Draft Science Curriculum under scrutiny | The Conversation

Professors Sara Tolbert, Ben Kennedy, Sibel Erduran and Troy Sadler explore Aotearoa’s draft science curriculum in a recent piece for The Conversation, questioning whether its “knowledge-rich” focus leaves enough room for critical thinking, the Nature of Science and mātauranga Māori.

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The piece warns that a curriculum centred on factual recall, without a strong and explicit emphasis on the Nature of Science, risks weakening students’ ability to understand how scientific knowledge is generated, tested and debated. It also highlights that critical and procedural reasoning are barely visible, which reduces opportunities for students to practise evaluating evidence, identifying uncertainty and making informed judgements.

Alongside this, the draft gives only brief attention to relational approaches to science learning, the ways students connect ideas across contexts, communities and systems, and offers very limited space for indigenous knowledge systems such as mātauranga Māori that help learners make sense of environment, whakapapa and place-based interdependence. Taken together, the commentary argues that this narrowing of what counts as science education could leave young people less prepared to engage with complex real-world challenges like climate change, public health, biodiversity loss and the rapid spread of misinformation.