1 Learning Out of the Classroom Michael Reiss Institute of Education, University of London m.reiss@ioe.ac.uk The UK has for about a century had a strong tradition of practical work in school science education. As a result, a well equipped laboratory has long been considered highly desirable for secondary science teaching, and the advent of the National Curriculum in England, Northern Ireland and Wales in 1989 led to primary science being influenced more by the assumptions of secondary science than vice versa. When this emphasis on laboratory work is put alongside the various pressures operating to make it ever more difficult to take pupils outside the classroom, it is little wonder that learning out of the classroom is the Cinderella of science teaching. I believe passionately in the value of high quality science learning in the classroom. But I also believe it needs to be complemented by learning out of the classroom. This chapter explores what research has to say about learning science outside the classroom. My hope is to increase the amount of learning that takes place in science outside the classroom so as to help students learn science better, to enjoy it more and to make it more likely that they will continue with it when it is no longer mandatory for them. Science in the classroom Whether science is taught in a specialised laboratory (as in many secondary schools) or in a typical classroom with some specialist equipment (as in many primary schools), the fundamental idea is that pupils are presented with a simplified version of reality in which it is easier for them to be introduced to key scientific ideas. Consider, for example, a typical piece of practical work (it might be a demonstration, an investigation or an experiment) in which pupils look at a range of substances to see which are magnets, which are magnetic materials and which are non-magnetic materials. All that is required are standard magnets (with North and South poles that can be distinguished) and a range of materials (e.g. a number of non-metals and metals including iron, steel, nickel, cobalt, copper and aluminium). In a classroom or laboratory setting the whole exercise need take no more than fifteen minutes. And yet in nature, it would not only take far longer but make much greater demands on students in terms of the interpretations they would have to make to reach the same conclusions. This, above all, indicates the value of classroom learning in science. The purified, controlled and simplified version of reality with which students are presented makes it much easier for a teacher to help students understand the conclusions of science.