It is valuable to look back at the nature of the curriculum reform projects of the 50s and 60s because some of them are still used in American high schools, and many, if not all, had an impact on one or more of the science disciplines. It all started with the improvement of high school physics, so that's where we'll start. We'll then a look at reform projects in chemistry and biology in the next two sections.
Prior to 1956, the content and organization of physics at the high school level was highly influenced by the Harvard Descriptive List of Experiments, or by the periodic emphasis on the application of physics (toy physics, household physics, consumer physics, atomic age physics). In 1956, a conference was held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Jerrold R. Zacharias, a professor of physics at M.I.T. The state of high school physics teaching was discussed, and the seeds were planted for the development and implementation of a new course for physics in the high school which became known as PSSC Physics.
PSSC Physics
During the period 1956 - 1960, the PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) Physics course was developed by several hundred physicists, high school teachers, apparatus designers, writers, and editors. The result was a course that contained a student textbook, teacher's guide, laboratory experiments, tests, films, and a series of paperback books on selected topics in science
The PSSC Physics course departed from the traditional course in physics which emphasized facts and description of physics concepts; the PSSC course was designed to help students "do physics," by engaging the students in activities and thought processes of the physicist. The goals of this new program included helping students:
In the 60s and 70s there were a number of studies done by science educators to evaluate the effectiveness of PSSC Physics and the other course improvement projects, and also to compare their effectiveness to the traditional courses in the respective disciplines. Studies showed that PSSC students did better on higher level cognitive tasks than their peers in traditional physics courses.
The PSSC course involved the students in a series of laboratory activities that were unique. Over fifty experiments were designed to support and help develop the concepts in the textbook. The experiments were not designed to verify a concept that had been introduced by the teacher or the textbook. Instead, the laboratory experiments created a novel situation in which students had to think about a problem, gather relevant data and analyze results. In order to accomplish this, the PSSC developers designed special laboratory equipment that was simple, easily assembled and inexpensive. All other course improvement projects followed this pattern of designing special equipment. The PSSC equipment included rollerskate carts, doorbell timers, and ripple tanks.
Project Physics
Another physics course developed during this period was Project Physics (originally, it was called Harvard Project Physics). It departed from the PSSC model, perhaps because the developers were science educators, and involved high school teachers from the beginning. Project Physics set out to develop a general education physics course based on good physics, but designed for citizen's of the day.
Project Physics developed a course along humanistic lines, in that the developers were interested in emphasizing human values and meaning, as opposed to PSSC Physics, which focused more on the intrinsic structure of physics. Project Physics objectives were designed to help students understand and appreciate:
Project Physics produced a vast array of teaching materials including 1). six student texts, called Student Guides (Concepts of Motion, Motion in the Heavens, Energy, Waves and Fields, Models of the Atom, and The Nucleus), 2). Physics Readers (articles and book passages related to the topics in the Student Guides), 3). Laboratory Guide (student experiments), 4) laboratory equipment, 5) film loops, 6) films, and 7) teacher's guide.
PSSC Physics and Project Physics were the two major physics curriculum projects developed with funds from the NSF. Physics enrollments continued to decrease during the period of time that these courses were developed and thereafter. Research results showed that the courses were effective in improving students understanding of physics, and ability to accomplish high cognitive tasks.