My Take | Science matters, and our children are falling behind
By several measures, students are losing ground to their overseas counterparts and our secondary school curriculum – known as the DSE – is largely to blame
Our secondary students’ usual stellar scores in PISA may be falling. More of our students are losing interest in STEM. Is DSE to blame? Many teachers and academics seem to think so. Frankly, I am not sure. But as a parent, I am concerned. You should be, too.
I apologise for throwing all these acronyms at you. It’s ironic that while education should encourage clarity of thought and expression, discussions of education policy inevitably involve an alphabet soup.
The Programme for International Student Assessment ranks 15-year-olds from dozens of countries and territories in mathematics, science and reading. Our pupils had usually done well – until last year.
The Diploma of Secondary Education was introduced in 2012 to replace the Certificate of Education Examination. Now, if those critics are right, the DSE curriculum not only fails to attract more students to science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), it may actually discourage them.
If DSE could do so much damage in five years, we have a major educational crisis on our hands. The matter is, of course, far more complicated. The decline of student participation in STEM is a problem in many developed economies, and they don’t have DSE.