Science Pre-course Task 2

The Education Endowment Fund published a guidance report, ‘Improving Secondary Science’ in 2018.

You can find a summary at: Education Endowment Foundation and can download the full report and a nice one-page summary via the link on the page.

Task A: Download and review the report. For each section, make brief notes regarding how this relates to your own experience of being taught Science.

We will visit many of these ideas further over the course of our sessions together, but we will ask you to contribute ideas to an early plenary session. Please bring your notes to our early sessions and you can then store them in the e-portfolio we will show you how to set up.

Now review the 2021 Ofsted research review of Science Education by reading the summary at the start of each section (and digging deeper where you wish). This collates research that contributes to our understanding of what makes for high quality science teaching. You can find it here: Research Review series Science

Ofsted also released a report based on recent inspections in February 2023 which you can find at: Report on main findings

There is a lot there so maybe review just the ‘Discussion of main findings’ and ‘Recommendations’ sections at this stage.
Does it appear that progress is being made? Are the key messages the same?

Task B: Consider, in the light of both these sources, the implications for the way you think Science should be taught.

You can collate your ideas as brief notes or bullet points – we will discuss these in early taught sessions in September.

N.B. Reference any additional reading you draw upon using the Harvard ‘author (date)’ style as illustrated in the recommended reading below. We use this system for all written tasks in the School of Education at the University of Leicester so it is a good habit to get into early rather than including, for example, footnotes which you may have used previously. There is plenty of support available online if you are unsure how to reference a particular type of resource using the Harvard system. More will be available once you have access to the University Library online.