Conceptual demand of science curricula: a study at the middle school level

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the level of conceptual demand of science curricula by analysing the case of the current Portuguese Natural Sciences curriculum for middle school. Conceptual demand is seen in terms of the complexity of cognitive skills, the complexity of scientific knowledge and the intra-disciplinary relations between distinct knowledges within the same discipline. The article also analyses recontextualizing processes that may occur within the official recontextualizing field. Theoretically, it is based on Vygotsky's ideas and Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse and uses a mixed methodology. The results show that the document with the broad guidelines of the curriculum contains a relatively high level of conceptual demand in terms of the three dimensions of conceptual demand studied. This message is recontextualized, in the direction of decreasing its conceptual demand, in the document with specific guidelines. The article explores consequences, in terms of all students’ scientific literacy, of the low level of conceptual demand recommended by the document with specified pedagogic guidelines, since teachers and textbook authors rely mostly on this official text to guide their practices and texts. 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.

Keywords:

• level of conceptual demand
• curriculum
• recontextualizing processes
• science education

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Foundation for Science and Technology for the financing of the research. The authors also acknowledge Vanda Alves and Sílvia Ferreira for their contribution to classifying curriculum excerpts and Theresa Lillis for revising the English writing.

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. See Model of analysis of “level of conceptual demand of science education” in http://essa.ie.ul.pt/researchmat_modelsofanalysis_text.htm

3. In this study, skills are seen as cognitive mental processes that may have different levels of complexity, depending on the steps involved (Marzano & Kendall, 2007).

4. The structure of the coding scheme presented in Figure 1 is such that it may be used in further studies either of science disciplines or of social sciences disciplines. The level of conceptual demand of the curriculum of a discipline (as, e.g. history in the field of social sciences) may be appreciated by analysing the complexity of knowledge and the complexity of cognitive skills that curriculum entails and also its intra-disciplinary relations. Such analyses may indicate the contribution of specific disciplines, as given by their curriculum, to students’ development, in terms of knowledge and competences. Any given curriculum usually contains general and specific guidelines and, as such, its meaning is better understood by an analysis that discriminates between broad aims and particular objectives and tasks. Furthermore, the coding scheme is also useful to analyse conceptual demand at levels of science education other than curricula as it is the case of pedagogic practices and teacher education.

5. Available online at http://essa.ie.ul.pt/materiais_instrumentos_texto.htm

6. According to this taxonomy, the cognitive domain involves six main categories of cognitive skills: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create.

7. From a conceptual point of view, the question is that the absence in the curriculum of the unifying concept of homeosthasis can compromise the understanding of relevant scientific knowledge when, studying the “Human body in balance”, the students have to understand that the human body “is organized in a hierarchy of levels that function in an integrated way and perform specific functions” (Department of Basic Education, 2001, p. 146).

8. The nervous and the hormonal systems are part of the same teaching unit this curriculum.

9. Computing the global index based on the three dimensions - degree of intra-disciplinarity between distinct scientific knowledges (IntraSK), degree of complexity of cognitive skills (CSk) and degree of complexity of scientific knowledge (SK): Exemplifying with the data obtained in the study of the pedagogic discourse of the EC:

10. Computing the partial index regarding intra-disciplinarity (IntraSK): Exemplifying with the data obtained in the study of the pedagogic discourse of the EC: