Science, Curriculum

Science curriculum is the portal through which everyone achieves the basic science literacy required for life in our increasingly technological world. Curriculum, often defined as a course of study or set of courses, is the result of a design process that includes all of the methods, materials, and media used to transmute raw scientific knowledge, the content, into a set of learning experiences. As cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have shown, learning is a change that occurs when people experience events that forge new neural pathways and change the structure of their brains in ways that enable them to accomplish tasks they were previously incapable of performing. Learning literally changes the physical structure of students' brains.

One of the most important breakthroughs in learning has been the research on experts and how they gain their expertise. The development of expertise serves as a good model for science curriculum for gifted students for two main reasons. First, the study of experts shows what successful learning looks like. Experts are, by definition, people who function at a high level within a domain of knowledge. Implicit within this idea is an emphasis on actively solving problems or designing new creations, rather than merely answering questions of the type that appear on standardized tests. After all, a scientist is someone who discovers something new.

Also, the expertise research lifts the focus of curriculum to the development of process skills and metacognitive skills (i.e., thinking about thinking), which form procedural knowledge, what cognitive psychologists term how-to-do-it knowledge. [Page 769]Procedural knowledge, the cognitive backbone of expertise, is the knowledge of how to accomplish key tasks and goals, which has become so deeply ingrained as to become an automated and unconscious skill. Procedural knowledge, developed through years of challenging deliberate practice sessions, is estimated to account for 50 to 90 percent of the performance of experts. This is the skill of the major league outfielder who, hearing the crack of the bat, races for the fences and catches the ball over his shoulder on the run.

Most curriculum and most state standards focus on declarative knowledge, the term for the conscious knowledge of the facts, concepts, and principles of a domain, the knowledge that allows us to answer test questions. This is why many students who have scored highly on science tests in high school encounter serious difficulty in college lab courses that require facility with lab equipment and science process skills. Expertise is the development of extensive networks of procedural knowledge in a domain, guided by highly developed metacognitive skills or the executive control functions, and richly studded with extensive declarative knowledge and cross-linked to be available when needed. To be most effective, this declarative knowledge must be linked to the key points on the procedure where they will be applied. This expertise is exemplified in the movie Apollo 13 by the skill of the NASA engineers, who were told, “Houston, we have a problem” and creatively solved the air quality crisis, along with many others, to bring the spacecraft home safely.

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