KEY POINTS:
Lydia Austin, science lecturer. Died aged 63.
Lydia Austin, a senior lecturer in science education in the School of Education at the University of Auckland, was a strong advocate of improved teaching of science in primary and secondary schools.
She was convinced that the understanding of science was greatly enhanced by exposing very young children to a wide range of experimental science, and that their ability to understand what they were doing was much greater than most writers of school curriculums believed possible.
The necessary requirement was to encourage the children using appropriate vocabulary matched to their abilities while they investigated.
She was also convinced that, in the senior school years, physics in particular needed to be supported by a philosophical and historical framework totally absent from most curriculums used in New Zealand schools but commonly used in Europe.
She argued that the study of how the important discoveries were made gave students an appreciation of what it meant to be a scientist and the appropriate weight to attach to current scientific knowledge, which should be continually tested.
She said proof by loud assertion or large consensus could not replace careful experimentation.
Dr Austin was a strong critic of the unit standards approach to curriculums. She saw it as dividing the intellectual structure of science into many apparently unrelated boxes, fragmenting the integrity and beauty of the subject. This fragmentation was emphasised by frequent testing of each small part of the material separately.
Internal assessment became a major task for teachers and students, thus limiting the time and energy available to come to terms with the important ideas essential to the subject. Moreover the mantra throughout the curriculum of "making sense of ... " overlooked the fact that astrology, for example, "makes sense" of some people's lives, but this did not make it science.
Dr Austin received her initial training in physics at Exeter University (UK) and the University of Waterloo (Canada) and did postgraduate study at McGill University (Canada) in physics and science education. After a teaching career at Christchurch Girls High School and in Montreal, she moved to Auckland.
After teaching briefly at Auckland Girls Grammar School she became a senior lecturer in science education and was heavily involved in setting up the University of Auckland postgraduate teaching diplomas.
Her assessment of the low level of science understanding of her students resulted in a content-driven programme with a large component of remedial science that attracted interest from some US researchers particularly but was discontinued when Auckland University's School of Education was combined with the Auckland College of Education.
Dr Austin wrote and taught in this vein and put her ideas into practice at home with her four children and eight grandchildren, using a well-equipped home laboratory.
She is survived by her husband Geoff and children.
