Representing science: an own goal?

In the 2023 Scott Report, Strong Beginnings, the Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) in Australia made a series of recommendations which effectively echoed recent ‘reform’ in England on pre-service teacher education. Based on Australia’s ongoing version of ‘PISA panic’, the Report pointed to its findings as being based on research provided by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). In its Priority Reform 1 on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (‘Strengthening initial teacher education programs to deliver confident, effective beginning teachers’), the Report’s recommendations reflected recent international focus on learning science. In the Discussion Paper which preceded Strong Beginnings, five papers were described as ‘seminal’ as underpinning the case for strong focus on learning science and alleged pedagogical implications, such as a central focus on specific versions of explicit instruction, mastery learning, or the implications of cognitive load research. Above all, there was a strong emphasis on the universal applicability of these approaches. In this paper, we examine the arguments of these seminal papers and question the extent to which they actually do underpin the claims of universal applicability made in Strong Beginnings and its Discussion Paper, with particular emphasis on the most comprehensive of these papers. Some of these papers present less certainty than their representation would suggest and, in fact, throw up a problematic issue of representation in the current fashion for learning sciences and associated fields.