Some Thoughts on Science Education Reforms in the Past Century
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Policymakers have tried to improve science education by altering curriculum for well over a century. The dream is that a new curriculum will get teachers to shift routine classroom practices and changed teaching practices will get students to learn more and better science. Over time, clear patterns have emerged from those dreams.
*Persistent shifting in purposes for science education, uncertainty over how best to teach the subject, and how to assess student learning. Multiple and competing aims for science education have plagued policymakers, academic scientists, practitioners, and reformers of all stripes for decades. Back-and-forth, time and again, different purposes have reverberated through the multi-layered curriculum (official, taught, learned, and tested), echoing previous reform efforts at the beginning of the 20th century, before and after Sputnik, and since the 1980s.
And there were differences over how to teach science. The dichotomy about teaching about science (e.g.,
