The Beyond 2000 report (Millar & Osborne, 1998) argued that the school science curriculum of the late twentieth century was designed primarily to provide a sound preparation for progress to more advanced courses in science. It proposed that the curriculum for students up to the age of 16 should instead be designed to develop all students' 'scientific literacy', through a focus on the major 'explanatory stories' of science and a set of key 'ideas-about-science'. Have the recommendations of Beyond 2000 had any lasting impact on curriculum and instruction? I will explore this question by considering the most explicit effort to act on these recommendations, the Twenty First Century Science project (Millar [2006] Twenty First Century Science: Insights from the design and implementation of a scientific literacy approach in school science. International Journal of Science Education, 28(13), 1499-1521.). The development of this curriculum programme for 14-16 year old students in England illustrates the scale and nature of the task of transforming a curriculum vision into an operational reality, and highlights the challenges of achieving significant change, and the main sources of difficulty and resistance. Despite evidence of positive impact on student engagement, external influences have steadily diminished its initial impact and the science curriculum has returned to its late twentieth century emphasis. Yet the Beyond 2000 critique remains as valid today as twenty-five years ago. The science curriculum in most countries does not reflect a clear vision of the contribution of science to a general education. The practical response to Beyond 2000 suggests that significant change requires clarity on intended outcomes and how they might be assessed, and the building of professional and social consensus around them.

Practical work is widely seen as an integral part of school science. Research and teacher guidance have tended to consider practical work in science, rather than in individual science subjects or topics. This study used a questionnaire of selected- and open-response items to probe the views and reasoning of a sample of 43 pre-service teachers in England about the considerations that influence their use of practical work. Responses indicated a strongly positive view of the value of practical work to support a range of learning outcomes. A majority of respondents thought that the usefulness of practical work varies across topics due to differences in what can be directly observed and in potential to challenge learners' ideas. Responses showed awareness of the key role of practical work in linking observations and ideas, but also highlighted challenges in applying broad principles about practical work to content-specific examples and a limited awareness of the range of possible types of practical activity. The study supports the view that researchers and advocates of practical work should engage with issues at a smaller grain size than hitherto in order to gain a better understanding of teachers' decision-making and enable more effective classroom practices.

York Science is a development and research project in England to support teachers in embedding formative assessment in their science teaching at lower secondary school level (students aged 11–14). The project is developing and trialling sets of diagnostic questions and tasks for each of the major strands of science which teachers can use to collect evidence of their students’ learning during the teaching process. These questions and tasks are organised and sequenced using outline teaching sequences (or learning progressions) for each strand, written in the form of concise narratives. The project rationale and development method are described, followed by a summary of findings from an initial evaluation of the impacts of these teaching resources on teachers’ practices and thinking, using data from written questionnaires (n = 45) and interviews (n = 13). The findings suggest that teachers in England are very positive about using diagnostic materials which provide insights into the thinking behind students’ answers and focus on understanding of fundamental ideas and can transfer ideas and approaches to new science topics. Many see materials of this kind as a means of addressing pressing issues that they face as a result of changes to the structure of the national curriculum in England. The findings lend support to the strategy of seeking to influence teachers’ practices in specific and planned ways through the provision of carefully designed assessment materials.

In this contribution we outline how the York Science project is using a ‘backward design’ approach to teaching science to students aged 11–14. We then present some examples of formative assessment tasks and show how simple selected-response questions can be modified to provide teachers with detailed information about students’ ideas. Finally we indicate how such tasks can help promote active learning.

This article considers the extent to which the English National Curriculum for science has influenced practice and learning outcomes, and briefly reviews the mechanisms through which this influence is exerted. It identifies and discusses three central issues for the review that is now in progress: the structure of the science curriculum; the purpose of science within the school curriculum; and the way in which curriculum content is specified and communicated. It argues that the conflicting demands of breadth and depth need to be more authoritatively resolved, so that students beginning upper secondary school courses in the sciences do so on a more equal footing. It explores the curriculum consequences of the tension between the role of school science in improving the 'scientific literacy' of all young people and in providing a sound foundation for more advanced study for the important minority who so choose. Finally it explores the aspirations of the current review for a clear and succinct statement of curriculum content, arguing that clear communication of intended curriculum content requires that examples be provided showing how these might be operationalised, and for recognition of both the value and the limitations of evidence and theory to underpin decisions on sequencing of science curriculum content.

An understanding of science and technology is central to a young person's preparedness for life in modern society. It enables an individual to participate fully in a society in which science and technology play a significant role. This understanding also empowers individuals to participate appropriately in the determination of public policy where issues of science and technology impact on their lives. An understanding of science and technology contributes significantly to the personal, social, professional and cultural lives of all people. A large proportion of the situations, problems and issues encountered by individuals in their daily lives require some understanding of science and technology before they can be fully understood or addressed. (OECD 2006, p. 20)

The framework developed for the PISA 2006 science survey starts from everyday contexts in which citizens encounter scientific issues and knowledge claims. Recent curriculum changes in England, making possible the introduction of courses for 15- to 16-year olds with an explicit "scientific literacy" emphasis, are based on a very similar analysis, identifying knowledge about science itself as a key element of knowledge, alongside scientific knowledge of the natural world. The pilot trials and implementation of such courses provide an unrivalled opportunity to study the nature and extent of the challenge facing policymakers, curriculum developers, and teachers in re-focusing secondary science on the learning needs of the citizen. This article examines the extent to which teachers recognized and were able in their practice to implement teaching of "ideas about science" (IaS), by looking at teachers' views and practices during the pilot trials of the Twenty First Century Science courses in England. Using classroom observations and teacher interviews, the practice in 8 schools was followed in depth over two years, supplemented by questionnaire survey to all 78 schools piloting Twenty First Century Science. Contemporary contexts were emphasized in the curriculum resources and welcomed by pupils and teachers. Teachers' perceptions and actions indicated that science content knowledge continued to dominate over knowledge about science, despite the curriculum emphasis on teaching the latter strand in the context of current socio-scientific issues. Dealing with contemporary contexts and IaS posed pedagogic problems for many teachers, even when professional support was available. Only after at least one full cycle of teaching the course had some of the teachers begun to modify their practice to address knowledge about science and contexts of application more effectively. The study suggests that teachers' practices can be changed, but that this takes time and requires considerable support from teaching materials and other forms of professional development that encourage reflection on practice. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 945-959, 2009

The past decade has seen fundamental questions about the nature and quality of educational research, and its relationship to practice and policy, placed prominently on the agenda in many countries. In the United Kingdom, the 1996 Teacher Training Agency lecture by David Hargreaves, then of the University of Cambridge, is widely seen as having played a key role in setting the agenda and influencing the direction of the ensuing debate. In his lecture, Hargreaves (1996) asked if teaching could be regarded as a research-based profession and concluded that it could not. This he attributed largely to the nature and quality of the outcomes of educational research: “Given the huge amounts of educational research conducted over the past fifty years or more, there are few areas which have yielded a corpus of research evidence regarded as scientifically sound and as a worthwhile resource to guide professional action” (p. 2).

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.

Many within the science education community and beyond see practical work carried out by students as an essential feature of science education. Questions have, however, been raised by some science educators about its effectiveness as a teaching and learning strategy. This study explored the effectiveness of practical work by analysing a sample of 25 'typical' science lessons involving practical work in English secondary schools. Data took the form of observational field notes and tape‐recorded interviews with teachers and students. The analysis used a model of effectiveness based on the work of Millar et al. and Tiberghien. The teachers' focus in these lessons was predominantly on developing students' substantive scientific knowledge, rather than on developing understanding of scientific enquiry procedures. Practical work was generally effective in getting students to do what is intended with physical objects, but much less effective in getting them to use the intended scientific ideas to guide their actions and reflect upon the data they collect. There was little evidence that the cognitive challenge of linking observables to ideas is recognized by those who design practical activities for science lessons. Tasks rarely incorporated explicit strategies to help students to make such links, or were presented in class in ways that reflected the size of the learning demand. The analytical framework used in this study offers a means of assessing the learning demand of practical tasks, and identifying those that require specific support for students' thinking and learning in order to be effective.

A reader of Traianou and Hammersley's article (in this issue), which discusses at some length the work we undertook in the Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) Research Network, might attribute to us views that are rather different from those which we in fact hold, and which we have sought to present in our own accounts of this work. We highlight several points on which their interpretation of our work and views differs markedly from ours. The aim of the EPSE Network was to explore the practical implications of 'evidence-based practice' in the context of a mainstream curriculum subject such as science, not to advocate any particular interpretation of that term. We would encourage readers interested in the relationship between research and practice in the teaching of specific subjects to base their view of our work, and the perspectives underpinning it, on our own account.