Science Education Curriculum, History of

Science education curriculum includes textbooks, instructional materials, and complete instructional programs designed to help students master the content and processes of science. Learning science requires that students acquire a rich understanding of both the science facts about the natural world as well as how science explains these phenomena. Such rich learning requires an equally rich set of instructional experiences. The history of science education curriculum has been defined by the tension between what is known to be good instructional practice and the difficulties that arise when attempting to implement such practices widely in U.S. schools.

When the study of science was recognized as a legitimate school subject during the last half of the 19th century, science education curriculum reflected the current understandings of how children learned; that is, by reading (or being read to) and by recitation of the facts. At the secondary level, students were to study chemistry, physics, and astronomy with a strong laboratory component. However, contemporary evidence suggests that most students were taught science by reading textbooks and reciting what they had read.

The last quarter of the 19th century saw the development of new psychological insights into learning that should be applied to schooling. The most widely cited formulation of the relationship between the mind and learning science is that of John Dewey. In Dewey's formulation, human evolution selected for adaptive intelligence; that is, humans have the ability to learn from experience. Central to Dewey's formulation of that learning as a natural human capacity is the understanding that learning is the result of active investigation of experience.

During the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, much thought went in to the development of science curriculum that reflected the psychological foundations of student learning. Work at Francis Parker's Cook County Normal School, at the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (under the direction of John Dewey), and the development of “project method,” as promoted by the Teachers College professor William Heard Kilpatrick, showed that it was possible to engage students in the crucial activity of investigation even within the context of a traditional school. The experimental spirit in science curriculum with its emphasis on student investigative and reflective activity contrasted with the experience of most students whose science instruction consisted of textbook reading and recitation of facts and vocabulary.

The first systematic attempt at formalizing what should be taught and learned about science was done by the National Education Association's Committee of Ten in 1893. The work of the Committee of Ten standardized what was to be taught in the elementary and secondary schools. During the elementary years, children were to engage in “nature study,” while in high school, students would study botany, zoology, chemistry, and physics with the goal of learning the facts and principles of those subjects in a laboratory setting. The work of the Committee of Ten was primarily about practice. If one were to operate a school, what would be done in the school?

World events of the 1930s and 1940s brought new imperatives for science education curriculum. Efforts to improve science curriculum were largely local before World War II. By the end of that conflict, U.S. citizens had become acutely aware of the power of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology and how important these disciplines were to the successful outcome of the war to the nation. The sense of urgency continued into the postwar world.

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