Using scientific enquiry
Science education is a matter of crucial importance to the UK, both for the future generations of scientists, engineers and technologists and for the wider public. Science and technology are essential for our economic competitiveness, and to our quality of life, and lie at the heart of our history and culture.
(Science and Technology Committee,
May 2002.)
Delivering the enquiry part of the science curriculum to their pupils is the area that primary teachers most often describe as difficult. Few primary school teachers have a broad science background and this can often cause feelings of insecurity.
Understanding the process of scientific enquiry, the skills involved and how scientists across the world conduct their work is an important step in improving one's own science teaching.
Since the evolution in access to the internet in schools, keeping abreast of current developments in science worldwide is relatively simple. Sites such as 'Science UPD8', 'Timesonline' or 'Science Across the World' give further details of issues that a primary school teacher may have noted in news broadcasts and decided to follow up for Continuing Professional Development or to enhance pupils' learning.
If you'd like to remind yourself of the main science enquiry skills and how they develop in primary children, click on the Text icon below.
Scientific Enquiry
(Word 97-2003 & 6.0/95 - RTF)
Enquiry into climate change
It would be impossible for anyone not to have heard of the debate in recent years on global warming, climate changes and the potential risks to the environment of reduced rainfall which some global models predict.
In part 2 of the Activity on the right, you can examine an experiment which took place recently in the Amazon. For five years, Daniel Nepstad and his team have been monitoring a very special corner of the Amazon rainforest. In the largest experiment of its kind, they suspended 5,600 large plastic panels between one and four metres above the ground. As a result, a one-hectare plot was deprived of 80 per cent of rainfall, mimicking the conditions of a prolonged and severe drought. You might like to discuss the article with your colleagues.
Activity Resources:
- Images
- Interactive
- Sound
- Text
- Video
Activity
- Use a grid to record what you know already about the effects of drought on large plants such as trees, and how scientists are researching this issue currently.
- Read the full article about Nepstad's unprecedented experiment from Science;
visit:
Experimental Drought Predicts Grim Future for Rainforest- Are there other facts you want to know about this experiment?
- After reading the article, jot down what you have learned, with especial emphasis on the scientific process.
Pupil activities
You could practise some of these science skills with your class. Try visiting this website: ASE Science Year Primary CDROMS online Go to 'About science', then 'Reporting Science' and read 'Eating peppermints makes you bald'. It will give you full teachers' notes and guidance on enabling pupils to raise and answer their own questions, using increasingly systematic approaches.
Pupils' activity cards help them to identify and manipulate variables, to test hypotheses and to search for patterns in data, before presenting their findings in the role of journalists.
You could also try the 'Managing science/Other resources' areas or the 'Websearch', which provides excellent lists of useful organisations
