Keeping the flame alive: stoking scientific curiosity from Primary to GCSE

Chemistry teacher Marcus Patterson unpacks why initiatives at Wimbledon High School to carry through students’ sense of wonder about the world, from Primary science right through to Key Stage 4, are so important

Curiosity may have killed the proverbial cat, but for us humans, it has been, and I’m sure will continue to be, our raison d’être. From the gastronomic delights we enjoy in restaurants to the latest technological gadgets we now take for granted, curiosity and investigation have been behind them all.

In Key Stage 4, students deepen and develop their scientific knowledge and skills in preparation for their GCSE exams. Some further their education by studying science subjects at A Level. However, for others, the science they study at KS4 will be the only science education they get. So it is important that they are not only exposed to high quality teaching but that they remain enthusiastic and curious about the world around them. Because we want – no, need – our students to leave Wimbledon High School equipped to face future challenges and to come up with creative solutions to current and future problems with knowledge, reason, and zeal.

Fading fervour?

My experience, as well as the consensus more widely, suggests that students’ fervour for science start to dwindle at Key Stage 4. All children come to primary school with their own ideas and questions about science; how nature works, what energy is, what things are made of, as well as a litany of whys about everything else. During Key Stage 2 at WHS, students investigate the phenomena of living organisms, materials, Earth, space and forces. Their curiosity and eagerness is evident in their exercise books, which contain some outstanding work.

However, at Key Stage 4, that same sense of enthusiasm and wonder for science is much more difficult to see in students’ work. To be fair, students spend more time taking notes and sitting assessments than they probably did in primary school. However, the point remains: many students’ eagerness for science starts to wane, and learning science becomes a chore, based on learning content and skills simply to receive some hoped-for grade in the GCSEs.

To turn the tide in this seeming trend, Key Stage 3 has a vital role to play, as a bridge between the zestful, open, and wondrous world of primary school science and the more sophisticated, yet more sedate, world of Key Stage 4 Science. At Wimbledon High School, teachers have come up with some interesting and effective ways to help primary school students transition to science education at Key Stage 3, enabling KS3 Science to become a more effective bridge between Key Stages 2 and 4.

Wimbledon High – Year 8 Science Fair

Extending enthusiasm

One opportunity is the taster lesson. In May, Alex Farrer brought her Year 6 Science students to work alongside Year 7 Science students in the Key Stage 3 Science Lab located in the STEAM tower of the Senior School. In the past year, Year 6 students have studied electricity and have collaborated with Year 7 students to investigate electricity and cells, and to build coin-cell batteries.

In addition, Year 5 students visited the Senior School Key Stage 3 Science Lab for a taster lesson during which they explored the world of chemical and physical changes. Both Years 5 and 6 taster sessions allowed students from the Junior School not only to see and experience how science education is done at KS3 in the Senior School, but also to reinforce and buoy the learning experiences they have had so far in science, giving students a sense of continuity. What they have learned so far continues to be explored, albeit a bit more deeply, at KS3. Such continuity allows students to maintain and further develop their curiosity and enthusiasm for science.

In Key Stage 3, students’ scientific knowledge and skills grow, and their ability to communicate scientifically is starting to develop. To give students an opportunity to apply what they have learned in interesting and creative ways, Year 8 Science students put on a Science Fair. They spent the last five weeks asking questions, coming up with hypotheses, and investigating the nature of light and sound. They presented their findings in a poster session and discussed their projects with judges, parents, teachers, and each other. Students were inquisitive and worked enthusiastically on their projects, and the results were consistently creative and superb.

Cultivating curiosity

As Key Stage 3 Science teachers, we can keep students wondering eagerly about the nature of the world around them as we encourage them to reflect upon and evaluate the answers to the questions they had before: are they satisfied, and what more do they want to know? Encouraging this type of self-reflection among students, whether through class discussions or a science journal, can do much to help them maintain that zealous and inquisitive momentum for science into and throughout their Key Stage 4 Science experience.

Just as Junior School students are given an opportunity to experience science at the Senior School, Key Stage 3 students could be given an opportunity to have taster lessons in Key Stage 4 science areas. They will come to see that the topics and themes they explored in KS3 continue to be explored at KS4, but their knowledge, understanding, and communication of science will become more sophisticated. Some of their previous questions will be answered, and then they will then have new questions. Our aim is to get them to seek the answers to those questions with the same zest and wonder as they had when they were in primary school. Exciting times are ahead!

Year 7 and Year 6 working together

Trying not to PEE on your paragraphs…

Holly Beckwith, Teacher of History and Politics at WHS, explains how the History and English departments are using a small-scale action research project to try and rethink the way in which analytical writing is taught at Key Stage 3.

The age-old question for history teachers: how do we get our pupils to produce effective written analysis? It is a question we regularly grapple with as a department. Constructing and sustaining arguments is at the centre of what we do as Historians and analytical writing is thus at the core of our teaching of the discipline. But it has not always been an easy task for history practitioners to get pupils to achieve this, even over a whole key stage.

Through published discourse, history teachers have explored the ways in which we can teach pupils to produce argued causal explanations in writing (Laffin, 2000; Hammond, 2002; Chapman, 2003; Counsell, 2004; Pate and Evans, 2007; Fordham, 2007).  Extended writing has been seen as an important pedagogical tool in developing pupils’ causal reasoning as it necessitates thinking about the organisation, arrangement and relative importance of causes.

In 2003, History teacher Mary Bakalis theorised pupils’ difficulty with writing as a difficulty with history. She posited that writing is both a form of thinking and a tool for thinking and, therefore, that historical understanding is shaped and expressed by writing. Rather than viewing writing as a skill that one acquires through history, Bakalis saw writing as part of the process of historical reasoning and thinking. Through an analysis of her own Year 7 pupils’ essays, she noticed that pupils had often failed to see the relevance of a fact in relation to a question. She realised that pupils thought that history was merely an activity of stating facts rather than using facts to construct an argument.

As a solution to similar observations in pupils’ writing, history teachers have used various forms of scaffolding to help pupils construct arguments. This includes the well-known PEE tool, which was advocated by genre theorists and cross-curricular literary initiatives as put forward by, for example, Wray and Lewis (1994), and has since been used widely in History and English departments nationwide, including ours at Wimbledon High.  The concept of PEE (point, evidence, explanation) is simple and therefore a helpful tool for teaching paragraph structure. It gives pupils security in knowing how to organise their knowledge on a page.

Figure 1: PEE – Point, Evidence, Explanation

But while PEE in theory offers a sound approach to structuring extended writing in history, it has been criticised for unintentionally removing important steps in historical thinking. Fordham, for example, noticed that the use of such devices in his practice meant that there was too much ‘emphasis on structured exposition [which] had rendered the deeper historical thinking inaccessible’ (Fordham, 2007.) Pate and Evans similarly argued that ‘historical writing is about more than structure and style; the construction of history is about the individual’s reaction to the past’ (Pate and Evans, 2007).  Therefore, too much emphasis on the construction of the essay rather than the nuances of an argument or an engagement with other arguments, as Fordham argues, can create superficial success. Further problems were identified by Foster and Gadd (2013), who theorised that generic writing frame approaches such as the PEE tool was having a detrimental effect on pupils’ understanding and deployment of historical evidence in their history writing.

After reflecting on this research conducted by History teachers as a department, we started to consider that encouraging our pupils to use structural devices to help pupils’ historical writing may not be very purposeful if divorced from getting pupils to see the function and role of arguments in the discipline of history itself. Through discussions with the English department, who have also used the PEE tool in their teaching, we realised we shared similar concerns.

Not satisfied with simply holding these, we decided to do something about it and have since embarked on a piece of action research with the English department.  Action research is interested in finding solutions to problems to produce better outcomes in education and involves a continual cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection such as Figure 2 below illustrates.

We started our first cycle of our piece of small-scale research last term teaching analytical writing to classes using two different lesson sequences: one which teaches pupils PEE and one which omits this.

We then compared the writing produced by these classes to identify any noticeable differences and structured our reflections around four questions:

1.      How has the experience of teaching and learning been different to previous experience, and why?

2.      How have students responded to the new method?

3.      How far has the intervention resulted in a different approach to analytical writing so far?
4.      What are our next steps – what went well, and what needs adjusting?

Figure 2: The action research spiral (Wilson, 2017, p. 113)

Thus far, the comparisons have allowed us to make some tentative observations. Whilst these do not seem to show an established pattern yet, there does seem to be a greater sense of originality and creativity in some of the non-PEE responses. Pupils seemed to produce more free-flowing ideas and were making more spontaneous links between those ideas, showing a higher quality of thinking. In addition, a few of the participating teachers noticed that their questioning became more tailored to developing the ideas and thinking of the pupils they taught rather than getting them to write something particular. However, others noticed that pupils were already well versed in PEE and so the change in approach may have had less of an effect. Other pupils seemed to feel less secure with a freeform structure. In order to encourage the more positive effects, our next cycle of teaching will experiment with different ways of planning essays that provide pupils with a way of organising ideas more visually and focus on the development of our questioning to further develop the higher quality thinking we noticed with some classes.

The first research cycle has thus been a worthwhile collaborative reflection on our teaching practice in the pursuit of improving our pupils’ historical and literary analysis. It has given us some insights which we’re looking to develop further as we head into the second term of the academic year.

References

Bakalis, M. (2003). ‘Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion’ Teaching History 110.
Chapman, A. (2003). ‘Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning’ Teaching History 112.
Counsell, C. (2004). History and Literacy in Year 7: Building the lesson around the text. Abingdon: Hodder Education.
Fordham, M. (2007). ‘Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument’ Teaching History 129.
Foster, R. and Gadd, S. (2013). ‘“Let’s play Supermarket ‘Evidential’ Sweep”: developing students’ awareness of the need to select evidence’ Teaching History 152.
Hammond, K. (2002). ‘Getting year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge’ Teaching History 109.
Laffin, D. (2000). ‘My essays could go on for ever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE’ Teaching History 99.
Pate, J. and Evans, G. (2007). ‘Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for causal argument in Years 8 and 11’ Teaching History 128.
Wray, D. and Lewis, M. (1994). Working with Writing Frames: Developing Children’s Non-Fiction Writing Scholastic.