Level Four Science for our Year 7 and 8 children

In my travels around the countryside (and always keen to head to new places so do ask!), one thing that strikes me is how we teach our Year 7 and 8 students. Quite often the question pops up "How do our Year 8s do in science when they get to college?" and unfortunately the answer can be "quite poorly". Students may be unfamiliar with the subject altogether, or not understand the vocabulary, or have little context knowledge, so feel quite insecure when heading into the classroom. In terms of the latter, I'm not sure that we should have our Y7/8 curriculum driven by knowledge needs of Y9 classrooms but even children going in knowing 'some stuff' may make them feel more confident in the attaining of some more!

The NZC nature of science strands and the context strands are quite general. Have a look and not only will you see a lot of it is the same as for Level 3, but also the verbs are not specific: explore, describe, appreciate, identify... (In fact, that could make an interesting activity for the staff: underline all the verbs): so what do these look like? How much "appreciate" is needed to be at Level 4? When will I know that students can "describe" at Level 4 rather than Level 3? I think these are valid questions but may also be quite different from school to school.

The other side of this is the how we teach science? How do we know we're teaching at a Level 4? I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of our teaching programmes may say we're teaching Level 4 but actually it's more likely Level 3 or even 2. Of course, if students haven't explored the topic before, they should start at an earlier level, but I think even when they have, we still tend to teach a hands-on approach that probably reflects lower level classrooms. The other issue is us! What if we don't really know enough science to teach Level 4? Or we don't really know what it should look like?

NZCER STwE Assessments

In answer to the second question, there are two options. We can start with the Science Thinking with Evidence assessments from NZCER. Besides actually finding out what level the students are working at in terms of the nature of science (the science capabilities are used for the Y4-6 tests), we can also look at the content of the tests. How are questions asked? What verbs are used? What are children expected to do? I think you might be surprised at the depth! Some questions may have contexts that if you knew about them would give you more confidence in answering them, but you can certainly answer them without knowing anything! And that's the key! Are we teaching our children the science skills and attitudes so that they can work in any context well?

The second option is the Assessment Resource Bank. I've been having a wander through today and have found lots of good examples of data gathering using statistics and measurement. Although the advanced search uses the nature of science strands, you can add key search words that are science capability based. Besides having tasks that will straight away show you how children could be thinking and how they are working at Level 4 with standardised comparisons to help you, I think there are some really good lessons that could be adapted from the assessments! Start with a discussion and 'the problem' (that just happens to coincide with the exercise!) and then let the students investigate, whilst we all critique our findings and research methods and then leave some space to investigate our wonderings that might result from our work.

Although these are assessments, I think they are fantastic starters for us teachers to build series of lessons around and they give us some ideas around how we perhaps should be teaching science at this Level 4. Pull out your Progressions in reading, writing and maths -if this is what we expect at Level 4, then we should be expecting the same for our science! I was going to put some links here -I like the Runny Honey, Propoerties of five drinks, Keeping drinks warm, but the list goes on (I have 11 tabs open at the moment!). With the arb site, you can save activities to your folders for later and you can make as many folders as you like!  

As always, I value your questions and comments (and requests for PLD!) and do check out my facebook page "science happening nz'.

Keep sciencing on!
Paul

Links: https://arbs.nzcer.org.nz/
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/tests/science-thinking-evidence
https://www.facebook.com/sciencehappeningnz/