Conserving education of science – can be through improving status!

The subject of science education has been of great concern to academics in science departments for some time, as the numbers of students applying for degree courses falls catastrophically. Notwithstanding the contribution from the UK Institute of Physics of a physics degree bursary. Believed that the impact of the standardised assessment tests (SATS) and the UK national curriculum are perhaps the biggest factors in the declining interest in science courses, both at school and university in the UK. Paradoxically, general interest in science may be growing, if only because many books about science achieve best-seller status.

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Science education in schools is in crisis. The number of teachers well qualified to teach science is declining; applications for university science courses are falling and departments closing; the number of school students taking A level science subjects is plummeting, and time and resources needed for laboratory study and scientific investigation in schools are cut every year.

Testing lowers pupils' self-esteem, setting up a downward spiral of lower motivation, less effort and even lower results in the tests. Other detrimental effects are that pupils see the goals of education in terms of passing tests rather than developing an understanding about what they are learning, and that they judge themselves and others by their test results. A consequence is that the gap between the lower and higher achieving pupils is widened (Harlen and Deakin, 2002). The SATS create 'failures' at age seven, and children can be marked as zero with bad psychological effects. The tests are reminiscent of Grad grind in Dickens' 'Hard times', who advocates facts, facts, facts--drilled out of context.