present context and impossible in the time available. Instead, I intend to focus my attention on a number of aspects of research in science education in Europe that seem to me to be of interest and worthy of comment. I acknowledge, of course, that such an approach necessarily exposes me to the charge of idiosyncrasy and bias, and makes it difficult for me to do justice to some of the more subtle differences in the research in science education undertaken in different parts Europe.

This partiality will become particularly evident when, as title of this lecture indicates, I look forward, rather than backward and offer some necessarily personal thoughts about research in science education in the early years of the next century. Few tasks are more perilous that predicting the future and I am only too well aware of those who have got it spectacularly wrong.

I hope, therefore, that you will understand that what I shall say during the course of this lecture makes no claim to being definitive. My aim is encourage a critical reflection upon the past and perhaps identify at least some of the points of a compass that may help navigate the future of research in science education. I am, of course, aware of insights into science education research in Europe offered by from the ESERA conference held two years ago in Rome (Bandiera et al. 1999). In my lecture, I want both to acknowledge those insights and to offer a number of comments upon science education as a field of research as it has developed in Europe in recent years.

A RELATIVELY NEW FIELD OF ACTIVITY

Perhaps the most obvious comment to make about research in science education in Europe is its relative newness. No European country can claim a long tradition of work in this field, although there is often a much longer history of scholarly study of some other aspects of education, notably in pedagogics, didactics and the history of education.. There are also many examples of research undertaken in the first half of the twentieth century that can properly be categorised as science education, but much of this, as far as I have been able to establish, has been the work of individuals or quasi-government committees. More significantly, such work does not reflect the existence of communities or groups of research workers within science education that are familiar to us today. In the United Kingdom, for example, it was the later 1960s which saw the establishment of the first professorial appointments in science education, a development that owed much to the attempts to introduce and support large-scale reform of school science curricula. It was the same decade which saw the emergence of new journals devoted to science education and the development of postgraduate courses in a number of UK universities. Elsewhere, such as in Israel, Italy or the Scandinavian countries, the 1970s might be a more appropriate decade in which to locate the origins of science education as field of research. Small numbers of research workers began to investigate various aspects of science education, their work sometimes being undertaken within Science Education Groups or Centres, some of which were set up with direct government funding and quite specific research and devlopment priorities. Collaborative work within, and, increasingly, between groups and Centres became more common and the appearance of the European Journal of Science Education (now the International Journal of Science Education) in 1979 reflected the need for a non-American outlet for the expanding body of research in science education being undertaken in Europe and elsewhere. It should perhaps be noted that the Editorial Board of the European Journal included two members from IPN, Gerhard Schaefer and Karl Frey, the latter serving as its chairman. In 1974, my then colleague, David Layton, took the bold and imaginative step of publishingthe research review journal, Studies in Science Education, the 33 volumes of which so far published provide promising material not only for researchers but also for those who wish to chart the fortunes of science education as field of research.

Three comments are perhaps appropriate about the relative newness of research in science education in Europe. First, it suggests a need for some caution in assessing the contribution such research might make to educational policy and/or practice, an issue to which I shall return later. Secondly, it stands in marked contrast to the much longer, and very different, history of such research in the United States of America. The various Curtis Digests of Investigations on the Teaching of Science cover research in the USA from as early as 1906 to 1957, and they reflect a research tradition that was almost exclusively quantitative and empirical in its methodology and largely behaviourist and positivist in its psychology and philosophy (Boenig 1969, Lawlor 1970). Thirdly, newness necessarily entails substantial and important diversity, for example in the topics chosen for investigation, in the assumptions made, in the methodology used, in the institutional location within which the research is undertaken and in the research and professional backgrounds of those undertaking the research. All these features are evident in the literature of the last few decades as science education has sought to establish its identity and authority as a field of research.

DIVERSITY IN RESEARCH IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

It is difficult not to be impressed by the wide range of topics that researchers in science education have chosen to investigate in the last thirty or so years. They have related to teachers, students, textbooks, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, evaluation and, within each of these fields, the diversity is compounded. For example, few fields, if any, have ignored, gender issues, although far too few have accommodated, or even attempted to accommodate a wider international perspective. Unquestionably, the bulk of the research has also been concerned with science teaching at school, rather than college or university level and with formal education, rather than informal or non-formal learning. Broadly speaking, secondary science education has had more attention from researchers than elementary or primary science education, although this has changed rapidly in some countries in recent years. Also in evidence are perspectives drawn principally from philosophy, psychology and sociology, although a number of other disciplines, including history, anthropology and economics are also represented. Comparative studies are relatively rare, although the work of the Third International Science and Mathematics Study (TIMSS) and the OECD PISA Project have brought an unprecedented level of interest in student achievement in many countries and in the factors which seem to lIE behind the differences that cross-national testing appears to establish.

In the last couple of decades or so, of course, the science education literature has been dominated by research findings concerned with children’s understanding and learning of scientific phenomena and it has become almost impossible to escape any reference to constructivism among the papers published in the research journals.

Phillips has claimed that ‘Across the broad fields of educational theory and research, constructivism has become something akin to a secular religion’. Claiming, that ‘whatever else it may be’, constructivism is a powerful folk tale about the origins of human knowledge, Phillips adds that ‘Like all religions. It has many sects - each of which harbors some distrust of its rivals’ (Phillips 1995:5). There is no doubt that constructivist views of learning represent the most marked psychological influence on science education in recent years and it would be interesting to speculate why this should be so. I will confine myself, however, to pointing out that AN influence of this kind is by no means new and to warning that IT is the dubious privilege of each new wave of learning theorists to rewrite the history of how science used to be taught to suit their own, current, agenda

Work drawing upon constructivist perspectives is perhaps the nearest that has emerged to a research paradigm within science education, although it would be unwise to apply this Kuhnian label too readily, and it may be more applicable in the USA, with its dominant behaviourist tradition, than within Europe. Quite simply, there remains far too much about which there is disagreement at a fundamental level. There have, of course, been shifts over time in the focus of attention of those working within this field. Early exploratory work, followed by replication studies, led by the 1980s to something of an emphasis upon how students’ ideas about a range of natural phenomena might be changed. Today, there is an interest in how students acquire these ideas, together with a greater understanding that ‘alternative’ and scientifically incorrect models of a range of phenomena are adequate for many everyday purposes, a view borne out by research in fields as different as the public understanding of science (Layton et al 1993), psychology (Lave 1988) and the nature of practical (Holzner and Marx 1979) and professional knowledge (Wilson, Shulman and Richert 1987). For some critics (e.g. Matthews 1998), constructivist perspectives on teaching, learning and the nature of knowledge are linked with philosophical concerns about relativism and the standing and authority of science and scientific knowledge in a world in which both are often seen to be under assault. It is a debate which, in my judgement, continues to be hindered, rather than helped, by intemperate language and fuelled by some of the extravagant and unsupported claims made on behalf of so-called constructivist approaches to teaching and learning.

The diversity in science education research to which I have just referred is not without its problems, although it is important to acknowledge that the field is by no means static. There is a real danger that researchers in science education will increasingly talk past each other, rather than to, each other and I suspect that we have all been at conferences where this has been the case. Beyond this, the emergence of science education as a field of research in its own right marks off researchers in this field from the practitioners, i.e. those who teach science in schools or other institutions, with all that this implies. There may also be questions of standards, and work that needs replication and development has often been published and then ignored, or more worryingly, offered in support of some element of science education policy. At the heart of the matter, however, is the following question: what sort of research domain is science education ? It is to this question that I would now like to turn attention.

SCIENCE EDUCATION: WHAT SORT OF RESEARCH DOMAIN ?

I don’t want to try to answer this question in some abstract way but by reference to the science education literature as I have read it. I am, of course, making no claim to have read all of it, and, here, as always, my judgement is coloured by my own professional and academic background and my inability to read as much of the literature published in the various European languages as I would wish. As with any research domain, science education is characterised by the research issues that it addresses and I have already indicated that these issues are very diverse. It is, however, perhaps just possible to identify two rather different traditions in the research that has been undertaken in Europe within the past thirty or so years, although this work has not, of course, been uninfluenced by developments elsewhere, for example, in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. At the risk of some oversimplification, the two traditions can be described as pedagogic and empirical and it is perhaps worth noting that there are some parallels with research in mathematics education where Bishop (1992) identifies a third tradition which he associates with the scholastic philosopher.

The pedagogic tradition has, at its primary focus, the direct improvement of practice, practice here being understood as the teaching of science. Improved learning is assumed to follow from improved teaching, and the evidence for improved teaching lies in such issues as enhanced student motivation, attendance or level of achievement

There may be some modest questionnaire or other form of evaluation but there is no rigorous research design, partly because no grand theoretical explanation or underpinning is sought and it is the practitioners themselves, i.e. the teachers who require and offer judgements about improvements in their practice. Such improvements cannot be transferred in some simple way to other classrooms, laboratories or teachers. Ideas, however, can be shared and, if judged appropriate, adapted for use in a different context. The work is close to the classroom or laboratory, and its point of reference is how to make some aspect of science more interesting to, and effective for, students.

The empirical tradition in science education research, always much more evident in the USA than in Europe, has weakened considerably in the last thirty years. It is associated with positivism and seeks the ‘objective data’ needed to understand and influence an assumed educational reality, close familiarity with which lies at the heart of the pedagogic tradition. While such weakening reflects a growing recognition of inadequacy of the view that science teaching can be reduced to a science, it almost certainly owes more to the failure of the traditional empirical approach to ‘deliver the goods’, i.e. to raise the standards of learning required of educational systems. Today, there is an improving, although, still very limited, understanding of the complexity of teaching and learning and the interactions that are involved in teaching science in classrooms an laboratories. It remains a struggle for researchers in science education to enter successfully the practitioners’ world and, in my judgement, little general progress has been made in working with practitioners in developing the conceptual tools needed to raise the quality of students’ learning. This is not, of course, to ignore important initiatives such as the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL) in Australia and the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) initiative in the United Kingdom. In both these cases, it is interesting to note that, although the teacher-researcher collaboration underpinning the relevant programmes is an application of ideas derived principally from research in cognitive psychology, the initiatives resonate with wider political shifts in a number of European countries to draw practising teachers more closely into the process of raising standards or even, as in the case of England and Wales, to given them direct responsibility for research, including access to, and control of, research funding.

How distinct are the two traditions to which I have referred? Within the Anglo-American community of researchers in science education, many of the differences can be quite marked, although I would not wish to draw boundaries that are too firm and there is, of course, some common membership of the two communities. The differences are found in the journals in which the research is published, the institutional location of the researcher, and the conferences which he or she attends. Using chemical education as my illustration, there are those who teach chemistry in schools, colleges or universities who publish papers concerned with chemical education. However, they would see themselves as teachers, not researchers, and their chosen journal might be Education in Chemistry, Journal of Chemical Education or the School Science Review. Typically, they are not members of the British, American or other national Educational Research Associations, and they are unlikely to be found at conferences such as this, preferring instead the European Conference on Research in Chemical Education (ECRICE) which started in Montpellier in 1992 or the International Conferences on Chemical Education held every two years, interchangeably with the ECRICE symposium. The researchers remain close to the academic discipline of chemistry and many, I suspect, would strongly resist any attempt to classify them as social, rather than natural, scientists. I would argue that parallel accounts could be given for physics and chemistry.

Outside the Anglo-American community, my suspicion is that these distinctions are much less securely grounded. This is partly because of the importance within the wider European tradition of didactics, a term that has no precise equivalent in the English language and which leads to sometimes seemingly insuperable problems of communication and translation.To an English audience, any reference to the ‘didactics of a discipline’ is usually very puzzling, not least because the word didactics is commonly associated with a rather direct and authoritative style of teaching rather than having anything to do with the grammar and syntax of a scholarly discipline and how it best be taught. One consequence of this difference between English and wider European traditions may be that, outside the United Kingdom, rather more researchers in science education work in, or in close association with, academic science departments and thus remain in closer contact with developments in the parent scientific discipline. Dialogue between educational researchers within, and others outside the didactic tradition ( including, most obviously, myself) is long overdue and this institution (IPN) has already made a distinguished contribution to the debate (Hopmann and Riquarts 1995)