Science curriculum development can involve changes in what is taught, to whom (target audiences), and how (ways of teaching and learning). This entry is concerned with the following questions: Why change the science curriculum? What should be changed? How and by whom is the change process initiated and sustained? The entry discusses various models for initiating and sustaining change.

Why and What to Change? Goals and Driving Factors

Throughout the last 60 years the goals and objectives for science teaching and learning have undergone changes many times, often leading to reforms in the way the science curriculum was developed, taught, and learned. Five key factors influence a change in curriculum goals: the learners (target population), the teachers, the science content, the context of learning and teaching both in and out of school, and the assessment of students’ achievement and progress.

The Learners

A long tradition of research on learning and teaching science suggests that learners are

Goal-directed agents who actively seek information. They come to formal education with a range of prior knowledge, skills, beliefs. In addition, they are directed by their concepts, interest, motivation, and attitudes that significantly influence what they notice about the environment and how they organize and interpret it. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, solve problems, and acquire new knowledge. (National Research Council 1999, p. 10)

Studies also indicate that affective (interest, motivation, and attitudes), meta-cognitive, and sociocultural aspects play an important role in the learning-teaching process (Linn et al. 1996). There is agreement among many science educators that the range (or repertoire) of the learners’ ideas and ways of making sense of the world should be a key factor in setting curricular goals and in developing teaching strategies and learning materials. Learners’ prior ideas and those developed in the process of learning have been researched extensively, indicating that they often depart significantly from the normative ones. The abstract nature of scientific concepts and principles and the need to understand phenomena and interactions that are not directly observable, in particular large or very small spatial and temporal scales, are examples of challenges facing science learners. Some learners’ ideas are resistant to change while others may stem, for example, from missing knowledge or confusing use of terms and can be easily remedied. Departmentalization of using science differently in different contexts has been documented extensively (e.g., “school science” vs. out-of-school science ideas or the use of a certain concept differently in different disciplines). Therefore, characterizing the sources of learners’ ideas and how they are used has a significant impact on the design of curriculum.

In the process of science learning, learners, either as individuals or as a group studying together, may grapple with a repertoire of ideas that are not necessarily consistent with each other. Science educators hold different opinions regarding the repertoire of learners’ ideas. Some regard them as barriers to the process of learning and design strategies to eliminate them, while others regard the repertoire as an essential and useful resource enabling learners to build on their experience and intuitions. Therefore, the curricular goals, the teaching strategies, and the assessments differ in these approaches.

It should be noted that some aspects of learning and teaching science described above hold for all science learners, yet changes in the target population of science learners over the last decade have had a significant impact on science curriculum development. For example, in the USA in the 1960s, the goals were strongly based on the view that science learning should serve students who plan to embark in the future on a career in the sciences, engineering, or medicine. The American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1962 summarized the goals of these curricular initiatives as follows:

  • Science education should present learners with a real picture of science, including theories and models.

  • Science education should present an authentic picture of scientists and their method of research.

  • Science education should present the nature of science (NOS).

  • Science education should be structured and developed using the discipline approach (key concepts in each of the subjects).

To attain these goals, a series of science curricula, such as PSSC in physics, BSCS in biology and CHEMStudy in chemistry in the USA, and the Nuffield courses in the UK, were developed. The development teams were led by scientists. All teams included teachers, but the teachers played different roles in the development process. For instance, the development teams in the Nuffield courses consisted mainly of leading teachers. About 20 years later, in the 1980s, there was a shift in many countries toward addressing the needs and abilities of all citizens. For example, an NSF sponsored project, Project Synthesis, which analyzed science curricula in previous years, led to a call to change the scope and goals for science teaching and learning, advocating that science education should:

  • Include major concerns regarding science as a means of resolving current societal problem.

  • Provide a means to attend to the personal needs of students.

  • Provide greater awareness of potential careers in science, technology, and related fields.

These goals led, for example, to curriculum projects focusing on science, society, and technology (STS) around the world. Attempts have been made to make science more relevant to learners and adjusted to their backgrounds (e.g., the Chemistry in Context and the Chemcom curricula), attending to characteristics such as equity; gender; students’ attitudes, interest, and motivation; conceptual understanding; creativity and curiosity; and knowledge integration.

The Teachers

One of the key factors regarding curriculum change is the teachers. In general, teachers are reluctant to accept radical changes and often do not implement them in accordance with the rationale for the change suggested by the curriculum developers. Such changes may not be aligned with teachers’ existing views and practices and may require new knowledge, perhaps content knowledge (CK), or its related pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), or curricular knowledge. Important factors influencing teachers’ response to change include personal characteristics, cultural norms (e.g., the role of questioning), the professional status of the teacher, the teacher’s understanding of the proposed change and its rationale, and systemic approaches to students’ future career opportunities.

The Scientific Content and Organization

The scientific content and the skills or scientific practices to be learned constitute the major fabric of the curriculum. Criteria for choosing scientific core ideas may relate to the importance of concepts within and across disciplines; the provision of key tools for understanding, investigating, and problem-solving; enhancing interest; the relevance to life experiences and the connection to personal and societal concerns; and being teachable and learnable over multiple grades at increasing levels of depth and sophistication (e.g., “learning progressions”). Changes in conceptions about how topics should be organized have also influenced curricular change. For example, “context-based science” (e.g., in the PLON curriculum in the Netherlands and the Salters’ projects in the UK) and “knowledge for use” approaches depart significantly from the traditional “structure of the discipline” approach often used for science curriculum development.

Aligning school science with contemporary scientific knowledge is an important consideration in areas that change at a very rapid pace such as molecular biology or nano-science, as well as topics that are interdisciplinary in nature such as brain science and medicine. Changes of this kind in the fields of science and technology are the driving force behind many innovations in school STEM curricula.

Another central issue is the methodologies used for enhancing the acquisition of skills in science curricula. There is a consensus that skills should be developed in the context of content and that in order to develop a generalizable skill (transfer), it must be studied explicitly and practiced in different topics. However, different ways of doing this lead to different curriculum structures.

The Context of Learning and Teaching: The Learning Environment

Learning and teaching science takes place in-school and out-of-school learning environments. Each setting has important benefits as well as limitations. Changes in the learning environment have been shown to influence students’ motivation and learning. These changes involve instructional approaches (e.g., inquiry and project-based learning, small group cooperative learning, debates on issues, use of games, and digital simulations) as well as the physical settings in which learning takes place (e.g., outdoors, science museums, authentic research laboratories, and industry). Rapid technological developments and the easy access to information resources in all formats for many of today’s students add to the mix of opportunities now available. This proliferation of learning environments raises issues such as: Do students integrate the ideas that they learn in different contexts? Do they have the skills required for autonomous learning, namely, learning to learn skills? What are effective ways and tools to scaffold learners? How can we provide rich opportunities to help socially and culturally deprived students? Responding to these issues influences the goals for learning and teaching and hence influences the design and development of new curricula.

Assessment of Learners’ Achievement and Progress

In countries with centralized educational systems, policy decisions concerning the assessment of students may have a radical impact on what and how students learn. Examples of such decisions involve, for example, participation in international testing projects such as PISA and TIMSS; changes in the format of matriculation examinations (e.g., in Hungary and Israel); and decisions made by governments to implement school-based continuous assessment conducted by teachers, allowing more flexibility in the curriculum content and the instructional techniques used. In some countries, as part of educational reforms, alternative assessment methods using tools such as portfolios or e-portfolios are integrated into the curriculum process.

The Curriculum Development and Implementation Processes

Ideally, a curriculum development process should be a holistic, continuous, and long-term endeavor involving several components often carried out in parallel. Key components include initial setting of goals, analysis, and selection of the topics aligned with official syllabi; diagnosis of students’ ideas as well as analysis of the inherent characteristics of the science concepts; design of learning, teaching, and assessment materials (e.g., crafting tasks, uses of representations and didactical aids); and small-scale implementation and teacher development cycles accompanied by research (teaching experiments). This process often leads to reconsideration of goals, the pedagogical resources, and the teacher development activities. Advanced stages of the process can lead to large-scale implementation and evaluation studies.

There are many open questions that require further study concerning the ways to enhance the development of useful practical and research-based knowledge relevant to curriculum development in specific topics (Kortland and Klaassen 2010), such as: How can one communicate detailed knowledge about teaching and learning sequences? How can one encapsulate and conceptualize practical knowledge of teachers? How can one develop cumulative research-based knowledge on the development of learning and teaching resources on specific topics?

Models for Curriculum Development: Initiating and Sustaining Change

Over the years, the need for changes in science teaching and learning has been raised by different interest groups such as policy makers, scientists, science educators and curriculum developers, teacher associations, and local initiators (e.g., a school, a school district, or schools networks). Pressure for change has also come from societal or socioeconomic sources.

In recent years, in many countries, curriculum change is often initiated and influenced by national and international standards and frameworks that characterize desirable change and are prepared by national academies, ministries of education (e.g., the Institute of Education in Singapore), and other organizations. Examples of such initiatives include the National Standards in Science Education developed by the US National Research Council in 1996 and revised in 2013 as the Next Generation Science Standards and the Benchmarks of Science for all Americans arising from Project 2061, developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The resulting frameworks have been used for developing curricula and evaluating their quality. Teacher associations have been very influential in initiating curriculum change through the development of frameworks (e.g., the National Science Teachers Association in the USA, the Association for Science Education in the UK, the Irish Science Teachers’ Association in Ireland, and the Australian Science Teachers’ Association in Australia). Another mechanism for initiating change has been through influential reports discussing goals, methods, and recommendations related to teaching and learning science. Examples of such reports are the ROSE project (Sjøberg and Schreiner 2010) and Beyond 2000 (Millar and Osborne 1998).

Calls for change have led to two key models of curriculum development efforts that differ in their methods of design and implementation and in the constituents involved in the curricular process: a center-periphery top-down model in which a central development group tries to influence those on the periphery and a bottom-up model, responding to local needs through school-based (or teacher-based) curriculum development or where change is instigated and implemented by leading teachers and then adopted by others. These two key models often differ in the nature of teacher involvement in the development process, in the activities of implementation, and in the professional development of teachers. The change processes associated with each of these models sometimes differ in the scope of curriculum adoption, in the relationship between the intended and implemented curriculum, in teacher ownership and ways of adaptation, and in the degree of sustainability. In both models, a major concern is how to prepare “educative materials,” namely, materials that promote teacher professional growth in addition to student learning, and how to assure effective implementation and sustainability.

Center-Periphery Curriculum Development Models

Big curriculum projects often use a center-periphery model in which a central group develops the curriculum and then tries to disseminate it to the periphery. These groups may include in their teams teachers, science educators, scientists, and other relevant experts (e.g., experts in technology and assessment), who together carry out a comprehensive development and implementation process as described above.

In the past, curriculum change in many countries has been dominated by central governments and/or official stakeholders in charge of curriculum development and implementation, who imposed curricula and assessment methods, sometimes taken from other countries. For example, the adoption by developing countries of curricula and assessment methods from developed countries prevailed throughout the 1970s and 1980s and still continues. Unfortunately, these methods often lead to unsatisfactory learning outcomes because they overlook the need to adapt the curriculum and assessment methods to the local conditions, taking into account aspects such as the availability of teachers with appropriate CK and PCK to implement the adopted curricula; the local culture and environment (e.g., attempting to introduce advanced open inquiry in a culture where asking questions is not the norm); the availability of laboratory equipment, technology, and lab technicians; conditions for studying at home; and problems of language. Present efforts to adapt new curricula emphasize working with teachers and are more sensitive to local conditions, building on the benefits offered by the local environment and the pedagogical and educational workplace.

Some center-periphery approaches of curriculum development involve intensive ongoing collaborations among school teachers, science educators, scientists, and other relevant professionals. For example, the Salters science curricula in the UK were initiated by a group of concerned teachers, academics, and industrialists whose goal was to make chemistry more relevant to the learner. Teachers were intensively involved in the process of developing the pedagogical ideas and collecting instructional approaches. A similar model is used by the Israeli Center for Science Education in a long-term collaboration between the Israeli Ministry of Education and several academic institutions. In addition to intensive involvement in the development process, lead teachers have a central role in working with other teachers through national centers for science teachers. Learning materials resulting from such intensive teacher involvement have more potential to be adopted in schools. The involvement of leading teachers in the long-term professional development and implementation of new curricula enhances effective customizations aligned with the original rationale of the developers, yet responding to local needs.

School- and Teacher-Based Curriculum Development Models

A growing body of evidence suggests that imposing a curriculum by central professional bodies in what is called “top-down” fashion, whereby teachers are expected simply to implement the developers’ philosophy, ideas, and intentions, has proved in many cases to be ineffective in introducing educational and curricular innovations into schools. One conclusion that comes out of decades of studying the success and failure of a wide variety of curriculum innovations is that imposed innovations are generally ineffective and that innovations succeed when teachers feel a sense of ownership of the innovation (Connelly and Clandinin 1988). In general, teachers tend to accept a new curriculum more easily when it is aligned with learning goals they personally value or when they perceive that the innovation provides an effective solution to problems they currently encounter. Several factors seem to be relevant for teachers in adopting curricular changes, such as judgments about the likely success of a new course, the teachers’ perceptions of its effects on students’ learning and attitudes, teachers’ views about students’ interest and motivation, perceived learning outcomes, and enhancement of self-regulated learning. The importance of supplementing the curriculum with materials developed by school teachers either in schools or districts, in the context of long-term professional development initiatives, has long been recognized.

School-based curriculum development (SBCD) can be viewed as an endeavor aimed at diminishing dependency on centralized national science curricula, increasing the schools’ autonomy, and enhancing teachers’ sense of ownership. A central aspect of SBCD relates to teacher professional development and entails the transfer of responsibility or ownership to the teacher. The basic assumption is that SBCD and teacher professional development are two coupled processes. Although ownership by teachers may be high in these models, often the extensive everyday demands on teachers’ time and the lack of competence in curriculum development have a negative impact on the quality of change. Another aspect that has to be taken in consideration is the time that is required for the new curriculum to be implemented. Without adequate time for teachers’ professional growth, it is unlikely that they will effectively develop and implement new teaching practices.

To sum up, curriculum development and change is a complex endeavor in which many factors need to be considered: the learners, the teachers, the scientific content and organization, the context of learning and teaching, the learning environments, and assessment of students’ learning. Years of experience of curriculum development and change provide evidence that it is important to carry out the curriculum development process in a holistic manner that goes beyond writing textbooks and teacher guides. Rather, it should involve cycles of developing innovative learning materials and pedagogical models, implementation, teacher development, and research. There are different models for curriculum development and change that can be roughly grouped into center-periphery models and teacher- or school-based models. No matter which model is adopted, the important role of experienced teachers in the curricular process should not be overlooked. Moreover, the professional development of teachers, and providing them with opportunities and tools to customize instruction to their needs, is essential for effective implementation.

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