Improving the quality of innovative science teaching materials

Abstract

An increasing number of scientists of different fields is working together in interdisciplinary subjects. For school science it is difficult to bring these interdisciplinary developments into the classroom. Pupils thus get an outdated view of science and of possibilities in science and technology for their future career. Also there are indications that interdisciplinary subjects are more attractive to pupils than classical science subjects, even more so for females. In the Netherlands one remedy for this is the development of a new interdisciplinary subject: NLT (Natuur, Leven en Technologie). This subject is offered to science stream pupils in senior secondary schools in addition to the regular subjects physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. A set of more than 50 modules is being developed as teaching materials for national use. Each module is developed by a team in which teachers of secondary schools and an expert of the subject work together. However this does not automatically lead to good teaching materials. For this reason a quality control procedure was developed for all NLT modules. In this procedure, teachers, pupils, scientists and science education experts all play a role in the evaluation of draft modules. The results of such a multi-perspective evaluation procedure are promising.