An Interdisciplinary Environment for Science Learning

In scholar curriculum, the integration of contents from different learning areas has been always a challenging issue, but with very few practical experimentations. A first attempt appears in the late 1920s under the name “core” [1]. Successively, interdisciplinary and integrated curricula have been widely associated with the progressive education movement [2]. In the last twenty years, a variety of approaches and case studies have been carried out, by combining different disciplines, pedagogical approaches, people and skills showing a deep improvement in scholar learning. This paper describes an experimental project of integrating mathematics, natural science, and computer science (technology education) in the right curricular direction for the first level of Italian secondary school. The project is aimed to improve learning in all the above disciplines and thus overcome the low level of knowledge of them held by Italian primary level scholars, as it has been recently shown by OECD statistics [3]. We show effectiveness of the conceived interdisciplinary approach by means of case studies in a network of thirty classrooms of 11 years old scholars: the INNOVAMBIENTE project. We describe the considered arguments, including justifications and reasoning. Specifically, we describe how such an interdisciplinary study can improve upon traditional approaches to school curriculum.