ASE 2025 Annual Conference

Imagine telling your students that their upcoming science mock exam is the most important exam of their life. Imagine the pressure this puts them under. Imagine the enormous quantity of information that they feel they need to ‘know’ for their exam. Imagine thinking that some revision lessons on ‘difficult topics’, and some general advice on revision will help.

Imagine doing this with the majority of students every year. Without question.

Imagine if you did question whether there was a ‘different way’. For many years, like most other science teachers, I had assumed that there was no ‘other’ way. Then I asked the question, and started on a journey, during which I used all my knowledge of formative assessment, built up since my early involvement with the King’s College team and the ‘Inside The Black Box’ project, to develop new formative methods for preparing my students for their science examinations. This journey resulted in the total breakdown of the differentiation between preparation for summative assessments, such as mock exams, and the formative assessment techniques that my students were used to using in their lessons.

Imagine the end result of the journey being a totally different, more formative, approach to both preparation for exams, and of the revision done, by students.

Imagine discovering that this benefitted every students’, confidence with their science exams, regardless of their abilities and past attainment. Imagine that this also resulted in far better examination results across the board.

Imagine that nothing on my journey involved any more work for the students, nor for the teacher.

Imagine if you could get the benefits of the first part of my journey in a single session at this year’s ASE conference.

Imagine a totally new approach to linking formative and summative assessment to help students prepare for their science exams.

Engaging students in the practice of science is fundamental for learning. Debate persists over how this can be achieved in the classroom and the research reveals the potential and caution required if teachers are to utilise practical science activities effectively, as ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ learning opportunities.

In this keynote, we will review and discuss the importance of facilitating practical work that supports students’ deep intellectual engagement with the practice of science during inquiry-based activities and how this translates into improved learning.

We will reconsider research around inquiry-based learning, cognitive acceleration in science education, and classroom dialogue through a practical science lens. This body of research provides valuable insights into how this can be achieved in your classroom. Drawing from the real-classroom experiences of KS2-KS4 teachers (like you) who have adapted their pedagogical and assessment practices, we will illustrate how practical science activity can engage students in minds-on learning.

Science Education has always been bound up with technology. Advances in technology mean that we need to re-think not only how we conduct education but also what education is for.

The new generative AI challenges many of the current goals of education. I argue, with examples, that this should return us to valuing the importance of dialogue more. Dialogues supported by AI can help teach students how to think better about science and help induct them into participation in the long-term global dialogue of science.

Practical work in KS3 Science is often framed as an activity and may not represent good progression from the primary phase.  This workshop will propose a way of ensuring students are challenged and supported to develop their skills and understanding of Working Scientifically, building foundations for GCSE.

The focus of our research is to inform how classroom science practice can be improved through effective engagement with parents in an out of school science club.

The focus participant samples are families from ethnic diverse backgrounds from The Meadows in Nottingham. Both parents and their children explore different scientific concepts from the EYFS or National Curriculum and develop their use of scientific vocabulary.

Parents are an important factor to the collaboration of home-school communication. In the session, they reflect on their school experiences and reflect on their science learning. They use their own unique experiences and life journey to present scientific learning in the classroom.

Providing contextual learning linked to the seasons/weather/local habitats allows the children to experience science daily and engage in everyday conversations using their scientific literacy.

By providing effectively engaging sessions, we are building a community of families that can envisage careers for their children in the world of science. The children build confidence in themselves as scientific explorers and can feel what it means to think like a scientist.

The co-collaboration of parents has enlightened us on their invaluable support for encouraging and supporting their children’s learning away from school.

As the majority of our families have English as a second language and some children also have SEND, we are proactive in promoting effective use of scientific literacy and scientific vocabulary.

We have observed children’s and their parents’ engagement and enthusiasm grow over the past 18 months. We have identified language as a barrier for communicating abstract concepts but have found that using the right approach and apparatus, we are able to teach the learning objectives clearly.

The approaches we have used are self-narration; short simple direct instructional language for processes and challenge; verbal feedback from the parents, praise and encouragement for the children. Importantly we have found that reflection on the learning also helps consolidate the new learning, ready for the next session.

Interestingly, we have applied adapted approaches to the input but have retained the same outcome for all of the children in attendance. We have noticed that the competency of children’s first language at home also correlates with the engagement of science learning. They can be imaginative and support this with language. They can create pictures mentally with the support of their parents in their first language. We call this ‘family learning’. Many of the families from the marginalised backgrounds express their desire for social mobility for the children and they believe that a firm grounding in science is essential. Many of our parents are highly qualified from the country of birth and apply their knowledge to the sessions explaining what is happening to their children.

The children have developed essential skills such as listening, following instructions, asking questions, sharing, turn taking, drawing, explaining, relating their understanding to others, developing writing skills and collaborating in family learning.

Join us for a dynamic, one-hour introductory session focused on mastering pedagogy in light of the RSC’s new on-line, on-demand course ‘Effective Pedagogy’. This session features a panel of expert authors and educators who will provide valuable insights into essential pedagogical topics, such as cognitive science and checking for understanding. Our experts will share their experiences and successful practices, offering practical strategies to enhance teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes. Find out how you can make the most of the RSC’s fully funded teaching resources and the RSC’s ‘Education in Chemistry’ magazine articles alongside the on-demand course as part of your professional teaching journey.  

Rationale:
This workshop addresses two important themes in primary science education:
•the effective application of oracy to the teaching and learning of science;
•the need to teach conceptual disciplinary knowledge (to develop an understanding of what science is and how the scientific community works) more effectively.

The materials to be shared are being developed as part of a project funded by the PHG Foundation and led by Professor Rupert Wegerif at Hughes Hall, Cambridge. They build on the legacy of the Thinking Together project which set out to enable pupils to make better use of spoken language to think well, both socially and individually. It is hoped that teaching pupils to think well about the nature of science and the scientific community will enhance their appreciation of science as a way of knowing about the world, make the subject more relevant and meaningful to them (build their science capital), and support them to better understand and evaluate information they are exposed to online. We also hope that engagement with the materials will support pupils to feel more ‘present’ and valued as co-constructors of their own understanding of science.

Outcomes:
Each participant will be given a set of materials developed as part of the project.
The session will enable participants to:
•use a set of detailed lesson plans and accompanying resources to teach pupils how to talk and think effectively in small groups and as a whole class (with benefits that extend beyond science lessons!)
•use the materials to explore key ideas about the nature of science and the scientific community with their pupils, mainly through the medium of talk;
•engage students in dialogues that connect the science curriculum to their lived experience, building their science capital;
•develop their own confidence to teach conceptual disciplinary knowledge;
•more confidently facilitate classroom dialogue so that pupils are more actively engaged in co-constructing their own understanding.

Session details:
Participants will be given an overview of the project materials and the opportunity to engage in a number of the activities. There will be time to reflect on the value of the materials and different models for their integration into the science curriculum. These discussions will be informed by feedback from rigorous in-school evaluation. The presenters will draw on their extensive experience of oracy-based pedagogy to model and discuss the effective use of the materials (Neil Phillipson is a SAPERE P4C trainer, an associate of Oracy Cambridge, and an author on dialogic education, as well as being an experienced Primary Science Quality Mark hub leader.  A practicing teacher from our teacher-evaluation team, will also attend).