IBSE Final

Chapter 3 The Science Curriculum and Classroom Instruction

tHE tEACHING OF SCIENCE: 21 st-CENTURY PERSPECTIVES 51

decades later, a major National Research Council report on learning confirmed

these insights. I shall return to this idea in a later section.

His point about commercialization was straightforward. For a program

such as SCIS to have a significant effect on schools, it had to be commercially

available. This, in turn, meant that the developer had to identify a publisher and

arrange for publication.

The chapter also included principles for curriculum evaluation, including

that the study has to occur when materials are stable (i.e., after field-testing); it

has to last long enough to derive longitudinal results; and it should include all

the “stakeholders” in the educational community (the units of evaluation incor-

porate students, groups of children, teachers, schools, and school districts).

Finally, Karplus defends the existence of curriculum developers. He states

that there is value in the specialization of labor here, as in other efforts. For

instance, small groups of individuals such as Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS),

Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), Technical Education Research

Center (TERC), and Education Development Center (EDC) can concentrate their

time, effort, and resources on the curricular needs of science teachers and the

aspirations of the science education community. Through such specialization,

science teachers will not be distracted from their primary work by curriculum

development. They can concentrate on effective teaching and student learning

in their classrooms and schools.

Guidelines for Science Instruction

After a decade of work on SCIS, Karplus had an opportunity to reflect on his work.

His reflections resulted in a short statement titled “Three Guidelines for Elemen-

tary School Science.” In this statement, Karplus first distinguished between the

experiential and conceptual aspects of the science curriculum. He indicated the

need to consider the relationship between the two, and he summarized a variety

of experiences from SCIS, such as electrical and magnetized objects interacting,

chameleons eating crickets, and seeds germinating. His point was that students

should have direct experiences with physical and biological phenomena. He

then went on to make a point that I think provides great insight about these and

other examples of experiences one might incorporate in a science curriculum. I

quote Karplus at length:

Being a physicist, I began my educational activities ten years ago with the

notion that force was the fundamental explanatory concept, since force is the

cause of motion, and motion is a part of all change. Now I believe that this

approach, which is also taken by most physics texts, is not valid. The reason

is that observable motion accompanies only a small fraction of phenomena.

Thermal, chemical, electrical, optical, and acoustic phenomena do not involve

observable motion, hence the force concept is not of direct value in dealing with