Process Skills Which Are Important

Process Skills Which Are Important in
the Process of Teaching and Studying Science
There are many process skills encompassed in the
conduct of scientific inquiry. It is a complicated business,
and it is not appropriate to teach all process skills at once or
to teach all of them at all age levels of students.
The concept of the spiral curriculum provides an
appropriate guide for the teaching and studying of process
skills in science. Appropriate selections of science process
skills can be taught and studied in the early years of primary
school. The young students can be given the opportunity to
to observe, handle things and explore the environment. The
basic learning which pupils achieve from these initial
experiences can be used as a basis for building a more
extensive understanding of science process skills in the later
years of primary school and on into secondary school.
Within Nigerian schools, one of the major deficiencies
which sadly arises out of the teaching and studying of
science is that students develop very limited understanding
of scientific concepts. For example, they can write a
definition for osmosis, but not associate any meaning with
International Journal of Educology, 2002, Vol 16, No 1
15
the definition. They can say and write the words, “An acid
is a proton donor,” but they attach no meaning to the words.
For the teaching and studying of science to be of
substantial value, the students must be able to apply
scientific concepts, procedures and attitudes to their wider
life. The value of learning science is greatly enhanced when
the students are lead into an extensive understanding and a
practical conception of how scientific concepts and
principles apply to themselves personally, to their families,
their communities and their nation. A restricted and narrow
understanding of science without expertise in the associated
scientific skills is an understanding with very limited value.
Lamentably, in Nigerian schools, sometimes the teacher
is the major impediment to the process of developing
scientific skills. Teachers sometimes simply lack expertise
in the science process skills themselves because of
inadequate and inappropriate training. In their preparation
to become professional school teachers, their guided studies
of science have been deficient. Also, their guided studies of
the educology of science education, i.e. knowledge about
the teaching and studying of science, have been inadequate.
Among the science process skills which should be
engendered in the teaching and studying of science are those
of measuring, observing, classifying, inferring, predicting,
communicating, interpreting data, making operational
definitions, posing questions, hypothesizing, experimenting
and formulating models. School teachers need to be expert
in these processes, and they also need to be expert in the
teaching of these processes.
From range of process skills associated with scientific
inquiry, some of the skills can be rated as being the very
basic ones. Students should be introduced to these skills
early in their school experience because so much of their
International Journal of Educology, 2002, Vol 16, No 1
16
success in subsequent guided studies requires a sound
understanding and appropriate use of these skills. This
basic set includes the skills of observing, measuring,
classifying, inferring and communicating.