Modeling: A Proposal to Rethink the Science We Teach

One of the decisions that we science teachers have to make concerns “what scientific knowledge” is important for our students to learn today. Although educational administrations set content and objectives, we teachers have a wide margin of maneuver and, in fact, faced with the same “official” curriculum, there are no two teachers who teach the same thing. In recent years, new “curricula” or content selection proposals have been generated that have focused on identifying a few major ideas of science to be taught and their progression throughout the school years. In this chapter, we will base a curricular proposal for science teaching related to the learning of theoretical models and with a selection and sequencing of activities aimed at the construction of these models or modeling. The ideas presented will be exemplified from a work carried out with 15-year-old students about the modeling of the chromosomal theory of inheritance.