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19 May 2005
Report: Robyn Anns
Photography: Melissa Di Ciero
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| Professor Dick Gunstone: the teaching culture needs to change. |
As a former science teacher, Professor Dick Gunstone has often seen secondary students 'parrot' the answers to questions. Whenever it happens, he despairs for an education system that appears to value learning by rote over inspiring students.
He believes the culture in which maths and science are taught, particularly at secondary level, needs to change.
"Too often maths and science are taught by rote and assessed by tests and exams that require students to merely reproduce facts in order to pass," says Professor Gunstone, who is head of Monash's Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education.
"I fear that in Australia, reproduction of knowledge is often more highly valued than the notion of inspiring students to learn.
"There are exceptions of course, but I feel that overall, we don't encourage inquiring minds -- we just give them facts to learn. In part this is because the Year 12
VCE exam totally shapes the way some teachers in secondary schools teach science," he says.
Professor Gunstone says that as well as facts, it is also important that teachers impart the values of the subjects they teach.
He and researchers from the centre are close to completing a three-year Australian Research Council-funded study into the values implicit in maths and science education in Australia.
They have found that teachers of these subjects are increasingly interested in their implicit values because they realise their importance.
He points to the school science topic 'The nature of science' as a good example of teaching values such as objectivity, accuracy and coherence -- ideas that are explicitly taught by many teachers.
"But there are other values that are only ever taught implicitly, such as Occam's razor -- a criterion for deciding among scientific theories or explanations. The Occam's razor idea says you should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic," Professor Gunstone says.
"If these values are not passed on, the subject is not taught properly or fully."
Despite its problems, however, the Australian education system compares well to that of other countries. Over the past decade, Australian primary and secondary teachers have participated in major international comparisons of teaching and learning science, looking at students' knowledge of maths and science and how they use that knowledge.
In general, Australian students performed well in both categories, with only a handful of countries -- Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic and Finland -- performing better. "The evidence shows clearly that Australia does very well, but that is probably because almost all the countries in the survey teach and assess the same way as we do," Professor Gunstone says.
He points to Finland as the exception -- it outranks Australia, but it also teaches differently and, he believes, better. "In that country, the culture does not blame kids for poor performance. The teaching system assumes all kids can learn, and schools take on the responsibility to teach them.
"In Finland, teachers help students achieve a greater knowledge of their subject, and it provides them with a greater ability to control their own learning. They have a responsibility to try to come to grips with what it is they may find difficult to understand. We could learn from that," he says.
Action: Professor Dick Gunstone can be contacted via email at dick.gunstone@education.monash.edu.au
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