Why Many Students Find Science Difficult to Study and Understand

Traditionally, learning science - let alone favourable - has been a difficult task. It has been assumed with relative normality in our educational culture that not all students are worthy to study the sciences, that it is an exclusive, if not exclusive, a subject for which not all of us are trained.

In this way, scientific education has traditionally fulfilled in our educational system, and perhaps unfortunately still continues to fulfil, a selective rather than formative function: more emphasis has been placed on selecting the most qualified students than in providing a scientific education to all students as part of their citizenship training. However, in the new curricular frameworks, especially since the introduction of Compulsory Secondary Education, the goals of scientific education should be explicitly directed towards what could be called a scientific literacy process, a scientific education for all, based on the assumption that scientific knowledge and thought, the ways of doing science, should be part of a shared cultural heritage, that all citizens should be able to use those forms of knowledge to make sense of the world around them and participate, with their actions and decisions, in social life. To lead a healthy life, to behave responsibly with the environment, to make decisions as citizens about the new gene therapies or the genetic manipulation of food, or simply to understand and optimize the functioning of the technologies at our service require in all cases knowledge scientists that protect us from the simplifying messages of advertising or demagogy.

But,

Is it possible to extend to all students the learning of subjects as difficult as the sciences have traditionally been?
What results have been obtained in the years in which this scientific literacy effort is underway? What are the main difficulties in the teaching and learning of science?
And how can an overcoming of some of these difficulties be achieved?

This module aims to answer some of these questions, starting with a general characterization of these difficulties and then presenting four concrete examples of typical difficulties in the teaching and learning of sciences, accompanied by concrete proposals for intervention to overcome them.

The truth is that returning to these questions, the data accumulated in these years are at first sight quite discouraging for the scientific literacy project. Thus, international studies, such as the famous PISA Reports, which include, among others, the results of learning scientific competences in 15-year-old adolescents, show relatively poor results among our students, although not clearly worse than in other areas such as reading or mathematics (OECD, 2010). In fact, these data are not very surprising in the light of the numerous researches carried out in very different countries on the understanding and learning of sciences.

Although later we will specify some of these difficulties, in a general way they show that a good part of the students do not usually reason with the rigour and precision that scientific activity requires, they tend to use intuitive ideas or models to interpret the daily phenomena, instead of the scientific knowledge they study, they find it difficult to relate this knowledge to situations of daily life, etc. In addition, contrary to those that tend to propagate certain simplifying interpretations of the PISA report data, it is not specific difficulties of our students, nor our curriculum, but in different countries, cultures and social conditions the learning difficulties of the students are very similar, showing that it is a significant event, that also deserves a systematic response. And neither is it reducible to the idiosyncrasy or mentality of adolescents.

Among adults, the levels of scientific literacy are not much more encouraging either. And not only among us. Thus, in a survey conducted in 2011 in the US, the supposedly most scientifically advanced country, only 16% of the respondents considered that the theory of evolution was true, while 25% believed that it is false, 18% that it was probably false and 36% that was probably true.  Perhaps as a consequence, in the same survey, 56% of people considered that in science class should be taught not only the theory of evolution but also creationism, a scientifically unsustainable theory.

But, why is this resistance to learning science? Why is science so hard to learn?

If one talks to science teachers, they often tend to attribute these difficulties to the students' own psychology.

Faced with these questions, it is common to find answers like "because they are not interested in science, they are not motivated", "science is difficult and they do not try hard, they do not study enough", "they do not try to understand, they just repeat what they read”, "They lack the capacity for abstraction or intelligence" or "they lack basic knowledge", etc. Psychological and didactic research has also tried to find answers to these questions, and although, as we will see, some of those answers are similar to those found by the teachers themselves, there is an important differential feature: while in the answers just mentioned it is They attribute these difficulties to what students lack, psychological and didactic theories explain rather by the knowledge and ways of thinking that these students have.

Of the various answers offered by classroom professionals and researchers, there are some that refer to general features of student learning -which are more pronounced in the area of ​​science but also affect other subjects- and others that refer to the specificity of science learning. Among the first, of a more general nature, there are two that are worth reviewing, even if briefly:

• They do not learn science because they do not strive: the lack of motivation

• They do not learn because they tend to repeat rather than understand: reproductive learning

But as we say, there are other factors more specific to the nature of scientific knowledge that can account for the difficulty of their learning, such as:

• They do not learn because they have no capacity for reflection and abstract reasoning: scientific thinking.

• They do not learn because they have no one to turn to get science homework help.

• They do not learn because they interpret the world from models other than those of the sciences: the conceptual change.

It is not so much about looking for the "correct" answer, the culprit or the killer of science learning, as it is about assessing the importance of each one of the proposed factors since without a doubt all of them have a real influence on that gap between teaching and learning in science classrooms. Thus, when presenting each of these four models or interpretations, we will refer to the cases and the didactic proposals that develop, in a more concrete way, those difficulties later on.