A review of the school science curricula in eleven high achieving jurisdictions.

The last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in science curricula, with many governments seeing improvements in the performance of their school students in science as key to future economic prosperity. We present the results of an analysis of the curriculum documents for primary and secondary science in Australia (New South Wales and Queensland), Canada (Alberta and Ontario), Finland, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and the United States (Florida and Massachusetts). Beyond our specific findings, we note a degree of convergence across these 11 very different jurisdictions. The Asian ones have made and are making changes to encourage students to be more creative and better able to apply their science knowledge and develop their scientific literacy; the ‘Western’ ones are becoming more knowledge focused. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]