An Experiment Based Science Curriculum for Middle School in Turkey from 70s and 80s

We live in times when access to information has never been easier. We can access millions of books and articles online, watch seminars by Nobel laureates, attend online courses and lectures on everything from plumbing to embedded system design. The storage capacity of our cell phones, tablets and computers dwarfs the ancient library of Alexandria. Today, the main challenge is not in knowing, but in being able to do something worthy with it. The main issue is to be able to turn knowledge into action, to have the skills to do a job/task and to exhibit the behaviors required by the job/task. Especially in the field of science and technology, progress can only be achieved through observation, trial and error, and experimentation. And the most effective way to gain these competencies is to organize education around experiment-based, project-based learning. This is reflected in the fact that college engineering departments increasingly require students to put into practice what they have learned throughout their studies into what is known as a capstone project.

I would like to give you an example of how these ideas were put into a pilot science curriculum 30-40 years ago. In Türkiye in the 1970s and 80s, a pilot program called Collective Science, based on experiment-based learning was implemented in 30-odd secondary schools. I went through this curriculum purely by chance, since the nearest state school to our home happened to be the Balçova High School in İzmir where my father was stationed as an army officer at the time, not because I passed an exam and was selected as a high achieving student. I have previously published an article about a study unit on systems and interactions in this curriculum. In this article, I would like to delve deeper into other aspects of this course that make it interesting and remarkable (Note: You might be tempted to think "Aha, here's AI at work" due to the appearance of the verb delve, but I assure I wrote this sentence without any AI assistance!)

This science curriculum adopted an approach that could be considered radical and even revolutionary at the time, where there was no conventional textbook. Sure, students were provided with books called “Student's Guide”, but they were definitely not textbooks at all. They were definitely not didactic. They did not provide the student with information or formulas, but only guidance for the experiments to be carried out on the subject at hand. Students were expected to figure things out after they had carried out experiments and observations. This was something that neither students nor teachers were used to. If you teach electrical circuits in a classical science class, you are expected to give the students formulas for calculating compound resistances in series and parallel circuits. Then the lesson plan is reduced to memorizing these formulas and applying them over and over again in various questions. However, these formulas were not included in the science curriculum I went through. We built circuits with batteries, cables and light bulbs and then observed the brightness of the bulbs in the circuits.

Another remarkable feature of the Student Guide was that it repeatedly asked us questions that could only be answered by observation. Connect the batteries, wires and bulbs as shown in the figure. Did you connect them? Yes. What do you see? Notice that the guide does not dictate information to the student by saying, “If you connect the batteries, cables and bulbs as shown in the figure, you end up with a circuit it is called this, and the resistance in this circuit is calculated according to this formula,” but says to the student, “Open your eyes, look, the answer is in front of you. What do you see?” Okay, we looked at the brightness of the light bulbs, we observed its brightness. But how do we quantify what we see? At this point, current and voltage meters could be used, but the guide was determined to lead us all the way to the first principles. It asked us to build a simple apparatus to measure the brightness of light bulbs.

I have previously published an article in which I refer to an experiment we carried out in high school chemistry to emphasize the importance of experimentation and observation in scientific studies and science teaching. Now, I still vividly remember how we made this brightness meter out of paper and how we earnestly measured and recorded the brightness of the bulbs we connected in different combinations with the brightness meter while we were studying this unit on batteries and light bulbs in 6th grade science class. A formula memorized while preparing for an exam is forgotten, but such an experience is etched forever in your mind!

Years later, when my daughter was studying parallel and series electrical circuits in her 4th grade science class, I remembered these experiments and helped her do a project assignment on this idea.

An educational unit in the curriculum, which I was very interested in but unfortunately not covered in class, was titled "Where is the Moon?" and it required students to observe the position and shape of the moon every evening.

The student guide, which made us measure the brightness of light bulbs with a simple brightness meter made of paper, suggested a simple method of using out fists to record the position of the moon that we would observe. When you use instruments such as astrolabes, protractors, telescopes, etc. to introduce basic concepts to students in science class, their attention shifts to the technical aspects of the instrument. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic to people who don't understand it”, if your goal is to teach students about the movement of the moon in the sky, the simpler you make the observation process, the deeper their cognitive understanding will be.

When you put declarative sentences in textbooks that present students with "scientific facts" without any appreciation for the long and winding route that led to them, such as “The phases of the moon are these”, the student cannot fully comprehend that the movements and nature of celestial bodies such as the moon, the sun and the stars have occupied the minds and imaginations of people for ages. But a student who turns his gaze to the sky every evening, asking, “I wonder where the moon is?” will realize much better that behind the information presented to him like a ready-to-swallow-pill lies thousands of years of curiosity and mystery.

My secondary school science curriculum had many other “interesting”, or "unusual" topics taken up in class. I won't go into all of them in detail. But I can't help mentioning one practice that caused violent reaction, especially from parents who said, “What kind of a class is this?!” In order to introduce statistical concepts in the class, students were made to count a jar of rice or a bucket of dried beans. Of course, we didn't count a bucket of rice one by one. Far from it. With a water glass, you first count how many glasses full of beans are in the bucket. You repeat this count several times. Then with a small coffee cup you count how many cups of beans there are in the water glass. You repeat this count several times. Then and only then do you count the beans one by one in the small cup. You repeat this count several times. In this way, you explain that you can count a bucket of beans without counting all the beans in the bucket. Counting the beans in a small coffee cup, and then averaging the count out to the whole bucket is how you count large number of things in science, from red blood cells in blood to the stars in the night sky. The important thing here is not to say that there are exactly one thousand six hundred and seventy-four beans in the bucket, but that it is enough to find that the number of beans is between 1650 and 1680 within a certain variation. But this practice would lead the parents to say, “They are crazy! They are wasting our children's time. They make them count the beans one by one!”

This peculiar science curriculum did not last long after my graduation. In an education system where centralized exams, multiple-choice questions, percentiles and rankings were getting increasingly important, there was neither demand nor interest in an experiment-based science course. Memorizing formulas and solving test questions were more appealing to everyone. Hence, this pilot program was soon discontinued.

In retrospect, of course there were shortcomings in this course. The “student guides” were unattractive books printed on third-pulp paper and typewritten. Today's vibrant, colorful, interactive e-learning platforms, combined with immersive augmented and virtual reality applications, would undoubtedly be much more attractive. But more importantly, students, teachers, parents and the public did not buy in the argument that an experiment-based science education would broaden students' horizons and improve their scientific thinking skills. There was simply no effort by the Ministry of Education to convince the public that this was an experiment worth trying. When no such convincing was done, the course was unfortunately perceived as an “educational fantasy”.

Personally, I am glad that I took this science course in middle school. I feel lucky that I had a chance to observe onion skin cells, microorganisms such as paramecium and oeglena under a microscope in a science class at a public school in Turkey, at a time when the funds allocated to education were much more limited than today. I conducted experiments and went exploring. Today, students can have similar opportunities in Teknofest competitions, Deneyap workshops and at many other similar programs. But unfortunately, the main framework of our education system has surrendered to central placement exams. I hope that with the strengthening of skills-based approaches in business life and the breaking of the monopoly of formal education, our young people will experience the joy of research, learning and discovery.