ASE 2025 Annual Conference

The talk will consider the barriers impacting learners within science education and strategies to overcome them by exploring the Plymouth Science SEND Toolkit. Consideration has been given to supporting pupils with particular SEND needs and how to scaffold learning to support them effectively.

The session will focus on unlocking learning and removing barriers to ensure all children make progress. During the session the toolkit will be explored to consider removing barriers for those with visual impairment, hearing impairment, physical disability, neurodivergent pupils, dyslexic pupils etc. Examples from lessons will be discussed to exemplify good practice. Evidence-informed practice will be explored.

In this session, the NUSTEM group at Northumbria University will introduce two practical resources for teaching climate change to upper primary pupils. The first resource, "Climate Change: It's in Our Hands," is an engaging board game developed in collaboration with young people from local schools in the Northeast. This game facilitates group work, collaboration, and critical thinking as children explore the complexities of climate change and the practice strategies needed to limit potential temperature rises. In this session, you'll learn how to play the game and access the free download.

The second resource, "Tipping Points", focuses on climatic changes in the Antarctic's sea ice through two planned lessons and accompanying resources. These lessons provide a comprehensive exploration of the scientific and environmental impacts of these changes and the scientists working on them. During this session, you'll learn how to effectively use these resources in your classroom.

Attendees will have the opportunity to practice using these resources, engage in discussions about implementation strategies, and leave with practical tools to enrich their teaching. This session aims to provide teachers with the skills and materials they to enhance their approach to climate change education.

Improving oracy through the Great Science Share for Schools. Prompts for talk offer ideal ways to formatively assess pupil’s learning in science. Find out more about the GSSfS Toolkit and the many ways in which you can promote discussion between pupils.

This work is based on research about Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) and recent trends in science teaching, related to the integration of scientific practices and the development of critical thinking and high-order skills in students (Kuhn & Lerman, 2021; Merta Dhewa et al., 2017; Oliver & Venville, 2015; Osborne, 2014). The work describes a proposal for science teaching at a public high school in the United Kingdom (St Joseph’s Catholic High School, Slough, UK)

The proposal encompasses 15 teaching units that engage students in inquiring, modelling, and argumentation practices around challenging learning scenarios found in the National Curriculum for Physics. The learning scenarios confront students’ initial ideas and engage them in outlining initial models that will be confronted with the results of hands-on work that creates a need for exploring and understanding. The teacher’s guide is essential to trigger the social construction of knowledge and the development of metacognitive skills in students, through small-group and whole-group discussions. Argumentation is carefully scaffolded to stimulate students’ logical reasoning and to support them in the development of evidence-based conclusions.

In addition, the teaching units integrate specific episodes of the history of science providing meaningful contexts to understand how and why particular scientific explanatory models around big ideas related to energy, forces, or the properties and structure of matter were built. These episodes are meaningfully connected to the topic explored in any teaching unit and in combination with the experimental work and guided reasoning, provide a powerful approach to support the reconstruction of students’ initial models.

This work is part of a PhD thesis using a pre/post-research design to evaluate the impact of the intervention on students’ knowledge and skills. In addition, qualitative and quantitative methods will be applied to analyse students’ artefacts and the teacher and students interactions to develop a better understanding of the process that fosters cognitive development and scientific reasoning in students

References:
Kuhn, D., & Lerman, D. (2021). Yes but: Developing a critical stance toward evidence. International Journal of Science Education, 43(7), 1036-1053.
Merta Dhewa, K., Rosidin, U., Abdurrahman, A., & Suyatna, A. (2017). The development of Higher Order Thinking Skill (Hots) instrument assessment in physics study. IOSR Journal of Research & Method in Education (IOSR-JRME), 7(1), 26-32.
Oliver, M., & Venville, G. (2015). Cognitive acceleration through science education: The CASE for thinking through science. In The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 378-387). Routledge.
Osborne, J. (2014). Teaching scientific practices: Meeting the challenge of change. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 25(2), 177-196.
Suprapto, E., Sumiharsono, R., & Ramadhan, S. (2020). The Analysis of Instrument Quality to Measure the Students' Higher Order Thinking Skill in Physics Learning. Journal of Turkish Science Education, 17(4), 520-527.

The session aims to support secondary school science teachers in the delivery of climate change education through evidence-based teaching materials. The climate change teaching materials were developed through a rigorous and robust scientific process based on the latest climate change evidence.

Every day, a vast quantity of research on climate change is produced. However, the majority of this research is directed primarily towards academic and scientific audiences, leaving a gap in its accessibility to the general public and, crucially, teachers. The specialised focus of current approaches means that the dissemination of climate change research, especially within the social sciences, is as rapid as needed; however, it does not succeed in enabling wider communities to gain an understanding, thus negatively impacting climate action.

Compounding the problem, there exists misinformation or ‘fake evidence’ about climate change that further prevents public understanding. The vast body of rigorous climate change research, combined with its complexity, means that this globally significant topic can be challenging to understand and decipher for those outside the scientific community.

It is imperative that all teachers are informed and kept up to date with the latest verified evidence on climate change to ensure that future generations are equipped with accurate knowledge and are empowered to act. To assist secondary school science teachers in teaching climate change, a set of evidence-based materials was created, incorporating the most recent evidence on climate change.