Science education
NZCER and the University of Otago have developed a new science toolkit to assist teachers to assess, understand and support Year 7 and 8 students’ learning in science.
To get the best out of using the toolkit, NZCER and NMSSA are offering two free webinars on:
Due to high demand, we are offering these Science workshop PLD sessions for teachers as interactive Zoom webinars.
• What does progress in science look like from Levels 1 to 4?
• How can progress be assessed?
• What can teachers do to help their students?
Free teacher sscience workshops, supported by the Ministry of Education.
These free workshops address these questions using findings from the 2017 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) in science. From the findings, four resources have been produced that introduce and explain student progression between Level 1 to 4
In the second in this blog series, Rose Hipkins takes on the challenge on thinking about how we might measure what we say we value.
By Rose Hipkins
In the first blog in this series I questioned the educational value of cobbling together reports of students’ progress in science from measures that lack coherence, such as a string of ‘unit’ tests. Instead, I suggested, we should think carefully about the sort of progress the curriculum indicates as important, and then ponder how we might measure that with at least some validity.
In the first of a new series of blog posts, chief researcher Rose Hipkins asks what we mean when we ask if students are "making progress" in science.
Thank you for coming back to our science blog. You get a tag-team handover this week - I am Rose Hipkins and I’m picking up from my colleague Ally Bull. My plan is to build on her thoughts and questions while turning the focus to an issue that I know is worrying a lot of teachers right now. I’ll be musing about how we might determine if – and how - students are making progress in their science learning.
In the last in her series drawing on interviews done as part of the Competent Learners @ 25 project, Ally Bull asks what if the whole focus for primary school science was creative play.
This is the focus of A Nation of Curious Minds: He Whenua Hihiri i te Mahara – the national strategic plan for science in society. So to what extent does science learning at school support this goal? Before we can answer that we need to be clear about what supports the development of innovators. According to Tony Wagner the answer is play, passion and purpose. He says that in his interviews with highly innovative young people, their parents, teachers and mentors, “passion” was the most frequently occurring word.
In this blog post, Ally Bull makes the case for science fairs.
School science fairs get a bad rap. They are often criticised for not promoting real learning, being overly-competitive, advantaging students from already privileged backgrounds, putting extra stress on children, teachers and families, not representing science as it really is, and so on. Despite this though, some people do leave school with very positive memories of science fairs.
