Practical work : making it more effective

This article outlines a model for thinking about the effectiveness of practical activities in school science and how this might be evaluated. This was used in a research study of current practice in the use of whole-class practical work in secondary schools in England. The emphasis in the lessons observed was on successfully ‘producing the phenomenon’. Little whole-class time was used to discuss the ideas that the activity involved. Task design did not reflect the wide variation in task demand. This suggests a need for greater clarity about the learning objectives of practical activities, and wider use of strategies to increase the ‘minds on’ aspects of practical work. Practical work is an essential part of science education. In science lessons, we are trying to extend students’ knowledge of the natural world and develop their understanding of the ideas, theories and models that scientists have found useful in explaining and predicting its behaviour. Teaching science naturally involves ‘showing’ learners things, or putting them into situations where they can see them for themselves. In this article, our focus is on whole-class practical activities carried out by the students themselves, usually in small groups. Most science teachers see practical work of this sort as an essential feature of their everyday work. Many say that they believe it leads to better learning: we are more likely to understand and remember things we have done than things we have just been told. And we know, both from experience and research, that students like practical work, preferring it to other kinds of lesson activities. On the other hand, we also know from experience that students often do not learn from a practical task the things we wanted them to learn. A few weeks after carrying out a practical task, most recall only specific surface details of the task and many are unable to say what they learned from it, or what (as regards science learning) they were doing it for. This has led some science educators to question the contribution of practical work to learning. Osborne (1998) suggests that practical work ‘only has a strictly limited role to play in learning science and that much of it is of little educational value’ (p. 156). Hodson (1991) claims that: ‘as practised in many countries, it is ill-conceived, confused and unproductive. For many children, what goes on in the laboratory contributes little to their learning of science’ (p. 176). Others have voiced similar doubts. Perhaps a key phrase in Hodson’s comment is ‘as practised’. Practical work is essential in science teaching and learning, given the subject matter. But do we use practical work effectively? To answer that question, we need first to ask ourselves what we mean by ‘effectiveness’. What do we mean by ‘effectiveness’? To think about the ‘effectiveness’ of a teaching/ learning activity of any kind, it is useful to consider the steps in developing such an activity, and in monitoring what happens when it is used. The model shown in Figure 1 was originally developed by the European Labwork in Science Education project (Millar, Tiberghien and Le Maréchal, 2002). The starting point is the learning objectives that the teacher (or whoever developed the activity) had in mind (box A in Figure 1). These will, of course, be influenced by a number of things: the context in which the activity will be used (what the curriculum being followed requires, what resources are available, how the students will be assessed, etc.); their views of science (what they think it is important to teach); and their views of learning (what they think is appropriate