Working with Big Ideas of Science Education

IAP - the global network of science academies - which comprises 107 science academies from both developed and developing countries, today announces the publication on its website of Working with Big Ideas of Science Education.
This publication is the work of an international expert group of scientists, engineers and science educators, and follows the earlier publication (in 2010) by the same group of Principles and Big Ideas of Science Education.
Working with Big Ideas of Science Education addresses concerns that the science curriculum in many countries is overloaded and over-detailed, frequently accompanied by assessment that requires memorising multiple facts, and a deterrent to the widely advocated inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. The book provides a reasoned response to this situation by expressing the goals of science education in terms of a relatively small number of powerful ideas – called ‘big ideas’ because they explain a range of related phenomena and events. It sets out big ideas of science and about science in the form of narrative descriptions of progression in building an understanding of key ideas across the years from the start of primary to the end of secondary school. More...