Teaching and learning in context-based science classes : A dialectical sociocultural approach

Internationally, many secondary school students are disengaged in science, finding the content of the curriculum unrelated to their everyday lives. Despite a rapidly changing world, outdated pedagogical approaches still persist in science classrooms where the focus is on the rote learning of conceptual knowledge, the application of concepts to routine problems, the treatment of context as secondary to concepts, and the use of practical work to illustrate principles and practices (Tytler, 2007)