Implementing the Australian Curriculum: Science with a Constructivist Mindset

Folie 1

• Components of the Australian Science Curriculum
• Science Understanding
• Science as a Human Endeavour
• Science Inquiry Skills
• Achievement Standards and Learning Outcomes
• 'Achievement standards for each learning area or subject describe the learning expected of students at each year level''
• 'By the end of year 2, students describe changes to objects, materials, and living thigs. They identify that certain materials and resources have different uses and describe examples of where science is used in people's daily lives.'
• 'Students pose and respond to questions about their experiences and predict outcomes of investigations. hey use informal measurements to make and compare observations. They record and represent observations and communicate ideas in a variety of ways'
• The Focus of Formative Assessment
• Ability to use the various processes and skills involved in scientific inquiry, and scientific and socioscientific decision making
• Understanding and application of science ideas, including their expanding knowledge of the nature of science
• Performative Assessment Strategies and Challenges
• Primary students' perceptions of assessment might be confined to summative tasks and not include issues such as clarifying understanding and accepting agency for their own learning
• he pragmatic assessment issue of assessing individual students in large classes It is more realistic at times to know where your whole class of students is at. Using assessment formats to engage students in a mixture of whole-class, group, pair, and individual activities that require them to share and defend their thoughts with peers and teachers is a way

Content Substrands

• Science Understanding
• Physical Sciences - energy (sound, light, electricity), movement, forces, and motion
• Biological Sciences - Living things and how they are grouped; their growth and change, structure and function, life cycles and interactions, and relationships between them
• Chemical Sciences - Everyday materials and their properties, forms, and uses; liquids, solids, and gases; physical and chemical change
• Earth and Space Sciences - Earth's place in space; daily and seasonal changes; the solar system; the daily and local environment; the Earth's resources and their use; change and major events on the Earth's surface
• Science as a Human Endeavour
• Nature and Development of Science - Nature implicit in many suggested pedagogies, explicitly in some. Contributions of people from various times and cultures
• Use and Influence of Science - How science impacts on our daily lives, helps solve problems, guides decision-making. Ways to interrelate these sub-strands with other content strands

Content Substrands

• Science Inquiry Skills
• Questioning and Predicting, Planning and Conducting, Processing and Analysing Data and Information, Evaluating, Communicating
• These science processes and skills help students to think and work scientifically; that is, learn through scientific inquiry
• Includes testing claims and solving problems by collecting and evaluating evidence
• Various tasks require students to use skills associated with these substrands
• Science inquiry skills can be developed as students extend particular science understandings

Folie 4

• Small Ideas and Bigger Ideas
• Concepts at various year levels build on each other
• Big ideas explain a range of related phenomena, rather than a collection of facts and theories
• Effective Explicit-Reflective Nature of Science Teaching Strategies
• Pointing out nature of science aspects that are embedded within particular activities
• Asking students nature of science questions based on children's literature about science investigation
• Using specific activities targeted at specific 'nature of science' elements
• Before engaging students in a socioscientific issues, teachers need to
• ensure students have adequate background related to science concepts discussed
• Be aware of information about topic in order to use appropriate questioning
• appreciate students' moral beliefs, alterative conceptions, lack of personal experiences ad content knowledge, limited reasoning skills and level of emotional maturity will influence level of engagement
• prepare tasks using scaffolded websites of diverse perspectives about the issue that students can read, discuss, and evaluate
• Consider using guided discussion before advancing to debate and argumentation strategies
• While engaging students, teachers need to
• Be sensitive to students who may feel dissonance when negotiating, resolving conflicts
• Expect and model tolerance, respect, sensitivity
• Assist students in developing critical thinking skills so that they wish to seek truth and be open minded, analytical, systematic, judicious

Seven Capabilities Overview

• Literacy
• Especially obvious in 'evaluating and communicating information
• Students introduced to the language of science; writing to learn science; developing general literacy skills
• Scientific vocab has its own specific terms
• Ways of presenting scientific information are developed and practiced
• scientific literacy, cultural literacy, digital literacy
• Information and Communication Technology Capability
• Represent concepts that are difficult to show in other ways
• Generate and test hypotheses and predictions
• Access to phenomena not possible in the classroom
• Numeracy
• Evident in science inquiry skills strand - fundamental to using mathematical and computational thinking
• young children appropriate a range of mathematical resources to formalise interpretation and representation
• Key aspects include measurement, representation of numerical data, pattern identification
• Critical and Creative Thinking
• Critical = examine way interpret world and how knowledge and opinions are shaped; open mind, asking deeper questions; involve socioscientific
• Creative = students develop new to them ideas; occur if teachers use inquiry learning approaches

Seven Capabilities Overview

• Personal and Social Capability
• Make more informed choices about health, nutrition, environmental actions
• Learning communication skills enhances abilities advance own ideas
• Many avenues for development of this capability - learning to work cooperatively,
• Ethical Understanding
• Behaving responsibly towards self, others, animate, and inanimate objects
• Deciding if investigation should proceed, how to present results honestly, how to ue scientific ideas
• Being aware of how values and behaviour impact on others
• Intercultural Understanding
• Overlap between this and cross curriculum priorities
• Cultural literacy aligns with this e.g. exercising cultural sensitivity

ICT Capability

• Tools, Reference Sources, and Communication Means
• Tools can be used:
• Collecting data and modelling
• As a means for visualisation
• For creating virtual situations
• ICT Science Applications
• Computer microscopes explore nature of materials; Virtual ecological world
• Online mapping and brainstorming
• Podcasts for learning
• Photostory - visual story of investigations
• Apps to model images and take photos
• Twitter to provide instant feedback
• iPads to record interactions
• ICT to Assist Learning: A Summary
• Teachers must decide whether it is better to use other available means
• Use of ICT should be worthwhile, interactivr, and based on sound scientific and educational principles.
• Detailed criterial
• How easy to use recourse
• is scientific content accurate
• Are pedagogical principles used appropriate

Cross-Curriculum Priorities

• Three Priorities
• ATSI histories and cultures
• Sustainability
• Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia
• ATSI Histories and Cultures
• Longstanding scientific knowledge traditions and developed knowledge by
• Observation using all senses
• Prediction, hypothesis, and testing
• Making generalisations with specific contexts e.g. use of food, natural resources, navigation
• Multicultural science education - different societies define and organise science differently
• Primary teachers need acknowledge student may hold worldviews different from western
• Sustainability
• 'Addresses the ongoing capacity of Earth to maintain life'
• Education for sustainability - knowledge, skills, and worldviews necessary for people to act in ways that contribute to more sustainable patterns of living - personal and collective
• Envisioning a better future
• Systemic, critical, reflective thinking
• Participation in decision making
• Networks and partnerships for change
• Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia
• Students 'develop knowledge and understanding of Asian societies, cultures, beliefs, and environments, and the connections between the peoples of Asia, Australia, and the world.'

Folie 9

• Science-Oriented Differentiation SUggestions
• Environment that encourages interactive talk
• Additional scaffolding; use of multimodal representations, grapic organisers, pictures, charts, graphs, diagrams, maps
• Integration
• Pragmatic response to increasing pressure to meet expanding societal learning expectations
• Approaches to Integrating Science
• Making a link; Topic or topic web
• Them or story to which discrete learning areas are related
• Integrated topic; Personalised topic
• Synchronised
• Project-based
• Thematic
• Community-focused
• Cross-curricular
• Literacy-Science Connections
• Students express science understanding using multiple literacies
• Students wrote science argument for audience
• Integrated focus on reading, writing, listening, talking outcomes
• Writing and Science C0nnections
• Allow for translation of multiple modes of representation
• Permit students move between narrative and scientific explanation and argumentation modes
• Include writing or refuting evidence based claims
• Be real to audiences with focus on big ideas
• Reading and Science Connections
• Consider using science information texts
• Be open to possibilities of unexpected competence in young children

Folie 10

• Technology and Science Connections
• Technology as applied science
• Science and technology as independent fields
• Technology as giving rise to scientific understanding
• Science and technology as equal and interacting fields
• Conditions for Effective Primary Science
• Students are encouraged to actively engage with ideas and evidence
• Students are challenged to develop meaningful understandings
• Science is linked with students' lives and interests
• Students' individual learning needs and preferences are catered for
• Assessment is embedded within the science learning strategy
• The nature of science is represented in its different aspects
• The classroom is linked with the broader community
• Learning technologies are exploited for their learning potentials