Evolution of Science Education in Nigeria

Science Education: History, Focus, and Evolution in Nigeria

• Science education is the teaching and learning of science to schoolchildren, college students, or adults within the public.
• Science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and teaching pedagogy.
• Science education is a well-established subfield of teacher education that prepares students for a career in the teaching profession.
• Science education helps students and the public in the meaningful acquisition of scientific knowledge, ethics, and process skills.
• Science education ensures a steady flow of scientists and technologists of all kinds to power sustainable socio-economic, scientific, and technological growth and development in society.
• Science education creates scientifically literate citizens who can make appropriate scientific decisions on socioeconomic, personal, and social concerns based on sound fundamental scientific knowledge and attitudes.
• Science education began informally in Europe in the nineteenth century and extended into family-based education and then straight into the teaching of school-age students.
• Informal scientific education is voluntary, open-ended, and built on experiences and ideas presented without structure or order, requiring the student to decide.
• William Sharp is credited with being the first person employed as a science teacher in a British public school in 1850, establishing a model for science to be taught throughout the British public school system.
• The introduction of formal education in Nigeria in the 1840s by the British Christian missionaries laid the foundation for western education, but science was conspicuously absent from the curriculum.
• The Nigerian government's promotion of science education was greatly aided by the national curriculum meeting that was conducted there in 1969, which led to the first Nation Policy on Education (NPE) in 1977.
• Science study at the tertiary level of education officially began in Nigeria with the establishment of the first tertiary education institution, Yaba College, in 1932, which offered science teacher education, among other programs.