The study of pedagogy aims at increasing opportunities for learning by students at every teaching episode. Movements range from constructivism, which believes that children’s prior knowledge and misconceptions need to be addressed for learning to take place, to argumentation, for cultivating scientific reasoning in students. In this paper, two purposefully chosen classes were given different treatments on a topic at the junior secondary school level. One treatment was a constructivism learning environment while the other was a traditional normal teaching lesson. Results show that whilst the teacher was a qualified science teacher with many years of experience, the partnership with the science education specialist was fruitful. Chronbach’s Alpha gave a reliability value of .764 with a near medium effect size (ω2 ) of .053. The traditional class (MH2), performed significantly lower than the constructivist class (F(1,84) = 4.702; p = .033) overall and also on question 2 (F(1,84) = 9.375; p = .003). Whilst the science teacher was willing to adapt to the new and different way of teaching, there were challenges nevertheless. It is suggested that professional development activities need to pay more attention to teacher needs than perhaps the traditional route of paying more attention to student performance.

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