Contemporary science in the lower secondary phyiscs classroom

Can contemporary science have a role in the classroom? While many students find contemporary science exciting, they often view school science as boring and uninteresting. Most of the physics taught in school was developed over a century ago and can be seen as well-established consensus science. Including discussions on contemporary research is one way to increase interest and motivation, and is also a way to provide students with possibilities to learn what research today could look like. It is also one way to teach general nature of science (NOS) perspectives, which have been argued to be important for many different reasons. In this presentation we will describe how a group of science teachers developed and implemented teaching sequences focusing on contemporary physics during in-service training. Each teacher chose a research area, interviewed a researcher, and wrote a popular science article aimed at secondary students (13-15 years old). Finally they designed, implemented and evaluated a teaching unit built around the popular science article. During the presentation we will describe the teachers’ experiences, the resources developed by them, and the kind of NOS perspectives included by the teachers.