Inquiry: The Emphasis of a Bold, New Science Curriculum

A question of primary concern to today's science educators is "How do children best learn science?" Researchers restate the question by asking "Under what conditions do elementary-school students grasp the essential concepts in science?" Constructivist researchers, those who believe that learners must construct knowledge for themselves by manipulating and transforming materials, think that the answers to these questions are found in well-designed "hands-on/minds-on" learning experiences--in which students cover less material in greater depth (as compared with a textbook's more general coverage of many topics)--and experiences that are integrated with mathematics, reading, multimedia and other technology resources. * Hands-on/Minds-on Curricula Fundamentally, the term "handson/minds-on" highlights a biological perspective on human learning-the natural way by which humans inquire about the world around them. People learn by doing and thinking about what they do. In a thoughtfully designed curriculum, what the mind learns from hands-on experiences can be extended toward abstraction through representational experiences (still and action pictures, drawings, photographs, video and videodisc). Full abstraction, then, can be reached through appropriate narrative and expository writings. Recognizing this, science programs now offer activities that integrate math, reading and writing skills with technologies such as videodiscs and other electronic learning materials. In the past few years there has been an outpouring of new science curricula. Statewide adoption processes, including 1992's California science adoption, increasingly focus on non-textbook-based approaches to science education. And virtually all the new programs share one significant element: they have veered from the traditional textbook path of reading about science to a more personal student-inquiry process with access to technologies. * Successful Approach As current researchers in this field, my team and I, based at the Center for Multisensory Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California-Berkeley, worked under an NSF grant to advance a hands-on/minds-on learning approach to teaching science. The approach has become the commercial program called the Full Option Science System (FOSS). Today, this activity-centered, inquiry-oriented program is integrated with videodisc and multimedia technologies to form the Britannica Science System (BSS). Both FOSS and the BSS are marketed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp. of Chicago, Ill., and both span K-6 grades. A middle school component is under preparation. When development began, we used these working hypotheses: * Learning takes place best via firsthand, direct-inquiry experiences and progresses to depth and abstraction through representation and narrative or expository tasks. * Learning is enhanced when learners work collaboratively. * Science is both process (how we come to know something) and content (what is worth knowing). We stressed seven particularly powerful thinking processes that enable youngsters to build scientific concepts: observing, communicating, comparing, organizing, relating, inferring and applying. * Program Testing Is a Key FOSS and BSS are the result of extensive research and years of classroom testing. Each of the 27 modules in FOSS took two years to develop. Developers taught preliminary ideas and tested the materials in classrooms, reworked them into effective sequences, then prepared trial guides for teachers. …