Practical work is an essential element of science education worldwide. The role of practical work is to help students understand scientific knowledge. The present study examines the characteristics of practical work in England by analyzing official reports, the literature on practical work, and TFCS GCSE Physics, 3rd edition.
We clarified two key aspects: the importance of emphasizing procedural knowledge in practical work, and the relationship between acquiring scientific knowledge and practical work. Firstly, although students can acquire declarative knowledge from textbooks, they can acquire procedural knowledge only through practical work. This underscores the importance of practical work in enabling students to understand procedural knowledge through their experience. Secondly, procedural knowledge encompasses not only knowledge about skills but also knowledge about the purposes of scientific approaches, their application, and the interpretation and representation of results. These aspects of procedural knowledge are addressed in the explanation and discussion when students plan an experiment, analyze scientific data, and illustrate them with graphs. Consequently, the characteristics of practical work are to construct a didactic approach from the perspective of how learners effectively acquire scientific knowledge through practical work.
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