Where Does Enquiry Belong?

Short answer: in science lessons, use enquiry once pupils already know the content.  You might ask: Why use a pedagogical … More

How Paradigm Trust is Supporting Teachers’ Primary Science Subject Knowledge

Teachers at Paradigm Trust have developed a knowledge rich EYFS-KS3 science curriculum which we have been running (and developing) for … More

Arguments for The Place of Science in the Curriculum

Policy makers have to justify the money spent on science education. During the early to mid cold war, the West … More

The Problem Solving Methods Learners Use – and How to Develop Them

Solving problems, especially in physics, has been well studied (e.g. Larkin, McDermott, Simon and Simon 1980: here and Chi, Glaser … More

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of physical, experiential knowlegde of physics: a sense of forces and flow; of motion … More

But where is the cognitive science and the knowledge?

I’ve just received an email from TES advertising a book they are publishing titled: tes guide to STEM.I was hoping … More

A Residue of Physics

Six months ago, I was helping English trainees write a knowledge organiser for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and … More

When knowledge is wrong…

Babies are born knowing physics. They express surprise when an object appears to be suspended in mid-air or pass through … More

What are the Cognitive Loads of reading and how can we reduce them?

Reading is a physics problem that doesn’t receive much attention in class. I think it should. Science professionals read a … More

Integrating Questions and Diagrams to Reduce Cognitive Load for Novice Physicists

I think this will be the last of my problem-solving blogs for a while – it’s a little one about … More