Teachers' Views About The Implementation Of An Integrated Science Curriculum

Integrated science curricula have been proposed since the late ‘70s with the aim of improving students’ scientific literacy. However, their adoption in classroom practice has been very limited. In Italy, only recently the official national guidelines have included the recommendation to adopt in the first two years of secondary school an integrated approach to science. In this study, we investigated teachers’ views about the integrated science curriculum proposed in the national guidelines. Four teachers (two biology, one chemistry, one physics) participated to the study and were asked about what could be the contents that can effectively be taught with and the didactical aims of an integrated science approach. The main contents identified by the teachers for an integrated approach were: nature of science, energy, gases, energy and matter flow in systems. The teachers identified also four general cross-cutting learning objectives: a) to familiarize students with the scientific knowledge as a whole, b) to provide students with tools and methodologies to understand real-world problems and act in a responsible and conscious way, c) to experience the scientific method and train students to learn “by discover”, d) to improve students’ views about Nature of Science. Implications of this study for the design of Integrated Science teaching-learning sequences are briefly discussed.