ARTICLES
Watching the pendulum swing: changes in the NSW physics curriculum and consequences for the discipline
By Helen Georgiou, School of Education, University of Wollongong and Simon Crook, Honorary Associate, School of Physics, The University of Sydney
This article has been re-published with permission, from the Australian Physics Journal Volume 54, Number 6, NOV-DEC 2017
For the first timein 17 years, the Higher School Certificate( HSC), New South Wales’( NSW) flagship course that wraps up 13 years of schooling for around 76 000 students each year, is undergoing major changes. As part of the reforms, many courses will be rejuvenated, removed or newly created in an effort to reflect achangingworldandworkplaceandto‘ increasestandards’[ 1 ]. In this article, wediscussthenatureand consequences of these changes in terms of HSC physics specifically, whilst commenting more generally on how physicists can positively influence the science education space.
Australian Science
The excitement around and appreciation of the necessity of Science or STEM( Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) for the country’ s future [ 3, 4 ] seems a sentiment not fully reflected in our schools and universities. In fact, evidence from several different sources is telling us that students are losing interest, performing worse and shunning STEM-related degrees and careers. For example, the Programme for International Student Assessment( PISA) shows Australian students are slipping behind their international peers in both science and mathematics [ 5, 6 ]. Results from TIMSS( Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) show that compared to the top five performing countries, only half as many Australian year 8 students achieve the highest performance band in science( 11 %, compared to 23 %) and this is worse at 9 %( compared to 41 % in top band) for maths. TIMSS also tells us that that student interest in science and maths declines throughout schooling with a healthy 55 % of students‘ liking’ science in Year 4 transforming into a disappointing 25 % in year 8. This is not to mention the teaching profession, where one in five science teachers are not technically qualified to teach science and 40 % of schools report they have difficulty filling maths and science teaching positions. Nationally, there has been a decline in participation in almost all science subjects( apart from Earth and Environmental Science) between the years 1994-2013, with physics participation decreasing by 5 %( Figure 1). Physics is easily the most‘ extreme’ example in the sciences; with lower enrolments( both high school and University), a more skewed male to female ratio and the enduring reputation for being‘ hard’ [ 7 ].
Figure 1: Enrolment trends for Australian high school science subjects [ 2 ]
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