The first stage in this project was a survey of science teachers and administrators. Its principal results were reported by Morrison (1978) and elaborated on by McFadden (1980a) at the first international symposium on world trends in science and technology education. This survey led to a series of curriculum development workshops, conducted as graduate courses at several local universities.
The resulting curriculum materials, consisting primarily of guidance to teachers, supported by worksheets for students, displaced the existing textbook-based curriculum in many schools in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and supplemented it in others. These materials represented the teachers' efforts to design a curriculum that would motivate student interest and learning while at the same time being manageable by teachers.
The result was a prescription for highly interactive teaching with approximately one-third of the time spent by students in the conduct of practical inquiry and most of the rest of the time in inquiry that is paper-based. The production of teacher guidelines and student worksheets, however, was not considered by the participating teachers to be a secure and adequate means of consolidating and improving a new curriculum; for that, textbooks for students would be needed. Therefore, by 1982, the ASCP had shifted its focus to the development of a textbook series.
The development of a textbook for students that would adequately support concept learning and model the interactive teaching style favoured by project participants turned out to be a formidable task. Including several rounds of field testing, the publication of the three year series of student textbooks and supporting teachers' resource books, under the title, SciencePlus, was staggered over three years, beginning with grade seven materials (ASCP, 1986, 1987,1988).
It proved not to be a simple matter to develop new textbooks for a local area that must be competitive with the quality of resources that are published and distributed nationally or internationally. To ensure quality, the publication agreement between the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project and Harcourt Brace Canada for SciencePlus included copyright retention by the authors and a commitment by the publisher to support field-testing and extensive work on illustration, photography and graphic design. A commitment was also made to publish two French language editions for the Atlantic Provinces, one for French Immersion students and the other for the Francophone school sector in New Brunswick. The result was competitive, but costly.
To make the effort economically feasible for the publisher, the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project agreed to cooperate with it in the development of further editions for Ontario (ASCP 1988,1994) and Alberta (ASCP, 1989,1990). However, because of different content requirements in these provinces, the development of these new editions nearly doubled the number of original units, adding to the cost. Thankfully, parallel reform efforts in the United States led to a demand there for new materials for grades 6 to 9 and to an interest in a US edition of SciencePlus (ASCP,1992). Its publication by Holt Rinehart & Winston, including a royalty split between Harcourt Brace Canada and the ASCP, made the continuity of the Canadian effort economically feasible. Ultimately, to ensure a high quality program to serve the needs of the teachers and students in a local area (population under two million), ASCP became a curriculum developer serving two countries (population approximately three hundred million).
With over two million students currently using the program, including over a quarter of a million students in Canada, SciencePlus is arguably one of the more commercially successful reform projects in science education in these two countries. A second US edition has been published this year (ASCP, 1996) and a further Canadian edition, building upon the latest US edition, is in the planning stage.
But numbers like these do not tell the whole story. What has been accomplished educationally and what has been sacrificed to achieve such an evident commercial success? What can be learned by others whose aim, like the ASCP's, is to improve science and technology education in their local area?
Discussion
The discussion that follows is organized around several themes that
characterize the ASCP's efforts and, to a significant extent, results.
(i) Linking curriculum development and professional development
Trying to avoid the apparent shortcomings of a previous era of reform efforts in science education, the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project decided from its inception to attempt to link curriculum development with professional development. In practice, this turned out to be a much more complex task than was foreseen. Initially, it required finding ways to engage the majority of teachers in the Canadian Maritimes in the process of curriculum development. Within its first three years of activity, ASCP did succeed in engaging 150 of the 500 junior high science teachers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the development of nearly 50 curriculum units. Many of the other teachers participated in the field testing of these units. However, during the lengthy transition from the development of elaborated curriculum plans by these teachers to the completion of the writing and field-testing of textbooks by a centralized team of eight principal authors and approximately fifty field-test teachers, there was a substantial discontinuity on the professional development side. Only in 1992 was a formal network of the users initiated.
While the SciencePlus Teachers Network has reached all grade 7 - 9 science teachers in the Maritime Provinces and effectively engaged about half of them in further, voluntary developmental activities, the links between curriculum and professional development have been harder to develop and maintain in connection with the Ontario, Alberta and United States editions.
In the United States, Holt Rinehart & Winston has supported the Atlantic Pacific Science Initiative, a business and education partnership chaired by Robert Yager at the University of Iowa, to develop a U.S. SciencePlus Teachers Network. The US network produces a lively and informative print newsletter (The Communicator), participates in NSTA meetings and has initiated an electronic network in an effort to link and support the 20,000 or more US teachers currently using SciencePlus. While the number of teachers involved in this activity is growing, this networking most certainly has not been able to catch up with the rapid uptake of the program. It is unclear now whether that will ever happen and indeed whether a curriculum specific form of educator networking remains necessary and viable once the reform goals become accepted policy and practice.
(ii) Teaching science in the context of human experience
A principal concern of the teachers in the early ASCP workshops was the development of a science curriculum that would be meaningful to the students. This concern translated into several characteristics of the resulting curriculum, including initial learning activities designed to motivate interest, elicit entry level understandings, address students' concerns and interests and connect science with everyday experience. Subsequent learning activities were designed to utilize everyday materials and events to explore and develop concepts. And further learning activities were planned to provide opportunities for students to consolidate their scientific understanding through application to questions, problems and issues that they find meaningful and interesting.
(iii) Education for responsible citizenship in a science and technology based economy
Leaders of the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project interacted with their international colleagues at the first Symposium on World Trends in Science Education in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in August 1979 and in the subsequent symposia convened by the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE). Among the shared interests of participants in these symposia has been a desire to see a renewed emphasis on science education for citizenship and more attention within science education to the links between science and technology education, including opportunities in science classes for related technological problem solving by students. Contributions on these themes at the first and subsequent international symposia convened by IOSTE played a significant role in shaping the curriculum materials developed by the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project, reflected in the full title of this work, SciencePlus Technology and Society. As described in more detail elsewhere, societal issues and technological problems have been used by the ASCP as organizers for several of the units in SciencePlus and are addressed as applications of scientific concepts in others (McFadden, 1990a, 1991a).
(iv) Facilitating the learning of scientific concepts.
The development of SciencePlus coincided with growing interest among science educators in research on concept learning and the increasing recognition of the large gap between the scientific concepts represented in traditional school science curricula and those actually held by students. The spate of research publication in this field from the late seventies to the present has been especially helpful in calling educators' attention to the teaching-learning problem.
While following the evolution of this research, the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project experimented with learning activities designed and sequenced to facilitate student concept learning for the whole range of scientific concepts included in the science curriculum for grades 6-9. The pattern adopted by the authors, with some variation, includes elicitation of the student's existing understanding, brief presentation of a selected new idea, opportunities through guided exploration for students to formulate their own understanding and match it against examples of acceptable formulations, and further requirements for the students to apply their understanding in a variety of situations. A major role is assigned to tasks that feature reading, talking and writing to learn and extensive use is made of photos, illustrations and graphs that students are asked to interpret.
(v) Assessing student progress in learning scientific concepts and preparing for responsible citizenship
The assessment strategies and materials developed to determine student progress in achieving the goals of the SciencePlus program mirror the program itself. In practice they serve as an extension of the learning activities. A variety of kinds of performance tasks are used that constrain students to represent and apply their understanding. Also, a model has been created to assist teachers to generate similar assessment materials themselves. A principal concern has been the development of performance tasks that reveal student understanding without presenting teachers with an unmanageable amount of marking. Checklists and reporting forms have been created for teachers and students to monitor and represent progress in achieving a variety of program goals.
Until and unless similar forms of evaluation are used in connection with traditional programs (an unlikely event!), a fully meaningful comparison between the effects of programs like SciencePlus and more traditional programs cannot be made. The adoption of SciencePlus and similar resources in Canada and the United States is taking place in spite of external examinations that feature machine-markable tests. Apparently, students using reform projects are not disadvantaged by these examinations. Indeed, at least one jurisdiction has attributed the improved scores of its students on these exams to the introduction of SciencePlus (Crocker, 1989; Nova Scotia Department of Education, 1990). The impact of the SciencePlus program on the actions of teachers has been documented by the author (McFadden 1990b, 1990c, 1991b, 1991c). These include a shift from student assessment that features selected response testing to embedded and performance assessment and from a teacher dominated classroom emphasizing fact-recall to an interactive classroom featuring hands- on, minds-on learning.
(vi) Inclusion of all students in learning science
A major goal of the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project in the development of SciencePlus has been the inclusion of all students in learning science. Features that address that concern include (a) contexts for learning that are familiar and meaningful to students, reflected in the different examples and illustrations used in editions intended for different regions, countries and cultures and in the use of everyday materials, (b) equal representation of both sexes and inclusion of all races and cultures in the numerous examples of those doing science, (c) inseparable links between the development of ideas and hands-on, minds-on involvement in the doing of science and (d) abundant opportunities for students to develop and represent their understanding in a variety of forms.
One indication of the ASCP's success in including all students in learning science was the recommendation by a major US national study of middle school science curricula that SciencePlus met its criteria for exemplary status in relation to the needs of all middle school students (Gore and Pogrow, 1991).
(vii) Author-publisher relationships that can support educational reform
The achievement of such goals as the inclusion of all students in science learning requires the active collaboration and support of publishers. Educators, however, cannot expect publishers to initiate educational reform. Given the commercial advantage held by publishers that employ large marketing departments and the cost of producing materials of high technical quality, most publishers support only a small number of publications for a given educational market, usually only one or two products for each subject and level. Publishers of unsuccessful projects can suffer significant losses (including their investment in these projects, market share and reputation); hence their caution. On the other hand, to publish a successful reform is a way for a publisher to gain a significant new share of the educational market. This interest opens the door to well-considered reform efforts that are able to demonstrate classroom success.
While the ASCP cannot claim that its relationships with its publishers have been without some tensions and misunderstandings, the main characteristic has been a remarkable level of commitment of the publishers to support the vision of the authors. The contract with Harcourt Brace Canada, as noted previously, included agreement to copyright ownership by the authors and a commitment by the publisher to support field-testing and to make an exceptional investment in illustrations and graphic design. This level of commitment was unusual then and now in Canada for secondary school curricula because of the fragmented nature of the Canadian school textbook market (McFadden, 1980b).
The 1991 agreements with Holt Rinehart & Winston in the United States added a commitment to facilitate the introduction of the program there by supporting an independent user network. The heavy investments by both companies were made at times when each was experiencing significant uncertainty. Elsewhere, the author has provided a more detailed consideration of the issues concerning author-publisher-educator relationships and the specific experiences of the ASCP (McFadden, 1992). That account includes a series of recommendations to educators interested in initiating similar reform efforts that include the development and publication of materials.
(viii) Linking educational scholarship with reform efforts
The example of the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project as an action research and development project, when considered together with similar examples, provides a model of scholarly activity that effectively responds to recent criticisms of the relevance and value of research conducted by university based educational researchers (McFadden et al, 1996). Ultimately, this model might be the main legacy of the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project.
Conclusions
(i) Those who participate in the development of a new curriculum necessarily
also develop themselves. A successful curriculum project, however, ultimately
reaches beyond the numbers of its participants. Success in this larger arena
depends on the match between the new curriculum and the needs and
possibilities generated by the larger reform movement.
(ii) The success of the SciencePlus curriculum illustrates the appeal to middle school teachers and students of the teaching and learning of science in the context of human experience, that is, of a Science-Technology-Society curriculum. However, the highly integrative nature of such a curriculum suggests that a Science-Technology-Society curriculum, broadly conceived to address all the related curricular goals, is an appropriate model for the entire school curriculum, and not just for the curricular space designated for "science". (See McFadden, 1991a, for an elaboration of this conclusion).
(iii) While the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project was motivated by the goal of science and technology education for responsible citizenship and active participation in a science and technology based economy, it is only when a generation of students who have been educated in this way enters adulthood and makes its influence on society felt that we will be able to fully assess the strengths and shortcomings of the present reform of education. Given the extensive adoption of the SciencePlus curriculum and other curricula with similar characteristics, and the evidence of the supportive manner in which these curricula are being used by teachers (McFadden, 1990b, 1990c, 1991b, 1991c), it is possible that we will have evidence of the societal consequences of these curricula within the next decade.
(iv) New forms of assessment are required and have been developed to evaluate the achievement of the new curricular goals, including assessment of student understanding of scientific concepts and their ability to use this knowledge. It is unlikely, however, that these new forms of assessment will predominate in external evaluation of school performance until most curriculum and teaching supports student success in achieving the new goals. In the meantime, teachers and students of the new curricula will have to live in a world where they are being judged by student success on trivial guessing games. Fortunately, these machine markable tests do not appear to discriminate against the new curricula.
(v) This brief summary of the Atlantic Science Curriculum Project has illustrated one path to educational reform that can be taken by a local group of educators even in the absence of substantial grant funding. The leadership of education scholars and an active collaboration between these scholars, school based educators and a commercial publisher are probably the keys to success.
Reference List
Atlantic Science Curriculum Project (1986,1987,1988). SciencePlus 1,2,3 (Atlantic Edition, includes student and teacher books for each of grades 7, 8 & 9). Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada.
Atlantic Science Curriculum Project (1988,1994). SciencePlus 7,8,9 (Ontario Edition, includes student and teacher books for each of grades 7, 8 & 9). Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada.
Atlantic Science Curriculum Project (1989,1990). SciencePlus Technology and Society 7,8,9 (Alberta Edition, includes student and teacher books for each of grades 7, 8 & 9). Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada.
Atlantic Science Curriculum Project (1992; 1996). SciencePlus Technology and Society , Levels Green, Red and Blue (First and Second US Editions, include student books, annotated teachers guides, teachers resource books and books of assessment materials for each level, grades 6-9). Austin: Holt Rinehart & Winston.
Crocker, R. (1989) Science Achievement in Canada: Interprovincial Comparisons, Research Report #2, St. Johns: Newfoundland Task Force on Mathematics and Science Education.
Gore, K. and Pogrow, S. (1991). Middle School Exemplary Curricula: Science, University of Arizona (for the National Middle School Association).
McFadden, C. (1980a). Barriers to science education improvement in Canada: a case in point. In C. McFadden (ed.) World Trends in Science Education. Halifax: Atlantic Institute of Education.
McFadden, C. (1980b). Combining curriculum materials development and in-service teacher education: Promises and problems of a regional curriculum project, Conference Proceedings 1980 Curriculum Branch, Publishers' Conference. Edmonton: Alberta Education.
McFadden, C. (1990a). Curriculum integration through a technological problem. In D. Herget (ed.) History and Philosophy of Science in Science Teaching, Tallahassee: Florida State University Science Education Program.
McFadden, C. (1990b). Science Teaching in New Brunswick Grades 7,8 and 9, ASCP Research Report #2. Fredericton: The University of New Brunswick. (ERIC 328 461)
McFadden, C. (1990c). Science Teaching in Nova Scotia Grades 7, 8 and 9, ASCP Research Report #3. Fredericton: The University of New Brunswick. (ERIC 328 460)
McFadden, C. (1991a). Towards an STS school curriculum. Science Education, 75(4), 457-469.
McFadden, C. (1991b). Conditions That May Affect Science Teaching in Grades 7,8 and 9, ASCP Research Report #4. Fredericton: The University of New Brunswick. (ERIC 328 462)
McFadden, C. (1991c). Teaching SciencePlus: An Observational Survey of Science Teaching in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Grades 7, 8 and 9,ASCP Research Report #5. Fredericton: The University of New Brunswick. (ERIC ED 351 189)
McFadden, C. (1992). Author-publisher-educator relationships and curriculum reform. J. Curriculum Studies, 24(1), 71-87.
McFadden, C., Mason, C., and Yager, R. (1996). Generalizing some of the current reform projects in science education into an action research and development model for educational scholarship. Paper presented to the conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, St.Louis, March 31- April 3.
Morrison, E. (1978). A teacher mandate for a science curriculum project, Lighthouse, Spring 1978.
Nova Scotia Department of Education (1990). The Education Challenge: Background Paper for the New England Governors/ Eastern Canadian Premiers Round Table Forum on Science and Technology. Halifax: Nova Scotia Department of Education.