THE CONTENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROCESS-LED SCIENCE CURRICULUM “WPS”

Abstract

Warwick Process Science (WPS) is a science curriculum for the secondary schools in U.K. developed in 1989 by the project founded in 1986 at the University of Warwick to improve the traditional science in the country. The present authors intended to clarify the philosophies underlying the curriculum, and its contents, teaching mehtods and assessment systems in relation to the newly enacted National Curriculum of U.K. in order to get some useful information for Japanese science education. The main results we found are as follows: (1) The general purpose of WPS is to get students to acquire “Problem Solving Abilities” by starting with learning six foundamental processes (observing, inferring, classifying, predicting, controlling variables, hypothesizing), then proceeding step by step through learning intermediate integrated processes to learning the final complicated stage. (2) “Inferring” is given the highest priority among the six processes, so that many activities in WPS are organized in the format of testing the students’ own inferences. (3) WPS emphasizes the formative evaluation and adopts the criterion-referenced evaluation as an assessment system, which is consistent with the National Curriculum. (4) The curriculum composed of many modules, each of which includes practical activities related to every day life, social industrial technical lives. It has adopted what has recently been called STS. (5) The organization of each module is broad and balanced in contents, context, and processes, so that any secondary school science teacher can select and use them by according to his own preference.