- Title
- Science and numeracy
- Creator
- O'Toole, Mitch; Sellars, Maura
- Relation
- Numeracy in Authentic Contexts: Making Meaning Across the Curriculum p. 373-404
- Relation
- https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811057342
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- The 2010 Australian Curriculum documents represent a sharp break with previous practice in Australian schools. They have resulted in mandated content from Foundation to Year 10 in all Australian jurisdictions. In the case of the Australian Curriculum Science (ACS), this content is set out in three columns as follows: • Science Understanding (SU: things to be taught to learners), • Science as a Human Endeavour (SHE: context to be exposed for learners) and • Science Inquiry Skills (S/S: things to be done by learners). The content descriptions are supported by introductory explanatory material, suggested elaborations, achievement standards and a set of very useful General Capabilities and Cross-curriculum Priorities (ACARA, 2015). Learners already know things and they use the things they know to make sense of new experiences. Any new learning that links to unpredictable experience may lead to expected understandings, unexpected misunderstandings or some alternative conception representing a combination of the two. If something new does not connect at all with learner prior knowledge, it is likely to be ignored or quickly forgotten (Baviskar, Hartle, & Todd-Whitney, 2009). Our learning experiences are scaffolded by our families and the cultures and sub-cultures within which we grew up. Learner cultural knowledge and the extent to which school knowledge is connected to their lives will influence the extent to which students pay attention to the experiences teachers design to help them acquire supposedly socially important knowledge, such as science (Waldrip, Timothy, & Wilikai, 2007). 'Knowledge' that learners do not recognise as significant is discarded. Because of this, science sits ambiguously in learners' worlds. On one hand, science is school knowledge: 'teacher stuff' at best and only of interest to 'dead privileged white males' at worst. On the other hand, learners are immersed in the world that science claims to explain. Both things are true: science is both all around us and locked in books written by people unlike ourselves. There have long been profound concerns about the lack of impact school knowledge seems to have on learner beliefs (Caleon & Subramaniam, 2005; Pfundt & Duit, 1997) and yet science-themed media command a wide audience. This combination is odd and the very popularity of science infotainment can bring tensions between specialist and popular science to the surface (Jeffries, 2003).
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1409208
- Identifier
- uon:35964
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789811057342
- Language
- eng
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