Science Education: Time for a ground-up reworking?

Great Debates
1

This thread got me thinking: I may disagree with some of the folks in discussion, but I must admit, the more I read their counter-arguments, the more I understand how they came to the conclusions they do, and how they’re not illogical conclusions.

It got me thinking about how I learned about biology, chemistry, physics…in the earliest years, I learned a lot of discrete facts. Mostly it was about keeping straight what branch of science is about what. I talk about frogs and their three-chambered hearts in biology. I talk about igneous and metamorphic rocks in geology. I talk about the solar system in astronomy.

Then around jr. high and high school, things change. Things get more slanted toward the conceptual than the purely factual, and instead of just noting the Moon orbits the Earth, we’re learning the rules that describe this phenomenon, and how those rules generalize all motion to forces and trajectories.

But we go about learning these concepts in an odd way: We gain our knowledge by tracing the development of that knowledge in an essentially chronological fashion. If I were learning about chemistry, I’d learn about phlogiston and why that’s wrong. This would get me to things like molar ratios of reactants and balancing chemical equations. Then I’d learn about Mendeleev and the first periodic table, which was thoroughly qualitiative and rather incomplete. Then maybe I’d learn how to make Lewis dot structures, and how those structures go some way toward describing the elemental periodicities Mendeleev first apprehended. Then I’d use them to get deeper into chemical bonding, and maybe then first learn about things like resonance strucutures and how Kekule’s structure of Benzene was incomplete without it. Then maybe before I finish my junior year I’m learning for the first time that all this stuff about dots and expanded octets and chemical vs. ionic bonds and resonance and everything else related to chemistry has to do with something I’ve never heard of before. All those pictures of C with four dots around it, or electrons in nice little circles around atoms, trundling around in their energy levels are really quite wrong. Those little dots crowding each other on the oxygen in such a way that water just happens to be shaped like a V instead of an I or some other shape are really clouds of a sort, regions where you’re most likely to find an electron called orbitals, and those orbitals and how they behave are the true key to everything about chemistry. Everything.

Now, why do we do this? Why do we rewrite history when we learn about science? Why do we do experiments that famous scientists long dead have already done as an exercise? Why do we learn about the world as they understood it, building up a picture of reality only to discover it’s an oversimplification, and then learn something else that explains what’s wrong with the first thing we learned about.

What about the deeper principles? What is chemistry but the movement of electrons? Why do I need to trace progress of human knowledge from the alchemists to Linus Pauling to finally get to the S orbital? Are orbitals really that hard for kids to understand? Can I not build on the knowledge of chemistry by first explaining, as much as the lack of mathematics will allow, how to build an understanding of chemistry from the configuration of electrons about the nucleus and their exchange between them?

And would electron clouds (versus neat little orbits) and other quantum phenomena seem so mysterious and unintuitive upon first encounter if, in physics, I started learning about path integration out of Feynman’s seminal popularization, QED, before I studied optics as Newton and Huygens understood the subject, with their opposing theories of corpuscles and waves?

And could I not gain a richer understanding of life science by studying evolution long before I start memorizing the bones of the hand or dissecting amphibians and sticking pins through their entrails? Would I not more fully appreciate and utilize, from an early and fertilely impressionable age, the ultimate importance in biology of the origin and evolution of species from a common ancestor if I learned about that before I delve into comparitive anatomy with no contextual background beyond frogs and piglets both have livers and mandibles and this is a good thing to know?

Am I just being naive? Are the fundamentals too challenging to built up from them rather than up to them? Do we really need to review the progression of human ignorance to understanding, learning and unlearning as we go just as our intellectual ancestors did, to really gain a good working knowledge of science?

2

I think you’re halfway on the right track; indeed, the issue of reworking education is a major issue in my classes on elementary education.

Where you’re right is that we need to learn theory instead of learning discrete facts. But I think where you start missing the mark is when you suggest that we learn theory before we learn facts. (If I misunderstand your suggestion, I apologize).

I think what we need to do is learn them concurrently. Kids need to be in situations where the Big Questions become clear to them; and then they need to have access to the resources that will enable them to answer these Big Questions; and then they need to have teachers who will work with them to discover and understand the answers.

Obviously, a lot of this process involves researching experiments performed by scientists. But when possible, it’s wonderful for the kids to engage in experiments that lead them to draw the same conclusions as scientists have drawn: by doing so, the theory will make sense to them instead of being something they memorize.

Daniel

3

I wonder if teacher quality isn’t part of the reason we don’t take a more conceptual view as opposed to just learning facts and writing tests of knowledge. It’s a hell of a lot harder to teach the first way, whereas anyone with a B.Ed can teach science if all they have to do is hand out the grade 3 lesson plan and teach from the teacher’s guide and mark multiple choice answers.

To teach conceptually you have to understand the concepts. Really understand it. It’s a lot easier to teach that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun than it is to answer, “How come some planets orbit in a circle and some orbit in an ellipse?”

Likewise, it’s a lot easier to teach a set of dates around major historical events than it is to have a serious discussion about the economic and political forces that led a country into a war.

4

Sam, I agree with you. One of these days I’m going to unleash a mighty rant on my classmates in the education department, and their cavalier apathy toward learning. But not today.

Daniel

5

I most certainly agree that proper and effective heuristics would be enormously valuable, though I readily acknowledge designing a curriculum that properly incorporates and implements such tools will be a monumental challenge. Enter Sam’s salient point: You need high quality educators who are not only well-grounded conceptually in what they’re teaching, but are also clever and creative in their approaches to teaching.

That said, even modest attempts at such an approach are virtually absent in the laboratory portion of science education. Remember titrating a buffer to find the critical point? I think the only thing that “experiment” tests is how well a particular child can follow directions, and they’re graded accordingly. One could easily gain all the conceptual knowledge such an exercise is going convey by memorizing a graph, and the only additional knowledge one is likely to acquire is the basics of handling beakers and burettes and other rudiments of wet-lab technology. Sure, those are some valuable skills for budding experimental chemists, but as only a tiny fraction of the kids in the room will actually build upon such experience, I think the general pedagogical value is questionable at best. But that’s the way it’s always been done, and is a representative example for virtually every “experiment” I ever did until I reached the advanced levels of undergraduate education and got a work-study assisting one of my professors with her reasearch.

6

I might give an idea of what I’d consider to be good educational practices by cutting and pasting a recent homework assignment of mine. (Keep in mind that this doesn’t contain polished ideas–it’s a very rough draft of ideas for science education). The list below comprises six different methods that a science teacher might use to involve students in their learning. The methods are from a textbook; the examples are mine.

7

I have to say, I feel like something needs to be done, but scrapping this historical background leading up to the great discoveries of science is the wrong way to go about this. The history isn’t so much necessary because current concepts are too hard to understand–it’s necessary because it provides a window into the scientific process and shows how science is a constantly evolving field. It also shows us how zeitgeist influences discovery. We learn about Lamarck’s somewhat ridiculous theory of inherited traits because it probably influenced Darwin’s way of thinking. We learn about Descartes’ mind-brain dualism and Aristotle’s belief in the heart as the central sensory organ because they show us paths we went down before and explain how they were rejected through observation and experimentation.

I despise the people who point to the missteps of science and indict the field as a whole as being flawed, but the process is fascinating and has to be shown. What I think you are correct about is the tendency to leave out critical information until much, much later. There is a compulsion, I think, for teachers to only give students half of the story when they would best be served by at least a cursory introduction to the whole. Obviously, baby steps need to be taken sometimes, but it’s always a bit disconcerting to come across a piece of information that either partially or totally contradicts something you learned earlier and to think “Great, my prof. lied to me.”

8

One problem that I see is that science classes don’t distinguish between teaching general science methodology and actual science. Learning about the progress of scientific theories, about how to set up double-blind studies, about how to correct for error in measurements…these are all important things. We should have a general science course, that is entirely focused on these things, and leave the actual teaching of scientific information to the science courses.

9

How do you plan to balance the additional time spent learning science with the continuing need to learn other topics in an educational program? Many of the propositions I’ve seen would call for additional science courses or time for lab studies. What courses do you plan to cut from a lot of already packed public school schedules to make time for the additional science courses? Foreign languages? Music? Sports? Mathematics? Art? How do you justify giving two courses a day in science when no other educational area gets that kind of focus?

As a broader question, most of the comments in the thread which inspired this one qualified their opinions by saying this was a “deeper understanding of biology” or a “complete view”. How important is it that we give this “deep understanding” in the classroom? Do we give a “deep understanding” or “complete understanding” of any other subjects in school? Is going to this level of detail and depth in science courses worth cutting back on what we teach students about foreign languages? History? Grammar and composition?

Enjoy,
Steven

10

One big reason for teaching the historical perspective is that it points out that what is eventually taught as the “way things really are” is just our current best understanding.

Teaching ONLY that would tend to create even more inertia for new, better, theories to overcome. We need only look to fundimenalists to see what happens when you are taught there is one right solution from childhood.

A second issue is the teachers. If you looked long enough you might find a phD chemist willing and able to teach junior high students…but is that cost effective?

11

I’d say (and there’s a whole educational movement to back this up) that we SHOULD give deep understandings of all subjects: if you’re not going to teach kids why multiplication works, for example, they’re not likely to want to explore math, and they’re not likely to be able to do problems correctly, and there’s a good chance they’ll grow up proudly proclaiming, “I’m no good at math!” Teach them why it works, and you’ll end up with engaged, interested students.

According to constructivist theory (I know, the name is awful, but there are some ideas worth stealing in the theory), you’re better off spending more time on fewer topics. By doing so, students internalize the information in that topic, make it their own, and learn how to learn. You’ll end up spending less time on review if you approach things from an understanding model rather than from a comprehension model.

As I understand it, Japanese schools have achieved their success in math precisely through this method. A class typically begins with one complicated problem on the board, a problem that the students don’t know how to solve; students divide into groups and work together to find a strategy that will solve the problem. At the end of the class, the groups come back together and share their strategies for solving the problem. Students end up with a deep understanding of the problem and of strategies for solving that problem; because they understand the strategy from the inside out, they’re much less likely to make errors in its application.

Compare this to US classrooms, where class typically begins with the teacher explaining a formula for solving a problem, and then students practice this formula on many similar problems. Students end up with an efficient tool that they don’t understand; because they don’t understand the tool, they’re much likelier to make mistakes in its use.

I’d think something similar applies to science education. Teach fewer topics in greater depth, and students will understand the process much better, and be able to connect their knowledge to other lessons much more easily.

Daniel

12

Steven,

What is impressive is that Daniel’s list of approaches does not need to take more time. In fact some time can be saved - by integrating a little across the curriculum you get double duty out of some time invested, creative writing skills coupled with some science inquiry, etc. The emphasis is shifted, that’s all. From isolated facts, to crtical evaluation and learning the process of critical thinking in an integrated manner.

Great in theory. Hard to actually implement. It requires teachers who not only know their stuff, but who can coordinate with each other. Moreover it goes against the current grain of Federal interventionalism and testing. The mastery of lists of facts is easily tested in multiple choice tests; the mastery of critical thinking skills is not.

Yet such a transition is essential, despite the incumbant difficulties. As was discussed in a previous thread (I can link later if someone really wants me to), science is losing the battle for America’s minds. Critical thinking and the management of uncertainty needs to be taught from very early on. As has been noted, citizens need to understand that science builds models of how the universe works and that these models are always held on probation. If citizens fail to understand that process then they are ripe for exploitation by fundamentalist forces who instead offer an absolute truth and by political forces who obfuscate issues by claiming that expert scientific consensus doesn’t mean anything because there are still individual scientists that they can find debating it.

13

I have two criticisms regarding modern U.S. science education.

First, while science itself can be very interesting, of all the things people are willing to watch others do (sports, music, theatre), watching someone else do science is truly boring. Classrooms in which the instructor spends much of the time telling students about science are doomed to failure. Thus, a simple presentation of the latest answer to a scientific problem that perhaps has taken mankind centuries to solve is a tremendous waste of a learning opportunity. Exploring these older theories–many of which might be held by students with a naive understanding of the world–represents a great chance for students to construct their own knowledge of the topic.

Now, simply presenting this historic progression leading up to the latest answer is also not enough: Students themselves have to do the discovery, guided by a well-informed teacher. A scientific subject such as the physics of light offers an example; there are dozens of simple experiments students can design and perform to test various ideas about the nature of light. It’s got to be better than just launching into a lecture about photons.

At the risk of raising the ego-level around here to an unbearable height, I’m betting that most posters on this board–not to mention this particular thread–had enough interest in and aptitude for science that they could overcome bad teachers during their academic career. Folks like this will learn science no matter how it’s taught. Others, however, really need better teachers to inspire a pursuit of scientific knowledge. You may disagree (“If I could learn it this way, so can they”), but the recent debates over evolution, global warming, and the like show the price of general scientific ignorance that is the fruit of poor science education.

In summary, I agree teaching methods have to change, but I don’t believe eliminating a student’s opportunity to explore older, incorrect scientific ideas is an answer; if anything we need more of this to provide more hands-on opportunities for students to explore their own knowledge of science.

As a footnote, if you are involved with science as a professional–or just as an interested amateur–I invite you to think about all the things that you think are really cool about science; “Mastery of the planet”, “Discovering new ideas”, “Touching the organized beauty of the universe”–get as geeky as you like. Now, ask yourself, does any of that ever happen in the typical US high school classroom? Well, why not?

14

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for reform of how the public schools work and the teaching approaches they use. My wife and I home school because we feel we can give our children a better education. A major factor is because we are free to design the techniques to fit the children. Many of the techniques LHoD lists are ones we have used at home. Our biggest goal is fostering a sense of curiosity instead of stamping it out with pre-made formulas and math questions which always come out to nice round numbers.

We believe very much in facilitating a child’s education versus serving it up via dry factoids and rote memorization. There is a huge difference between the ability to regurgitate and comprehension. We’re aiming for the latter and if I could have thought of a way to make it happen in public school then we would have left the kids there. I just don’t see it happening there because of the institutionalized views on how to teach. Having “teaching materials” versus using the real world to teach is one of my sore spots. Even when I was a student it bothered me that math problems on tests always came out to nice round numbers. I knew the real world didn’t work like that and it was just one more thing which made it harder to realize there were applications for what we were being taught outside of our workbooks.

You know the difference between theory and practice? In theory there is no difference. In practice there is.

My wife and I are teaching our children at home so we can get them exposure to things which would never leave the realm of theory in a public school. These things, these real-world things, challenge them to be able to apply what they’ve learned. If they’ve misunderstood the lesson it will become readilly apparent and we can try a different approach. I don’t see how that could be done in a public school given the number of students per teacher and resource constraints. We can build a custom cirriculum for each of our kids. A school with a couple thousand students couldn’t hope to.

Enjoy,
Steven

15

And this doesn’t just occur in primary school; I saw the same pattern of pedegogy all the way through engineering school. You do your problem sets, study your file tests, and get your grade. One thing I’ve noticed in talking to engineers and scientists trained in Europe is that a) “undergraduate” eduation generally involves some amount of extensive hands-on research and independent study, roughly equivilent to a master’s thesis in the US, and b) the lectures are more of an emphasis on application of principles to real-world problems rather than repeated solving of textbook-style problem sets.

For instance, in basic mechanics, the concept of energy is introduced immediately and repeated throughout the coursework rather than spending weeks on kinematics and momentum methods before introducting concepts like conservation of energy, friction, thermodynamic losses. You can’t teach it all at once, but you introduce the concepts up front, as they apply to actual problems, and then fill in the theory and math as the basis of understanding develops. Looking in my old phsyics text (Wolfson, Pasachoff, a very standard text) I see that they don’t even introduce the concept of energy until the sixth chapter. And that philosophy goes all the way back to primary school.

Those who remember the “New Math” will also remember the ridicule leveed against it; and for the most part, rightfully so, as both the texts and the teachers were manifestly unprepared to present the material in an organic, rather than pedantically structured, context. Most teachers didn’t understand math–the knew arithmatic, not mathematics–and so couldn’t teach it. But the tenets behind it–that young children could grasp the concepts of sets, discrete mathematics, basic priciples of calculus–were valid, and the theory being that this would create a basis for reasoning once students came to study more advanced mathematics. Instead, students come into a calculus class knowing only the two-column “proofs” of plane geometry and the dumb monkey algebraic manipulation and trigonometry functions, and are then staggered by the notions of limits, sets, sequences and series, derivatives, et cetera.

Ditto with science, and for that matter, history, literature, et cetera. Unfortunately, it takes exceptional teachers–those who actually have a superior grasp on their topic and an enthusiasm for presenting it even in the face of apathy–and frankly, most aren’t up to either the challenge of teaching the material or overcoming indifference and crappy materials and curricula.

I can’t agree more. The idea of primary education should be to create a foundation for students to explore the real world with a critical and discerning mind, so that they can learn from the world rather than merely about the world. This is the basis for life-long education rather than a technican’s narrow inculcation.

Stranger

16

I don’t dispute the importance of portraying the history all, I just wonder if a “history of science” course might be a better vehicle. Speaking of zeitgeists, who had a greater influence on 20th century thought than Einstein? They wanted him to be the president of Israel for crying out loud. Why, in a typical history curriculum, do we only focus on the contributions of generals and politicians, and virtually ignore their scientist contemporaries, unless they invent a big weapon or something of that nature?

17

The thing I find coolest about science is testing a hypothesis, however trivial, and getting an answer (especially if I’m right, admittedly). Simple as that. I doubt it would matter what field I was in, I’d still get an enormous charge out of that process. As it happens, I’m simply not enough of a mathematician (though I held my own in my core courses well enough to get the B’s), so biology is about as hard a science as I can reasonably expect to make a living in.

I really think teaching science could be fun for almost everybody. Honest. But it’s the fact-based prognosticating and testing that’s the hook, and that’s what your average student gets about zero practical exposure to.

I’ve read all the posts above with great interest, by the way, and offer sincere thanks for bringing such thoughtful and insightful discussion to this thread. It’s cool to know educators and other specialists are thinking along thes lines of change too.

18

Yes, it is. And it’s a great idea. There’s a misconception that PhDs are well paid. PhDs in the biological sciences, for about ten years after their PhD (from the age of 30-40, about) can expect to make less than 40K per year; they’re called postdocs, and they’re the biggest bargain in the US economy according to Harvard economist Richard Freeman.

Relevant quote and link:

“Whatever they are, however, postdocs are one of the greatest bargains in the U.S. economy. Where else can one hire Ph.D.s, whose training and smarts put them among the best and brightest in the world, to work 60 hours a week for $30,000 to 40,000 a year, with limited benefits and little power to influence their working conditions and pay? Given the long hours that postdocs work, their hourly pay is on the order of $10 to $13 per hour–on par with the wages paid to custodial and other low-paid workers that have spurred living wage campaigns around the country.”

http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/08/23/4?

Only about ten percent of those people ever get a tenure track position, allowing them to make more. The other 90% find something else to do, often leaving science.

My solution: offer newly minted PhD scientists 60K per year, with an opportunity to move up the ladder, to become junior and senior high school teachers. It’s 50% more than they’re making in science. It’s steady work that doesn’t require applying for grants and changing institutions every two years, and many, many newly minted PhDs have NO interest in doing science by the time they deposit their thesis. Why not make use of these people. I would have taken such an offer, and I’d have been a fantastic teacher (he says while patting himself squarely on the back).

19

The one caveat I have with this plan is that not all scientists have got the chops to be teachers. There’s three things that a teacher needs, IMO:

  1. A thorough understanding of the material to be taught;
  2. A passion for teaching; and
  3. A thorough understanding of the skills of pedagogy.

PhD.s should have the first one down pat. Those who go into teaching will probably have the second one down. The problem is the third one: there are definite skills of pedagogy, and they’re not just intuitive.

That said, formal teacher education programs often cover #3 at the expense of the first two, so I’m not saying that our current situation is any better. I’d like to see more doctorates in teaching, but only if they study pedagogy. A smart, bad teacher is almost worse than a dumb, good teacher.

Daniel

20

I agree. But, I think you’re underestimating the pedagogy of graduate school. By the time I had gotten my PhD, I would estimate that I’d given about 100 lectures. I think with some sort of transitional course on how to teach younger and less informed pupils than the graduate students and professors that I’m used to lecturing to, those skills could have been pretty easily transferred.

I’m not suggesting that all PhDs would make good high school teachers. But, even if it’s 5%, shouldn’t we tap that resourse of disgruntled, underpaid, brilliant people?

Talking to a fellow postdoc yesterday, she is trying to get a teaching job, and she would be great at it, but she’s finding it difficult to be considered for such positions, and the salary is not commensurate with what she feels that PhD in her early 30s should be paid. If a transitional system were set up, and she were paid fairly, she would likely take advantage of it. And you would have a teacher of science who would have, you know, done some actual science.