With regards to practical work aiding understanding in science, there was a small minority of students (29% seen in table 5.1) that felt it did not help their understanding of science. Whilst this was not the majority of students, their Level 2 reasons related to
how easy it was for them to obtain the correct answers or see the expected phenomena that the teacher had asked them to see. Although, this ability to ‘see’ the expected phenomena may be down to the maturity of the students as indeed Jenkins (2006) found that as students mature through school they begin to value the use of taking notes as being a more effective means of learning and understanding scientific phenomena. In this study, comments during the observation as seen below did discuss how the practical work could cause them to incorrectly understand scientific phenomena and that they needed the theory to help engage with the practical work - practical work to them, would not work on its own:
Nancy 10P: Sometimes the practical goes wrong but we don’t know it has and so we get the wrong answer, not knowingly and then we learn the wrong answers, so the book telling us the answer is better.
Lucas 9C: I think that… Like somebody said earlier, I think that without the practical the written work wouldn’t work properly and then without the written work the practical wouldn’t like work. Because it’s like they’re both helping each other, and helping us to then understand.
Indeed, for some students seen during the observation, using practical work to link to science phenomena was difficult and confusing at times as it would not always match up with the theory. Indeed, this is a similar finding to Wellington (2005) who reported how for some students practical work could confuse “them if the result were not as expected and when they did not conform to theory” (p. 102).
An equal number of students involved in the questionnaires who claimed that practical work was not easy (50% seen in table 5.1), did so giving the Level 2 reasons that they would struggle, finding it hard in trying to understand what to do and what they were learning from it. Indeed, during the observations it emerged that practical work was
seen as being relatively easy to carry out if students were explicitly told what to do as the examples below explain:
Nadia 10P: He [the teacher] just doesn’t tell us what we did wrong. He’s just like, yeah, you did this wrong, but then he walks away. It’s well hard to do!
Luke 9C: I can do practical work if I’m given the instructions as to what I’ve got to do. Sometimes I think you get given an experiment and they don’t explain it fully and then you go wrong and then the teacher will like blame you because you haven’t paid attention. But if they don’t give us clear instructions about what to do you just don’t get it or understand as much.
In the comments above, students’ attitudes here to finding practical work easy when given explicit instructions, are similar to the findings by Kempa and Diaz (1990). They reported finding that whilst the most conscientious of students enjoyed doing practical work this was primarily the case when they were given clear and explicit instructions regarding the procedure to follow. Conversely they found that sociable students preferred group discussions in science, and those students who were high achievers preferred the more individual or whole class teacher demonstrations. This was something that whilst not possible to ascertain from only one observation in each of the three schools, was still noted by the researcher within the field notes.
In this study, 50% of students (seen from the Level 1 results in table 5.1) claimed that practical work helped them to understand science which is similar to that reported by Cerini et al. (2003) where 47% of students claimed that practical work made understanding the theory easier in science. Indeed, similar findings were reported by Toplis (2012) where students spoke about how practical work enabled them to link the domain of observables, the aspects of practical work they could see, with the domain of ideas, that which they could not see (Millar, 2010). This may explain why those students in this study (50% seen in table 5.1) who claimed that practical work did not
help them understand because it gave them the wrong answers (as explained in their Level 2 responses), were actually placing too much emphasis on practical work producing the phenomena which they thought would mean they understood the science as the comment during an observation explains:
Lisa 9C: Well if we, when we do practicals and the results are wrong then we don’t learn science. But when it does work the results are there for us and we actually see them so we learn and like get the ideas and facts about science then.
Indeed, these comments suggest that when ‘doing’ practical work, students expect to ‘see’ the phenomena and they then believe they will understand, such views are similar to those reported by Toplis (2012) who found that students claimed they understood through doing. Indeed, Abrahams and Millar (2008) have claimed that teachers need to spend more time helping students use the ideas that have come from the phenomena. By doing so, this may enable those students like these in this study be able to understand that it is not merely about seeing the end result that is important but understanding the science ideas to explain the phenomena they see.