Curriculum Design

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The usual approach to planning a year, or a two year GCSE course of teaching is to look at the topics and teach them one after the other. For example, in science we’ve always simply taught biology 1, then chemistry 1, then physics 1, one after the other, then revise the lot at the end for the exams.

Everything we read about cognitive science tells us this is a bad idea. One reason why is linked to the deliberate practice we are encouraging through our lesson design – interruption actually has a beneficial impact on long term retention of information. The traditional approach does not brook this interruption. Another reason is the well-known Pareto principle: 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. Similarly, 20% of subject content permits 80% of the understanding. So, we need to teach the important stuff first, and we need to interrupt the topics so students have an opportunity to forget. This is because forgetting, then recalling, is excellent for long term retention.

With the new science GCSE starting this year, it was the perfect chance to break the usual mould. We’ve designed a radically different curriculum for the two years. There are twenty topics. The first three cover the threshold concepts for physics, chemistry and biology (in that order – which may just be contrary). These are the key ideas – maybe not precisely 20% of the content in each discipline – on which the rest of the content rests to a greater or lesser extent. For instance: at GCSE level, the fundamental of biology is the cell. In physics, you cannot appreciate energy without understanding forces. In chemistry, not a lot makes sense without a strong grasp of atomic structure and the periodic table. Thus, these form our threshold concept topics. In the spirit of deliberate practice, of course, we’ll keep coming back to them in future topics.

So, we are interrupting and spacing learning in our topics with an interleaved curriculum, with the express goal of maximising our students’ long term retention of science knowledge and understanding.

For those interested, here are our twenty topics for the new AQA Combined Science GCSE:

Topic Number	Topic Name	Maximum Lesson Allocation
1	Physics Threshold Concepts – forces and energy	Topic 1 = 8 lessons
2	Chemistry Threshold Concepts Particles, Atoms and Reactions	Topic 2 = 8 lessons
3	Biology Threshold Concepts – cells to organisms	Topic 3 = 8 lessons
4	Physics: potential energy and elasticity	Topic 4 = 12 lessons
5	Chemistry: Periodic table	Topic 5 = 12 lessons
6	Biology: cell specialisation and hierarchy of organisation in multicellular organisms – what is an organism?	Topic 6 = 10 lessons
7	Biology: exchange, transport and homeostasis – how do organisms stay alive?	Topic 7 = 14 lessons
8	Physics: particle model to explain density and thermal energy	Topic 8 = 12 lessons
9	Chemistry: materials, structures and bonding	Topic 9 = 16 lessons
10	Biology: photosynthesis, respiration and metabolism – how do organisms get and use energy?	Topic 10 = 12 lessons
11	Physics: waves	Topic 11 = 10 lessons
12	Chemistry: quantitative chemistry and electrolysis	Topic 12 = 12 lessons
13	Biology: disease - how do organisms get sick?	Topic 13 = 12 lessons
14	Physics: nuclear physics (initial content appears in chemistry part of specification)	Topic 14 = 10 lessons
15	Chemistry: rates of reaction	Topic 15 = 12 lessons
16	Biology: how and why do organisms reproduce?	Topic 16 = 12 lessons
17	Physics: electricity	Topic 17 = 14 lessons
18	Chemistry: energetics	Topic 18 = 10 lessons
19	Biology: how do organisms relate to each other and the environment?	Topic 19 = 12 lessons
20	Physics: electromagnetism	Topic 20 = 12 lessons
	Total	228 lessons

 

 Phil Wilson