Towards Evidence-Based Practice In Science Education
January 2000 - June 2003(Contact: Professor John Leach)
Funded By: ESRC
Other project members:
Professor Robin Millar - University of York
Professor Jonathan Osbourne - King's College London
Dr Mary Ratcliffe - University of Southampton
For full details of the network activities, visit the Network homepage.
Project 2: Issues on the implementation of evidence-based approaches in science education
This project is working with teachers to devise and evaluate short teaching packages, based on research evidence, to teach some key ideas in science more effectively to students aged 11-14. Students' learning will be evaluated after following this teaching, and compared to students' learning who follow conventional teaching. We will also be collecting data about how teachers actually implement the teaching in the classroom.
The teaching packages address the following topics:
- Physics: electric circuits (PDF, 1MB)
- Chemistry: conservation of matter in physical and chemical change processes (PDF, 438KB)
- Biology: plant nutrition (PDF, 670KB)
At a later phase in the work, we will be investigating how insights into effective teaching in these topic areas can be disseminated to other teachers so that they can teach the topics in question equally effective.
Further information will be posted here as the project develops.
Publications from Project 2
LEACH, J. & SCOTT, P. (2000). The concept of learning demand as a tool for designing teaching sequences [pdf file] Paper presented at the meeting Research-Based Teaching Sequences, Université Paris VII, Denis Diderot, November 2000.
LEACH, J., AMETTLER, J., HIND, A., LEWIS, J., & SCOTT, P. (2003) Evidence-informed approaches to teaching science at junior high school level: outcomes in terms of student learning [pdf file] Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Philadelphia, March 2003, as part of the symposium Evidence-based practice in science education .
EPSE Teaching Resources
Please download the teaching packs linked above.
Internal Working Papers
The Internal Working Papers are password protected, for access by School of Education staff only - if you have forgotten the password or are having problems logging in, please contact the webmaster.
This project last updated by Peter Edwards on 6th November 2006.