Practical Work In Science Education

Practical work is generally defined as any teaching and learning activity that involves student’s science process skills in observing and manipulating real objects and materials. It is typically followed by a period of discussions of observations and measurements that have been made and then the similarities, differences and correlations will be further interpreted and explained. Practical works linking two domains of knowledge between the domain of real objects and observable things with the domain of ideas of scientific knowledge which plays significant role to ensure the student would unlikely grasp new scientific concept or understand a theory or model (Millar, 2004). This means practical work is more to an open-ended, investigative and

Based on Millar, the main ideas of science education are to ensure the students to gain an understanding of scientific knowledge as it is appropriate to their needs, interests and capacities and also to develop knowledge about science by understanding the methods and skills. In order to achieve this aim, the practical work that was conducted in school must emphasize the theory that has been taught through practical activities. Moreover, the needs of practical work in curriculum will be connected to the main purpose of practical work which is to possess student’s scientific knowledge to be best seen, judged and enables communication rather than enquiry. This is because practical work involves action and reflection where most of the practical tasks requires students to develop their thinking skills and science process skills (Millar, 2004). As we see the pattern of student’s interest in school, they prefer to be more active in class and able to centralized their ideas and opinion. They also tend to explore faster than the students in

Why? Bacause practical work is essential for developing student’s scientific knowledge. The learning of science should involve seeing, handling and manipulating real objects and materials and that teaching science will involve acts of ‘showing’ as well as ‘telling’ (Millar, 2004). In addition, students are able to communicate among themselves with the practical activity while committing to their task with their minds as as their hands. Students will be prompted to handle the phenomena at hand on conceptual level and at the same time promote to make links between the practical and theoretical understandings. That means, there is close correlation between the role of 21st century skills with the aim at practical work that highlights on the collaborative learning throughout the activity during the lesson. Students will work together to discover the information about the topic and construct their own understanding rather than passively received the information directly. Plus, studies had found that students can gain more knowledge through discovery activity as they trained themselves to solve problems, interpret data and discuss the theory. However, there is much debate about the conductance of practical work within the teaching and learning of science in schools. Nonetheless, the