Bringing CASE in from the cold: How is it going?

The Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education programme (CASE) was designed as a two-year intervention for students aged 11-13  to address the mismatch between student cognitive readiness and the formal abstract demands of the science curriculum. Cognitive Acceleration (CA) is a pedagogical approach, developed at King’s College, London, originally within the context of secondary science, informed by a Vygotskian and Piagetian theory base and designed to support teachers in transforming their classroom practice to develop students’ ability to think. The secondary CASE research yielded a significant impact on student GCSE outcomes (see Adey & Shayer, 1993), three years after the CASE intervention and this generated a world-wide uptake of the secondary intervention. The pedagogical pillars underpinning this approach (concrete preparation, social construction, cognitive conflict, metacognition, bridging) are still completely as relevant today as they were in the 1990s. This session will support science teachers and leaders who want to consider how to embed challenge, collaborative learning, metacognition and key ideas from cognitive science within their science curriculum. In this session, participants will be interactively involved in a short section of a CASE type lesson, and this will lead into a discussion of how the CASE methodology can “bridge” to their own curriculum. During the session we will: > Outline the history of data that showed the mismatch between student cognitive readiness and the formal abstract demands of the curriculum > Explore how we have been renewing the application of its principles with bridging lessons > Share new forms of Professional development and application beyond the original secondary science programme