THE SCIENCE EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS

Science Education Curriculum nowadays is in the row of unending issues and concerns particularly the quality being offered by the schools and the teachers. The bane now is the fact that it yields to the production of not competitive graduates, unable to demonstrate the supposed scientific skills. This problem is a major challenge to all schools across the globe since the demand of highly competitive graduates is increasing, while the supply is endangered. One root cause of the decreasing number of science graduates is the fading perceived interest of the students to take science courses; perhaps this is due to the teachers who failed to demonstrate how interesting science is and how it plays a significant role in the society at large. The conundrum now is to strengthen science education through developing to the students the sense of valuing the significance of the latter scientific knowledge and skills as honed by the teachers in their lower years. It was noted however that the attitudes of students towards learning science subject can be traced back to the educational experiences of the students offered by their teachers. Thus, it is indeed important to always give students meaningful and positive learning experiences as it will impact their attitude and interest in the

science subjects. Noted as well was the significance of outside the classroom experiences as it will offer a lot more than the classroom based learning, it gives the students direct learning experiences to the different concepts that seemed difficult for students to understand. Science teachers must also keep into their minds that they are not supposed to create just a future citizen but rather a future scientist. One problem which also arises is the inappropriate administration of assessment by the teachers since most predominantly; low-level cognitive skills are given emphasis. To establish an influential impact to students: learning and teaching methods, the curriculum and assessment should be of paramount importance as it determines the students’ attitude towards science. In teaching and learning, interaction between the teacher and the students is very important, it will enable students express their stand about the concepts being learned. Through this, teacher can make predictions and decisions about what is learnt and is supposed to be learned. A student-centered pedagogies and approaches can be best used in this 21^st century learning environment, it will enable the students’ capacity to generate ideas and correct the misconceptions about the things they are learning. Feedback of the students’ outputs should be constructive in a sense that they can use it to improve their outputs. Sad to say, most of the teachers are using and depicting number to measure their outputs without even depicting a phrase or words that is helpful for improvement. Thus, feedback about the students’ achievement must be useful on their part as learners and can be used as their guides to attain the competencies. Curriculum content and structure also play a massive role in strengthening science education and one perhaps is the integration of practical work which will improve students’ attitude to science. And lastly, the summative assessment; issues about the mismatch of the actual test questions and the competencies are among the trends. Another issue is about the type of test given by the teachers inside the school which is actually quite opposite to the test given during the national test. The latter issues should be given prior attention as it will affect the educational system.