Throughout their schooling, students are typically taught mathematics and science as separate subjects with each aiming to promote knowledges, skills and understandings of each discipline. Mathematics knowledge, skills and experiences often link with and support learning in science, and vice versa. Yet, anecdotal evidence from practising classroom teachers suggests that students experience difficulty in making connections across these two disciplines. A current research project being undertaken in Australia is about helping students to make connections between topics in science and mathematics. Targetting students’ proportional reasoning skills is the point of connection across these two disciplines in this research project.
Many topics within the school mathematics and science curriculum for the middle years of schooling (typically regarded as grades six through nine) require proportional reasoning. Proportional reasoning is to understand the multiplicative relationship between quantities in proportional situations. The following list of topics, brainstormed by a group of mathematics and science teachers when asked to consider proportional reasoning in the teaching of their respective subjects, indicates its pervasiveness : scale drawing, fractions, algebra, density, molarity, decimals, percentages, forces, ratio, rate, speed, gas laws, body proportions, currency exchange, cooking, trigonometric ratios, forensic measurements, velocity, simple machines, chemistry, magnification, the solar system, metric conversions, scales of distance, timelines, floating, sinking, gravity, acceleration, velocity, pulleys and levers, ...
In the middle years of schooling, the topics of ratio and proportion are normally studied in mathematics classes. Research has consistently highlighted students’ difficulties with proportion-related tasks and applications in mathematics, which means that many students will struggle with topics within both the middle years mathematics and science curriculum due to their lack of understanding of ratio and proportion, and hence their limited capacity for proportional reasoning. In our current research project, researchers and teachers from six different schools are exploring the synergies between mathematics and science curriculum through proportional reasoning, creating and trialling integrated mathematics and science tasks and assessment strategies. A comprehensive unit of work on density has been developed and is currently being trialled in a variety of school settings, by teachers who teach only secondary school science, by teachers who teach only secondary school mathematics and by primary teachers who may or may not teach integrated mathematics and science lessons. This unit has been designed to equally and simultaneously target mathematics and science core learning outcomes. Preliminary results of a proportional reasoning test developed in this project, highlight the great variance of proportional reasoning of students across the middle years and underscores the importance of a more systematic and structured approach to promoting proportional reasoning across mathematics and science. In this paper, the theoretical framework guiding this research project will be detailed and research data to date presented. The capacity for this project to promote transdiscipline knowledge in primary and secondary mathematics and science is discussed.