The Human Sciences Program is an interdisciplinary curriculum designed to fit the developmental characteristics and concerns of 11- to 13-year-olds. This project bridges the gap between the abstract formulations of science and the problems students encounter in the real world. The project is modular, activity-centered, personalized and flexible. Activities engage students with objects and events important in their own lives that also are important to the natural and social sciences. Students choose their own topics for investigation. The curriculum material derives from four sources:

1. major concepts from the natural and social sciences;

2. generic questions related to the major concerns of emerging adolescents;

3. research on human development, particularly that of Piaget; and

4. analyses of societal influences that affect the lives of 11- to 14-year-olds.

Four generic questions provide the project's structure:

1. Why do things change?

2. Why do living things act as they do?

3. What determines who gets what?

4. What is normal?

As a primary goal, the Human Sciences curriculum relates what is being taught to who is being taught. It seeks to facilitate the student transitions from the lower levels of cognitive and affective development (concrete operational) to the higher levels (formal) as they mature from childhood into adolescence.

History of Development

The Human Sciences curriculum was developed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study with support from the National Science Foundation. Middle and junior high teachers' concerns about their students led to the development of this project. Teachers reported the units helped students see more connections between the course content and their lives.

Biologists, teachers, and other educators set the guidelines for the curriculum. Input from young people consisted of student interviews, questionnaires, and journals.

Organization of the Project

The project covers three interdisciplinary themes:

1. continuity and change;

2. competition, accommodation, cooperation; and

3. equality and inequality.

The Human Sciences Program consists of fifteen modules at three levels of increasing complexity. Each of the modules centers on a theme. Modules are then subdivided into several problem areas that contain from eight to ten activities. Culture and Technology contains two of the modules, Knowing and Change, both of which are at the third level of complexity. A complete list of HSP Modules follows:

Level I:

Sense . . . Or Nonsense
Growing
Motion
Behavior
Learning
Surroundings

Level II:

Perception
Rules
Where Do I Fit?
Interrelationships
Reproduction

 

Level III:

Change
Feeling Fit
Invention
Knowing