A SHORT NOTE ON SCIENCE PRACTICAL WORK AT MIDDLE SCHOOL LEVEL
- 1. A SHORT NOTE ON SCIENCE PRACTICAL WORK AT MIDDLE SCHOOL LEVEL Lalt Kishore Children develop scientific skills, attitudes, knowledge and understanding through both formally organised and informal exploratory experiences at the middle school level. The laboratory experiences help children to acquire the requisite scientific skills. The scientific skills include: o Observations o Explorations o •Investigations and finding out o Data and information handling o Research from secondary sources o Discussion and interpretation o Project work with planning, recording, presenting and reporting o Improvised models For effective teaching and learning of science, the teacher is to facilitate acquisition of these skills. At the middle school level, it is advisable that through practical experiences with structured activities with the readily available materials be provided to students. Through practical work, the students learn to observe, raise questions and draw conclusions. Similarly the exploratory and Investigative work helps students in the following tasks • Clarifying ideas • Making the direct and first hand sense of the world around them • Getting a feel for the processes of science Therefore, at the middle school level, students should be given the opportunity to analyse and reflect on their observations, experiments, models, explorations and investigations and interpret them to draw conclusions. Furthermore, students should be afforded opportunities to present their work in a number of ways, through scripts, visuals, drawings, tables and charts and written reports. Thus, they will be able to develop the required scientific skills and understanding of the scientific processes.