AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF TEACHING BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

                                                                                                    Dr.M.MARIA SAROJA

Research Director , IQAC Coordinator& 

Associate Professor for Biological Science  

St.Ignatius College of Education(Autonomous), 

Palayamkottai Tirunelveli-2

Introduction 

One of the important aims of education is to help students to become responsible democratic citizens of the country. The responsibility of science teachers is not only to teach facts, principles, and processes of science, but also to facilitate students to discharge their social responsibilities and preserve democracy as well. They should appreciate how science and technology have developed and are affected by many diverse individuals, cultures, and societies. They need to be encouraged to appreciate and participate in the responsible use of science and technology for the benefit of society, to visualize future of our nation and to become sensitive and responsible citizens. It is important to develop critical thinking in them about the interconnectivity of science, technology, and society in order to maintain a healthy and sustainable society. Students should be encouraged to develop a scientific vision about different issues, about acquiring and processing information, about scientific and technological developments and their relevance to everyday life and long-term implications to society. Science education aims at making the students develop their scientific attitude, so that in later life, they can help the society in making rational choices when confronted with various possibilities and challenges.

• Acquisition of knowledge and understanding
• Development skills
• Development of scientific attitude
• Development of thinking abilities
• Nurturing curiosity
• Nurturing creativity
• Nurturing aesthetic sense
• Development of problem solving skill 

Acquisition of knowledge and understanding:

 An important trait of humans is to wonder, observe, and interact with the surroundings and look for the meaningful patterns and relations by making and using new tools and building conceptual models to understand this universe. This human’s endeavour has led to modern science which took thousands of years to get crystallised. So, one can say that, science leads to generation of ideas helping to make sense of observed facts that get accepted if they find observations, but may be refused until tested through evidence. These represent a broad view and are generalised as the scientific principles that are true universally. It is important for children to acquire the knowledge of science content, i.e., concepts and underlying principles as they provide a sound base to explore the unknown and to build further knowledge, yet these cannot be passed to children directly. In addition, their understanding cannot be developed by rote learning. It can be done by providing children relevant and age appropriate learning opportunities that allow them to undergo experimental learning through exploration and interaction with their environment and construct their knowledge. Creation of knowledge is crucial to children’s  learning. Their pervious experiences are very important for it, as the experiences lead them to develop new ideas. Teachers need to collect such experiences of children to build further knowledge on their previous knowledge. For this, they may engage the children in meaningful discussions through questioning and listening. Even children’s drawings and concept maps also serve as good tools to acquire such information. 

Development of skills: 

Science is about asking and finding answers to them through scientific method and inquiry. The processes that scientists use in it are science process skills. Science is important to all young people, not only to acquire the knowledge associated with it, but also to imbibe its inquiry and process skills. These skills enable them to develop into adults who are able to take informed and responsible action while engaging and reflecting upon different ideas, opinions, beliefs, or values. These are long lasting thus; tend to be useful throughout each area of our lives. These skills involve the use of all the sense organs providing hands-on experiences for enjoyable and effective learning. Doing experiments require certain skills, which are called laboratory skills. In order to do experiments, students have to handle the apparatus carefully, set up the apparatus to perform the experiment and make correct observations. These are the skills which come under laboratory skills. Some simple apparatus can be prepared by the students which also require some skills. When they experiment in laboratory, they have to move with the other students cooperatively sharing the responsibilities. This develops positive feeling in the students. This is called general skill. They also need to develop drawing skill. These skills are necessary for the students to develop when they study Biology. All these basic skills are important individually as well as when they are integrated. 

Development of scientific attitude: 

Scientific attitude is a composite of a number of mental processes or tendencies to react consistently in certain ways to a novel or problematic situation. These include accuracy, intellectual honestly, open-mindedness, respect for evidence, skepticism, suspended judgment, critical thinking, perseverance, and looking at true cause and effect relationship. Scientists, because of their thirst for knowledge become perpetual learners. They are constantly curious and continually seeking knowledge by inquiring. This, in turn, nurtures the trait of scientific attitude. Students who study science are curious. So, the students of Biology are also curious. They are also openminded to hear anything from anybody. They receive information and come to a conclusion or judgment only based on facts. At the same time, they are ready to test and verify their judgments. This makes them believe that nothing is final in Biology. They are truthful in doing experiments, making observations, recording and reporting. They also have faith in cause and effect relationship. The students of Biology possess all these qualities and also develop these qualities while studying Biology. These qualities are called as scientific attitude. Science attitude can be nurtured over a period of time through process relevant learning situations that require creating an open classroom environment encouraging the children to perform activities and experiments and reading scientific literature, freely interacting with their surroundings and asking questions. A science teacher needs to provide the children experiences of a number of scientific activities as a base for a thorough understanding of science and developing scientific attitude and temper. 

Development of thinking abilities: 

In science, critical thinking increases science learning potentials. It requires deliberate review of the way in which activities are carried out, the ideas emerges and the way these can be improved. It is the ability to analyse information and experiences in an objective manner. Reflecting on the processes of thinking does not come readily to young children as it involves abstract thinking as well. Teachers can facilitate this by engaging the children in discussions through activities. The process of linkage of the past experiences in terms of cause and effect relationship on a model of set rules, i.e. thinking with reasoning is known as logical thinking. Children should be helped to reason out consistently before arriving at conclusion. Scientific temper is the refined logical thinking. 

Nurturing curiosity: 

Curiosity leads to questions in his/her mind like why, what and how. When students ask such questions, the teacher should not discourage them. S/He should facilitate them to find answer using scientific principles. Science is nothing but all that happens around us. Students come across many questions out of curiosity. Curiosity leads to inculcation of learning to learn aspect of education. Curiosity can be generated in the learners by taking them to science centers, providing opportunities to work on science project and to read scientific literature, facilitating interaction with persons having scientific attitude, encouraging to participate in science exhibitions and science quizzes, etc. Science activities can be designed to encompass several factors making up curiosity. Curiosity gets aroused as a result of doubt, perplexity, contradiction, cognitive conflict, ambiguity, lack of clarity, etc. A teacher needs to create suitable learning situations for this. 

Nurturing creativity:

Creative thinking is a novel or innovative way of seeing or doing things. Creative thinking enables a learner to explore available alternative and consequences of actions or non-actions and contributes to decision-making and problem solving. Creativity has been defined in different ways. It is the production of relevant and novel product and process. Also, it involves classification and assessment of different components of the problem or delineation, manipulation and linkage of ideas in a novel manner to solve a problem, or to deal with an idea or to confirm a conclusion. Creativity is doing or seeing the things differently. It cannot be taught, but developed in children by using planned strategies and techniques. The teacher plays an important role for nurturing creativity in learners. From pedagogical perspective of physical science, inquiry and activity oriented, process based teaching-learning can facilitate in nurturing creativity. Therefore, the role of the teacher should be to Assist students in developing models of inquiry and discovery

  Guide students in the use of multidisciplinary approach 

 Recognise and appreciate creative ideas and products of students 

 Provide rich variety of learning experiences to students 

 Encourage students to frame questions and browse variety of reading materials and

  Express to the students that their ideas have value. 

A creative child thinks differently, expresses unending curiosity, and possesses divergent thinking ability. She wonders what makes things work. S/he is always a keen observer who ponders over the outcome of an event of phenomena and seeks information. S/he had original, divergent, independent, fearless, and intuitive thinking and welcomes new ideas. S/he likes to ask thought-provoking questions rather than fact seeking or memory type questions. Teachers should identify these traits and provide a variety of learning experiences of inquiry and discovery of science to nature creativity. 

Nurturing aesthetic sense:

 Aesthetics deals with the creation and appreciation of beauty that gives us happiness. Harmony, order, and pattern are some of the criteria which define beauty. A learner of science is also concerned with them. S/he gets motivated to see some patterns in the properties of substances and other things in his/her surroundings. S/he appreciates his/her creation and derives joy when finds that a particular toy or a gadget works on same scientific principle that s/he has already learnt. 

For nurturing aesthetic sense through science teaching learning, the teacher may encourage students to consider the following steps: 

 Observe keenly while doing any work. 

For example, observing the flowers while walking in the garden one can appreciate their colour and wonder why the flower is of that particular colour. 

Observe, analyse and reject what is not scientific. 

 One should be conscious of one’s inner being. 

 Learn to be generous. One should develop the sense of sacrifice and self-righteousness.

 Development of problem solving skill 

Problem solving means that an individual has learned the skills and acquired relevant information necessary to solve problems that are not only curricular, but also related to everyday life. Various skills required for problem solving can be enhanced by providing opportunities to students to ask questions, think aloud, look for alternative explanations and procedures, isolate and control variables, keep records, apply reasoning and analogy, make models, and apply process skills in teaching-learning of science. Students can explore potentiality while working on the problem. They feel a sense of achievement on getting success and develop self-confidence.

 In order to provide opportunities for problem solving, we need to inculcate the following abilities among the learners: 

 Flexible and divergent thinking 

 Decision-making and generating self-confidence 

 Accepting or rejecting hypothesis 

 Correlating between various quantise or phenomena 

 Checking the validity of results 

 Expressing the task in term of goals

  Searching for innovative practices

  Creating new challenges for life and

  Developing positive and cooperative attitude

 To solve the problems in science, students must acquire what cognitive psychologists call declarative knowledge which consists of the body of knowledge and facts needed to work in science. Simply acquiring knowledge of science is not sufficient. One must organise this knowledge in such way that it can be retrieved easily to solve problems. Simultaneously, while acquiring and organising declarative knowledge, one must also acquire procedural knowledge (knowledge of processes) which are procedures and heuristics that can be applied for solving problems.

Further Reading 

https://ignatiuscollegeofeducation.com/pdf/Teaching%20of%20Biological%20Science.pdf

https://www.learningclassesonline.com/2020/11/pedagogy-of-biological-science.html