Towards Evidence-Based Practice In Science Education

Start date: 1 January 2000
End date: 30 June 2003
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Primary investigator: Professor John Leach
External co-investigators: Professor Robin Millar - University of York; Professor Jonathan Osbourne - King's College London; Dr Mary Ratcliffe - University of Southampton

Project 2: Issues on the implementation of evidence-based approaches in science education

This project is working with teachers to devise and evaluate short teaching packages, based on research evidence, to teach some key ideas in science more effectively to students aged 11-14. Students' learning will be evaluated after following this teaching, and compared to students' learning who follow conventional teaching. We will also be collecting data about how teachers actually implement the teaching in the classroom.

The teaching packages address the following topics:

Physics: electric circuits (PDF, 1MB)
Chemistry: conservation of matter in physical and chemical change processes (PDF, 438KB)
Biology: plant nutrition (PDF, 670KB)

At a later phase in the work, we will be investigating how insights into effective teaching in these topic areas can be disseminated to other teachers so that they can teach the topics in question equally effective.

Project Publications

Leach, J. & Scott, P. (2000). The concept of learning demand as a tool for designing teaching sequences [pdf file] Paper presented at the meeting Research-Based Teaching Sequences, UniversitÃ© Paris VII, Denis Diderot, November 2000.

Leach, J., Amettler, J., Hind, A., Lewis, J., & Scott, P. (2003) Evidence-informed approaches to teaching science at junior high school level: outcomes in terms of student learning [pdf file] Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Philadelphia, March 2003, as part of the symposium Evidence-based practice in science education.

Millar, R., Leach, J., Osborne, J. and Ratcliffe, M. (2006). Improving subject teaching: lessons from research in science education. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Leach, J., Ametller, J. and Scott, P. (2009). The relationship of theory and practice in designing, implementing and evaluating teaching sequences: learning from examples that don’t work. Education et la Didactique, 3(2), 139-161.

Leach, J., Ametller, J., Scott, P. (2011). Establishing and communicating knowledge about teching and learning scientific content: the role of design briefs. In K. Kortland and K. Klaasen (Editors), Designing theory-based teaching-learning sequences for science education: proceedings of the symposium in honour of Piet Lijnse at the time of his retirement as professor of physics didactics at Utrecht University. Utrecht, NL: CDBeta Press. pp 7-36.