Using Perspectives on Subject Learning to Inform the Design of Subject Teaching: An Example from Science Education

The difficulty of using insights from educational research and scholarship to inform the design of subject teaching is widely acknowledged. In this article, we present an example of the design of a short science teaching intervention to illustrate one approach to using insights from research to inform the design of teaching. After outlining the general difficulty in question, the article begins by justifying two "design tools" in terms of perspectives on science learning ("learning demand" and "communicative approach"). We show how these design tools were used to generate a "design brief" for the teaching, and how the design brief was addressed through one "worked example". We consider the role of factors other than educational research and scholarship in the design process. The article concludes with a discussion of this approach to designing teaching as compared to approaches used in the North American design literature, and the (non-Anglophone) European didactics literature. (Contains 1 figure.)