Nuffield Curriculum Centre

Nuffield Modular Sciences

Director
Andrew Hunt

Editors
Andrew Hunt, Bryan Milner and David Brodie.

Background
The northern examining board (NEAB now merged into AQA) had produced a very innovative and successful modular science course in the 1980s under the leadership of Bryan Milner. This built up to be the ‘brand leader’. When the National Curriculum of the course were being revised, Nuffield and its publisher decided to develop a differentiated modular sciences course to match the NEAB syllabus. This was known as Pathways through Science.

Differentiation
The scheme aimed to make differentiation feasible according to the National Curriculum levels which applied at the time. The programme was modular. Each module was divided into a series of episodes.

The idea of the episode structure was that it allowed everyone in a class to keep in step while tackling learning tasks appropriate to his or her level of performance.

Publications
The package of publications was complex. For each module the team devised:

• A study guide - spelling out the requirements of the course specification in language accessible to students to help them with planning, record-keeping and revision.
  
• A set of activities - a set of worksheets with a variety of practical and non-practical teaching and learning tasks.
  
• A Sourcebook - a magazine-style presentation of information, stories and picture to support the activities.
  
• A commentary - providing feedback and help to students with answers, sample data, and an indication of the level of response expected for the various tasks.

Impact
The arrival of the 1988 National Curriculum should, perhaps, have lead to a stable environment for further developments. Unfortunately the new curriculum proved highly unstable, and successive changes had damaging consequences for Nuffield and commercial publishers.

The model for differentiation was undermined when the approach to assessment proposed by the Task Group for Assessment and Testing ( TGAT) was abandoned. The publication model was much too complex – it has been described as multi-media on paper.

Schools that adopted the resources used them very effectively, but there were only about 100 of them. Those involved in the project, both developers and teachers, have had leading roles in subsequent Nuffield and other projects. And the resources have been extensively plundered ever since by other Nuffield projects including Twenty First Century Science.