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Conceptual Demand of Practical Work in Science Curricula

A Methodological Approach

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Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the level of complexity of practical work in science curricula and is focused on the discipline of Biology and Geology at high school. The level of complexity is seen in terms of the emphasis on and types of practical work and, most importantly, in terms of its level of conceptual demand as given by the complexity of scientific knowledge, the degree of inter-relation between knowledges, and the complexity of cognitive skills. The study also analyzes recontextualizing processes that may occur within the official recontextualizing field. The study is psychologically and sociologically grounded, particularly on Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse. It uses a mixed methodology. The results show that practical work is poorly represented in the curriculum, particularly in the case of laboratory work. The level of conceptual demand of practical work varies according to the text under analysis, between the two subjects Biology and Geology, and, within each of them, between general and specific guidelines. Aspects studied are not clearly explicated to curriculum receivers (teachers and textbooks authors). The meaning of these findings is discussed in the article. In methodological terms, the study explores assumptions used in the analysis of the level of conceptual demand and presents innovative instruments constructed for developing this analysis.

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Notes

  1. The ESSA Group – Sociological Studies of the Classroom – is a research group of the Institute of Education of the University of Lisbon.

  2. Bernstein’s model of pedagogic discourse is accessible at <http://essa.ie.ul.pt/researchmat_modelsofanalysis_text.htm> and its characterization is available at <http://essa.ie.ul.pt/bernsteinstheory_text.htm>.

  3. The concept of practical work presented in the Biology and Geology Portuguese curriculum is the following: “practical work must be considered as a broad concept that comprises various kinds of activities, ranging from paper and pencil activities to activities that require lab use or field trips. Thus, students can develop skills as diverse as using a binocular dissecting microscope or an optical microscope, the graphical presentation of data, writing reports of practical activities, carrying out autonomous information research using different media, without neglecting but rather strengthening the capacities of written and oral expression” (DES 2001, p. 70, translated).

  4. The high school Biology and Geology curriculum for the 10th and 11th schooling years (DES 2001, 2003) was constructed by two different teams of authors. One team wrote the curriculum for Biology and another team wrote the curriculum for Geology.

  5. At this level of analysis, we established a parallelism between the MES–teacher relation and the teacher–student relation. It was considered that, at the level of the MES–teacher relation, there is a text (the curriculum-OPD) to be acquired by the teacher and that the more implicit the evaluation criteria are, the more control the teacher will have of that text.

  6. The instruments are available online at <http://essa.ie.ul.pt/researchmat_instruments_text.htm>.

  7. Units of analysis were taken as ambiguous whenever they did not allow for a clear distinction either of the type of practical work, or the degree of complexity of scientific knowledge, or the degree of complexity of cognitive skills, or the degree of intradisciplinary relations, and as such classification was impossible.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge Isabel Neves for her contribution in the analysis of the curriculum. This research was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology.

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  1. Institute of Education, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Sílvia Ferreira & Ana M. Morais

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  1. Sílvia Ferreira
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  2. Ana M. Morais
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Correspondence to Sílvia Ferreira.

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Ferreira, S., Morais, A.M. Conceptual Demand of Practical Work in Science Curricula. Res Sci Educ 44, 53–80 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-013-9377-7

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