What science do we learn at school?

Science is omnipresent in our daily lives. At home, on the street, at leisure, at work, in the media, we all not only hear about science, but also see and use objects resulting from science. We are sometimes asked questions about climate change, pollution reduction, the proper treatment of waste, the cost of energy, the location of a dam, the reasoned answers to which require scientific knowledge. Despite its constant presence and recognised relevance, science has not been properly valued in our education system. One indicator of this is the fact that learning in this area is not currently assessed by external national exams in any of the cycles in the first nine years of school (with the exception of mathematics, which some do not consider to be a science because it does not necessarily have an empirical basis). It therefore makes sense to find out what kind of science is being taught in our schools.

Through this study, coordinated by Margarida Afonso, Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos has sought to analyse the teaching of science in basic education and make her results known, focusing on a very important indicator for understanding the quality of the education system – conceptual demand:

• Are Portuguese pupils getting an education that provides them with more complex and abstract knowledge and skills, as well as the close relationships between them?
• Are Portuguese students getting an education that encourages only purely factual knowledge and elementary skills, such as simple memorisation?
• Are our students getting an education that encourages them to see science as a set of isolated facts, with their cognitive work consisting of memorising a set of names and facts, more or less detailed, but generally disconnected?
• Are our students getting an education that gives them access to complex knowledge, generalisations, abstract thinking, synthesising, planning, argumentation and creation skills?

Through this study, FFMS seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the reality of science education in Nature Sciences/Natural Sciences in the first nine years of schooling in Portugal (making up what is known as "basic education"), which lay the foundation for the future development of children and young people, and thus identify problems and help parents, teachers, authors, politicians and decision-makers to find lines of action to overcome these problems.