Sir, – The new Junior Cycle emphasises a narrow range of skills over a broad knowledge base. Speaking at the Sutton Trust in April, the leading educationalist Dylan Wiliam, whose work is often referred to in the implementation of the new junior cycle, stated that skills-based curricula are lowering student achievement and that it is time to return to more knowledge-intensive curricula.
Simply put, we are dumbing down our system at a time when other countries, such as the UK, are raising the bar.
The retention of history and geography as core subjects is even more important in this context so that at least current students can retain a core foundational knowledge, that also speaks to their identity as individuals, and they can walk away with something more solid from their Junior Cycle. – Yours, etc,
PETER LYDON,
President,
Association of
Geography Teachers
of Ireland,
Clondalkin,
Dublin 22.
A chara, – Much has been written in these pages recently about the downgrading of subjects such as history and geography in the new Junior Cycle. It should be noted that similar worries are also being expressed by science teachers in relation to recent changes to their subject. Where previously there was a clear, fixed, national syllabus which indicated to science teachers what topics to teach and to what depth, this has now been replaced with a set of indistinct statements known as learning outcomes bundled together in what is known as a “specification”. There is extreme vagueness about what should actually be taught and to what depth of treatment. Two science teachers working side by side could approach the same learning outcomes by teaching totally different subject material and to different depths of treatment yet both believing that they were correctly following these“specifications”.
The lack of a higher-level paper means more able pupils cannot be adequately challenged and differentiated learning in the classroom becomes harder to attain.
It is clear that the lack of depth of treatment is not in keeping with best international practice.
Also of concern is the much-reduced amount of tuition time that our students will receive under these new specifications. The Educational Research Centre, an independent statutory body, recently reported that our current Junior Cycle students spend a third less time studying science than the international average and rank third from bottom in a list of 56 countries surveyed for science tuition time.
Incredibly, one of the stated aims of the new Junior Cert Science specifications is to further reduce the time that our students spend studying the subject. The suggested timetabled hours have been reduced from 270 for the three-year course down to just 200 and a large number of schools are reducing the number of class periods accordingly. The norm for our second-level schools is moving towards just three 40-minute class periods a week for science while little over a decade ago it was five.
While it could be argued that Irish science teachers and students are “doing more with less”, reducing Science tuition time while also trying to promote the Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), it seems to me to be a major contradiction in terms and one that seems guaranteed to reduce the scientific literacy of our students in the long term.– Is mise,
KEVIN P McCARTHY,
Killarney,
Co Kerry.