Ignoring research and getting the science wrong

There has been some fuss in recent weeks about a document published by the UK government's Department for Education¹ setting out the future requirements for teaching and examining science at GCSE level (i.e. for students aged 14-16). Discussion on the physics teachers email list (PTNC - Physics teachers’ notes and comments) pointed out that several of the physics equations included in the documents were simply wrong, and this was also reported in the national press. Whilst such basic errors should not have been allowed to pass unchecked into the official document, they are easily corrected and indeed a revised version of the official document appeared within a day of the story breaking.

However there are other statements in this document which should give more cause for concern. For example, in the chemistry section students are to be taught that “energy is conserved in chemical reactions so can therefore be neither created or destroyed”. This seems a well-intentioned attempt to link chemistry and physics - but whoever wrote the document shows either limited understanding of the science or poor logic. In physics there is a general conservation principle that energy is never created nor destroyed, and this applies in chemical reactions as everywhere else. However, the conservation of energy as a general principle certainly does not follow from the specific case of chemical reactions as implied in the curriculum document. Indeed chemical reactions often seem to involve considerable energy changes that we explain in terms of non-observables (such as bond energies), because we assume the general conservation principle will apply. This is the kind of faulty logic that teachers are warned to look out for in students’ scientific explanations.² It is hard to imagine any scientist or science teacher would have produced or approved such a statement, leading one to wonder who actually wrote and checked the science subject content document. This error should also be quickly repaired.