Scientific work

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With the 2004 education plan in Baden-Württemberg , one of the most important innovations in the reform of the education plan for secondary schools was replaced by the natural science subjects biology , chemistry and physics by the scientific working group ( NWA ), which is a core subject alongside mathematics , languages ​​and compulsory elective subjects.

Up to grade 7, lessons in NWA are usually integrative, i.e. one teacher teaches the entire class. In grades 8 and 9 there is usually a division into NWA chemistry, NWA biology and NWA physics. Project lessons are then on the program in class 10. In all grade levels, only one grade is given for the subject network NWA.

The annual weekly number of hours for NWA is 24 hours. As a result, the natural sciences area has been significantly upgraded compared to the 1994 educational plan. The NWA concept was developed at a time when the poor performance of German students in the natural sciences in the PISA study was not yet known, but the TIMS studies previously carried out in the mid-1990s had already identified clear deficits in basic scientific education.

NWA is about a basic scientific education , the focus of which is on scientific methods . The principle of work orientation always comes into play, because NWA wants to be an explicitly practical subject group, which is expressed in the emphasis on the term “work”. The central principles of NWA "experiencing nature and phenomena directly", "own experimentation", "own research", "cooperate and communicate", "own reflection and understanding" as well as the development of a "uniformly structured conceptual system" are fine methods (for example documenting and presenting, observing, examining, measuring etc.) as well as fine skills (e.g. understanding your own body, quantifying, recognizing and describing causalities, understanding and applying the energy concept, etc.).

One goal of NWA educational standards is the ability of students to "draw conclusions from evidence in order to understand and make decisions about the natural world and the changes made to it by human activity."

criticism

In practice, the successful implementation of NWA in schools is jeopardized by insufficient number of hours allocated to schools by the school inspectorate. The scope of the hours of division provided does not correspond to the concepts initially presented in the glossy brochures of the Ministry of Culture; given the importance of student experiments, this is not only questionable with regard to the quality of the teaching, but also in view of the up to 33 experimenting students and non-specialist teachers (see below) serious security problem.

There will be no teacher training for NWA in the future either, but up to and including grade 7, all of the lessons will be taught integratively by a teacher, so that most NWA teaching teachers are only trained in one of the subjects biology, chemistry and physics.

Further criticism comes from the industry. Many companies cannot do anything with the collective grade NWA because they are primarily interested in performance in one of the sub-subjects chemistry or physics, for example.

Project lessons in grade 10 also cause problems, because despite project work, schools are obliged to write several class tests.

On the part of the vocational high schools, the parents and the GEW, the lack of compatibility of NWA with the natural sciences in the vocational high schools is complained. The resulting inadequate connectivity led to the admission in the coalition agreement between BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN and the SPD Baden-Württemberg 2011 - 2016: "The education plan for the Realschule must be improved so that it is compatible with that of the vocational high school."

In the new education plan of Baden-Württemberg (from 2016) the subject network NWA will be dissolved again. It is replaced in grades 5 and 6 by the subject network Biology, Natural Phenomena and Technology (BNT), consisting of biology, physics, chemistry and technology. From grade 7 onwards, the natural sciences are taught again in the individual subjects of physics, chemistry and biology. The NWA experiment is therefore considered to have failed.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ministry for Culture, Youth and Sport Baden-Württemberg (Ed.): Education plan 2004 for Realschule. Stuttgart, p. 96.