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Are we really teaching science in our schools?

Jyotsna Vijapurkar

Science should be taught to children as an inquiry into the world around them. Curricula cannot be developed without intensive research with children to determine what they can and cannot learn at a given age.

THE SHORT answer, applicable to almost all schools, would have to be `no.' Walk into an average classroom and you are likely to find the teacher copying material from the textbook to the blackboard, and the student, in turn, from the blackboard into the notebook. This is hardly the stuff of science education. Most of this material busily being copied has nothing to do with the questions and naïve concepts children have about the world around them. This leaves children puzzled and resigned to this exercise being far removed from their world. Such teaching is a recipe for unbearable dullness, which is bad enough in an environment meant for learning. What a pity that this should happen in a classroom of children, naturally curious about the world, and full of energy and eagerness to explore and learn about it!

You might, on occasion, find a classroom where children are engaged in some hands-on activity. While any activity is better than none, very rarely are these activities exploratory, and designed to help children grasp a difficult concept. That much used phrase heard in B. Ed. colleges `learning by doing' often is reduced to mean `doing something, never mind if anything is learned.' More often than not an experiment is done by the teacher and serves to give evidence for a fact or a law of nature that the children have been told. Many textbooks prescribe experiments, tell children what they will observe, and even tell them what to conclude!

Many myths about what constitutes teaching are reflected in our textbooks and teaching approach. A common one is that telling children a concept or an idea is the same as teaching them that concept. Children often have their own naïve theories about the world, which conflict with what they are told in the science class. As they try to make sense of the world, they make a coherent mental model that accommodates these conflicting pictures. How far this model is from what was taught would amaze many adults if only they made the effort to find out what the child has learned. It does need effort, because children are such masters at figuring out what the expected answer is.

One of my favourite examples is that of young children who are told that the Earth is a sphere. The Earth they live on looks very flat indeed, so it cannot be the one the teacher is talking about. One of the coherent pictures they make up is of two earths — the round one in the sky and the flat one they live on. Incidentally, many children interpret the circles in their textbooks used to depict the Earth to mean the planet is a circle not a sphere. It is only at about age 10 that children are ready for the concept of the spherical Earth.

Making solar system models well before they are ready probably just strengthens their belief in the two-earth model. A professor of physics relates how his six-year-old grandchild proudly showed off the `A' she got for her model of the solar system, made for her science class. He took her out in the yard to show her Venus and Mars, which were in the evening sky. She asked him "Wait, if this is Venus and that is Mars, where is Earth"? In her model, Earth was between Venus and Mars (school models are almost invariably made with all the planets in a straight line on the same side of the sun). Here is an example of an activity that did little to teach the solar system as the teacher had in mind. To teach children about the spherical Earth, and thereafter the solar system, you need to teach them about the relative sizes of the Earth and things on it, teach that there is no universal down (or `up') but that it depends on one's position on the Earth (down always points to the Earth's centre), that how curved a sphere's surface appears depends on the radius of the sphere. You need to do this not by telling children these facts but through well designed activities and questions that help them grapple with these concepts. And you need to do this when children are old enough to learn them — certainly not in the early years of primary school!

Little effort is made to get to the root of children's difficulties and thus enable them to develop the basic concepts and skills needed for learning science. Without such foundations, children go through years of schooling carrying misconceptions with them, facing greater difficulties as they encounter more difficult concepts that build on the earlier ones. A vast number of papers published in science education journals on misconceptions in science among high school and college students amply demonstrates this.

Another myth that contributes to the problem is that children's science is a watered down version of adult science. It naturally follows that just about anything can be taught at any age, provided it is sufficiently watered down. Why else would many States include in the science curriculum for early primary years lessons on the evolution of humans? Even the pictorial depiction — of time lapse series showing a primate gradually standing more erect and losing body hair — could easily be interpreted as a single individual who just comes down from the trees and straightens up, thus turning into a human. The concepts needed to comprehend evolution are completely disregarded, as is the age at which they can be meaningfully introduced (long after primary school); again just telling children about evolution is taken to be teaching it. Similarly, photosynthesis — the process by which plants make glucose from carbon dioxide and water — is `taught' years before children are introduced to the idea of atoms and molecules and basic chemistry. To water down this difficult concept, textbook writers resort to phrasing it in what they believe is simple language for children: "plants make their own food." Put yourself in the child's shoes for a moment. Do you not wonder: "so do people" (in the sense of cooking)! "What does the plant's own food look like?" "Can you see it in the plants?" But parents, teachers, and perhaps children themselves believe they have learned some science — they have learned the word `photosynthesis.'

Extrapolation from an adult's perspective, without regard to how children learn, shows up in our science curricula time and again. Concepts are considered to be trivial if the calculation of a related quantity is mathematically trivial for adults. This is far from the truth. Concepts of area (taught as length times breadth), of density (mass per unit volume), pressure (force per unit area) are all very difficult for children, to quote just a few. Similarly, the traditional treatment of topics in science textbooks for older students are blindly adopted for children, such as idealised situations (ignoring friction in a problem in physics) before real world situations (where friction cannot be ignored).

No doubt many of these difficulties have been noted by observant teachers and parents. Without a robust mechanism by which such feedback is taken as a key input for curriculum design, however, we can expect many years of frustration for students and teachers. Not to mention years of wasted time and opportunities for making a science lesson the joyful activity it can be.

How, then, should science be taught to children? As an inquiry into the world around them. Children are naturally curious, so it is much easier to do than one might think. But to accomplish this requires an understanding of which concepts form the framework for what is to be taught, at what age children are ready for those concepts, and how best to teach them. But many of our teachers are poorly trained both in the subjects they have to teach (they are products of the same system!) as well as in the art of teaching itself. It would be unfair, however, to pin the responsibility for this sorry state of science education on the teachers alone. Our textbooks too are poorly designed and our curricula misguided. Curricula cannot be developed, and textbooks written, without intensive research with children to determine what they can and cannot learn at a given age, and without trials in the classroom to evolve a workable teaching plan. Admittedly this is a very difficult thing to do; but considering what is at stake, it is not only highly desirable but imperative that we do it.

(The writer, an astronomer, is on the faculty of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.)

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