New science A-levels will require students to think creatively about practical work, says Jonathan Osborne
The British sociologist of science Harry Collins perhaps put it best. In science laboratories across schools in England, you can find children everywhere measuring the boiling point of water. Why? Everybody knows what the value is. What matters is why one child measures it to be 98, another 96, and another 103, and then how we go about agreeing a result.
Current science A-levels suffer from far too much attention on the measuring, and not enough on the experimental design or interpreting the data. In short, what the experiment shows. It is the latter that makes for an interesting lesson, and which develops young scientists' minds so that they can go on to greater things.
Science practical work, which should be the most motivational and challenging of all, is currently formulaic and, because it takes place in a high-stakes environment, simply does not challenge, interest or help students.
Instead, too often experiments have become a ritualised experience without any discrimination in performance. They don't prepare young people properly for the kind of tasks that they will encounter at university and neither does current practical work stretch them.
In short, they are psychometrically useless, other than as a demonstration that human beings are rather adept at jumping through hoops. The current system of assessing practical work is not fit for purpose.
But future practical science work in new A-levels has the potential to be engaging, requiring not just hands on, but minds on.
A student of physics, or chemistry, or biology, will need to think, and think creatively, about what to control and what to vary, what they are measuring, how accurate their measurements are, and then how they will interpret them.
Read the full story in The Guardian.
See more about GSE Professor Jonathan Osborne.
Read an article about future science assessment quoting Professor Jonathan Osborne in Education Week.
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