The Big Ideas of Science as Means for Promoting Interdisciplinary Science Learning

A significant problem in today's school science education is that students often perceive fundamental scientific principles and natural laws as isolated pieces of knowledge without connections between them or to natural phenomena. Instead, students too often are engaging in activities which are distinct and do not follow a meaningful learning sequence, thus depriving them of the opportunity to transfer knowledge and build on past experiences make connections between the different fundamental principles of our world. In our work, we proposed to teachers the use of the "Big Ideas of Science", a set of overarching core ideas, as a cross-disciplinary 'backbone structure' for science education that could support their efforts to facilitate students' ability to see and make the connections between previously and newly acquired knowledge as well as between science subjects taught in school classroom and everyday life. The results presented in this paper confirm that teachers indeed found such an approach beneficial for their students and that the "Big ideas Of Science" could contribute in teaching science more effectively.