What can we do to improve Science Education?

[selfAdjoint]

Something came along simultaneously with the high tech era. Whether it was; Video games, MTV, or more moms working, something apparently happeded to education during that time frame.

By 1972 the Boomer generation had just taken on all the teaching roles from elementary teacher to high school principal. They were badly educated themselves, but still with the high seriousness of intent of the older generations, but the Boomers had the "Elvis Studies" and y'all come ideas of learning. They built the present shoddy system.

 

[BobG]

The link below is to my local newspaper and an article about SAT scores falling. There were various reasons mentioned, especially the new longer test.

The thing that really caught my eye was the graph of SAT scores since 1967. There was a tremendous plunge during the 1972 to the 1985 era that we really never recovered from.

Something came along simultaneously with the high tech era. Whether it was; Video games, MTV, or more moms working, something apparently happeded to education during that time frame.

http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/144317

Could it be an expansion in the diversity of the students taking the test? Ethnic background, education level of students' parents, and family income have a huge impact on SAT scores.

SAT Scores vs. Parental Education
SAT Scores vs. Family Income

As a matter of fact, parents' educational level and family income have the biggest affect on student performance in schools, as well.

I'm not sure if the drop is a realistic reflection of the quality of education. By the end of the 60's, the pipeline should have been filled with students that spent their entire academic career in the schools created by the 1957 National Defense Education Act which placed more money on math and science in an effort to keep up with the Soviets in the cold war. Or, if it is, then the educational reforms of the 50's were a disaster.

 

[Bystander]

(snip) By the end of the 60's, the pipeline should have been filled with students that spent their entire academic career in the schools created by the 1957 National Defense Education Act which placed more money on math and science in an effort to keep up with the Soviets in the cold war. Or, if it is, then the educational reforms of the 50's were a disaster.

They were --- NDEA a decent, not all that good, idea, poorly implemented; counsel and guide students into areas they aren't suited to handle; scrap vertically integrated curricula for "global" surveys of fields, rather than emphasizing fundamentals; if it can, or could, be done wrong, public education will do, or has done it.

 

[selfAdjoint]

The U.S. colleges at the undergrad level and the schools seem to me to be the best equipped in the world, so the problem lies elsewhere...in the popular culture perhaps?

I remember some studies a few years ago of different schools and what they did, and the result on statewise tests (not the best quality measure, but relatively indicative). The result was clear, dollars spent on equipment had almost no effect, and neither did more teacher training. The only thing that made a big difference was more teachers; schools with a lower number of pupils per teacher had significantly better results on the test.

 

[edward]

I think that high -school faculty are spending a lot of time teaching students to pass "state wide" tests, or just teaching enough to get the students to graduate. This leaves a situation where the curriculum being taught is in isolation from the knowledge required for college level work. Secondary and post secondary education are not on the same page.

The Arizona State test is called the AIMS test. (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards.) The State Legislature payed a private firm $6 million to write the test. Passing the AIMS test was to be required for graduation. It has been an eight year nightmare. It has never adequately measured anything. It has proven that politicians should stay out of education.

 

[Astronuc]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0000DE94-3ED7-14F7-BED783414B7F0000

African-American schoolchildren who completed a brief writing assignment designed to reaffirm their sense of self-worth received higher grades at the end of the semester than those given a control intervention, a new study finds. These better-performing children closed the grade gap with their white peers by 40 percent, apparently because the assignment interrupted the harmful effects of declining performance early in the semester.

Researchers have invoked a concept called stereotype threat to help explain why black students in the U.S. consistently perform worse in school than their white counterparts. In this view, members of a minority experience anxiety at the prospect of confirming negative stereotypes about their group, such as low intelligence. This anxiety impedes their performance in tasks that reflect on the stereotype, creating a downward spiral in which anxiety and poor performance feed on one another. In past experiments college students have been told that a test they are about to take is insensitive to race or gender, and such interventions can reduce group differences in test scores. "No one had looked at whether these kinds of processes could be manipulated in the real world and have long-term consequences," says social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Affirmation works, encouragement works, inspiration and motivation works - and that applies to everyone to some extent.


Recently I heard an interview with Lou Holtz. He has a very good philosophy about life and success. On of the things he mentioned was that people can lift others up or put them down, and he preferred to be one who inspired and motivated people to do their best. I don't necessarily agree with the 'reward/punishment approach' that he mentioned, but I find his approach to be affective.

Holtz is a sought after speaker.
http://www.washingtonspeakers.com/speakers/Speaker.cfm?SpeakerID=429#

He has also written a book about his experience and the lessons he learned in life.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060840803/?tag=pfamazon01-20 (Hardcover)

------------------------------------------------------
Popular culture may have an impact if parents decide not to be involved in their children's education.

One indicator of how well a student will do is the educational level of the parents. The affect can be through expectation and/or participation.

Parents who participate in their children's education can make a huge difference. I read to my kids for years, and still read to my son, who is now 15. My wife and I take our children to books stores and the library. As a result, my children have read well above grade level.

On the other hand, my wife and I know many parents who do not read to their children, and some may not read very much at all.

This afternoon, my son announced he plans on studying physics - because its more challenging. Well, we'll see how he feels about it at the end of the year.

 

[Chi Meson]

One indicator of how well a student will do is the educational level of the parents. The affect can be through expectation and/or participation.

This is believed by many to be THE top indicator of success in education. (Especially that of the mother, or "primary home-care-giver")

This afternoon, my son announced he plans on studying physics

HUZZAH!

 

[franznietzsche]

Public schools are god awful. Tax payers already shell out enormous loads of money for kids to go to them, so why not redirect the money that would pay for a student's public "education" into a private education. I, though not Catholic, attended a private Catholic elementary and middle school, where I received a superior education (at least to all other schools anywhere nearby). Private schools are indisputably better, and all children deserve the opportunities they offer. And what's wrong with religious schools? If your objection has something to do with the oh-so-sacred wall of separation between church and state, note that the individuals would choose where to send their children, not the government.

As for unions, there are good teachers... and then there are bad ones. Bad teacher should be fired readily, for the sake of the students. But unions hinder this process. Public schools often just put up the bad teachers as they are helpless to get rid of them. So, obviously this is not what should be happening. Childrens' educations should take precedence over teacher's interest, but since powerful unions back teacher's interests, childrens' educations suffer.

This is on topic because the key to a better science education is a better education in general. And the key to that is to put more options in the hands of parents with school vouchers and to make teachers fear losing their jobs if they suck.

You are making broad generalizations about public and private schools that are simply wrong. There is a very good reason that neither myself nor any of my three brothers went to private schools. Quite simply, they would have been an inferior choice. Not because they had worse programs for normal students--but because they had very limited options for advanced classes. In the public schools we had far more and far better options. So no, private schools are not indisputably better.

The purpose of unions is to protect the mediocre, so of course they make it hard to fire bad or mediocre people. Unions form in industries where the personnel are expendable and exchangeable-- or at least treated as such by those in control of hiring practices. In those situations the mediocre need protection.

 

[franznietzsche]

This is believed by many to be THE top indicator of success in education. (Especially that of the mother, or "primary home-care-giver")



HUZZAH!

In my opinion the importance is not the level of education of the parent, but their level of expectation of and involvement, which is is most likely correlated to their education level. Neither of my parents finished college when they were young (My mother actually finished her bachelors the same semester I finished high school). But my mother, especially when we were young before she started working again, was very involved in our academic lives and very much on our cases to do well. And all of us did as a result.

 

[BobG]

I think that high -school faculty are spending a lot of time teaching students to pass "state wide" tests, or just teaching enough to get the students to graduate. This leaves a situation where the curriculum being taught is in isolation from the knowledge required for college level work. Secondary and post secondary education are not on the same page.

The Arizona State test is called the AIMS test. (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards.) The State Legislature payed a private firm $6 million to write the test. Passing the AIMS test was to be required for graduation. It has been an eight year nightmare. It has never adequately measured anything. It has proven that politicians should stay out of education.

It only makes sense to know what knowledge you want students to have by time they graduate and to have a means of assessing whether or not those students have acquired that knowledge. The minimum requirements won't necessarily reflect the knowledge required for college level work, since the majority of students won't graduate from college (in 2003, Massachusetts led the nation with 37.6% of its population, 25 and older, having http://www.epodunk.com/top10/collegeDiploma/).

Even though the concept of standardized testing makes sense, there's a lot of risk in it.

1) If you don't correctly identify the knowledge a student needs to get by in life - the knowledge most employers want, the knowledge needed in order to evaluate whether a person is getting a fair deal in a transaction or not, the knowledge needed to assess and plan for their retirement, etc. - then the tests will be worthless, as well.

2) If you do correctly identify knowledge required in today's world, will your program be able to react to changes that are sure to occur in the future or will it always be a step behind, always testing the skills and knowledges that were required for yesterday's world.

3) If your program is incredibly good at identifying required knowledges and skills, and very good at detecting and reacting to changing requirements, is there any guarantee that future changes will render nearly your entire program and direction obsolete. Changes drastic enough that even if you react quickly, a huge portion of your students have wasted most of their educational years.

The biggest strength and the biggest weakness of allowing teachers to do too much of their own thing is in its lack of focus. It's too inefficient to get great results system wide, but it's wide spread means even big changes have less risk of turning your entire educational program into a disaster.

It winds up being an interesting trade-off between efficiency and adaptability. Trying to identify the right stuff to test today is challenging enough, let alone trying to make sure your base of required knowledge is wide enough to adapt to unforseen future changes, and that is why standardized testing certainly has a high chance of turning into a disaster.

Of course, an alternative option to both is to hope some other state does better than you at educating students and just lure people that were educated out of state. (I bring that up only because Colorado was third in the nation in percentage of college graduates in the link I provided, yet they consistently rank in the bottom fourth in the number of high school students that go on to college).

 

[Chi Meson]

In my opinion the importance is not the level of education of the parent, but their level of expectation of and involvement, which is is most likely correlated to their education level. Neither of my parents finished college when they were young (My mother actually finished her bachelors the same semester I finished high school). But my mother, especially when we were young before she started working again, was very involved in our academic lives and very much on our cases to do well. And all of us did as a result.

Well yes, we agree on this point. The level of education of parents is the statistical indicator of sucess in education, but not itself the reason.

 

[Astronuc]

from AAAS
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/922/5?rss=1
By Jeffrey Mervis
ScienceNOW Daily News
22 September 2006

Children are capable of understanding more science than many educators give them credit for. But those same teachers may not know enough to help their students learn what they need to know to compete in a global economy. That message comes from a new assessment of U.S. science education in elementary and middle schools from the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC).

The report, Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, says that U.S. students are continuing to fall behind their international counterparts despite 15 years of reform efforts. Part of the reason, according to the expert panel, is an overstuffed curricula taught by teachers who don't thoroughly understand the subject matter. Students are also stymied by "repeated, shallow coverage" that fails to give them a conceptual understanding of what it means to do science.

"With all the pressures facing teachers, that's just not on their radar," says panelist Daniel Levin, a former middle and high school science teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, who is now pursuing his doctorate in science education. "Sure, there's an emphasis on teaching the components of the scientific method so that students can spit it back on a test. But they miss the bigger idea that science is a way of making an argument, of convincing someone based on the evidence."

The report notes that the debate between direct instruction and hands-on, inquiry-based learning has created a false dichotomy. It says both approaches should be used to help students become proficient in science and to understand scientific inquiry. The panel also laments the achievement gap between majority students and non-Asian minority and disadvantaged students, although it says that it was not able to come up with a solution during its 2-year study. Next spring, NRC plans to issue an easy-to-read version of its report for practitioners and the general public.

"This is an important report," says Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, "because it hits on two key points: the need to pare down the number of requirements in the current standards, and the need to offer better professional development to improve teacher content knowledge. We will be pushing it."

Taking Science to School:
Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8

Certainly teachers need to be taught how to teach effectively (sometimes I wonder based on what I hear first hand) and they need to master the subject. I think teachers are blamed far too much for the failures of politicians/school boards, students, parents and many adults in the community.

Then students need to work hard. My experience is that many students just don't want to work hard, and they avoid courses which require effort. I think most participants in PF do not fall in that category.

I think many parents do not provide proper support to their children, nor do they provide appropriate examples with respect to learning and hard work.

And finally, the adults in the community and the popular culture. When have you ever seen an effective mentor program? Probably never! Who are examples of successful people in the media? Atheletes, movies stars, politicians, business persons? How often are scientists presented as models of success and hard work, in comparison? Probably not often enough.

Popular culture needs to extol the virtues of hard work and learning. Instead we get mindless entertainment and over-emphasis of celebrity atheletes and entertainers, and in some cases politicians. Pretty sad.

One reaps what one sows.

 

[edward]

Astronuc. Interesting links.

Science and physics have to be an adventure. Students have to be almost obsessed with wanting to learn more. I think in many schools science has become more, "memorizing enough facts to pass the test", than an adventure.

 

[Astronuc]

I took courses in Chinese history and culture during early years of university, and one aspect that intrigued me was the Chinese practices of the "investigation of things" [gewu] and "exhaustively mastering principles" [qiongli]. It was intriguing because it was exactly my approach in life (being that I am inherently curious about all things and I am driven to understand the way(s) of all things), and at the time, I had not heard of such a concept in the west.

I would very much like to see this approach developed in US and Western nations.

On Their Own Terms
Science in China, 1550-1900
Benjamin A. Elman
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ELMONT.html?show=contents

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/RethinkingSciCiv/etexts/Elman/Chinese_Sciences.html
"Chinese Sciences" and the "Triumph" of "Modern Science" in China

http://www.geocities.com/athens/oracle/2793/china.html

Extension of knowledge consists of the investigation of things as they really are.
When things are investigated, knowledge is extended.
When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere.
When the will is sincere, the mind is correct.
When the mind is correct, the self is cultivated.

It was this Confucius' humanistic insistence on the "investigation of things as they really are," that is, observing reality without the interference of religious dogma or one's presuppositions, that led to the great Chinese discoveries in science and technology. Confucius had provided not only the method for acquiring knowledge--"investigation of things as they really are"-- but also the purpose for which things were to be investigated--"humaneness"--(ren), that is, to create a humane society. Characteristically, Chinese scientific and technological advances were made, not to exploit human beings, but to enhance their quality of life by improving their living and working conditions. Chinese contributions to the West are indeed in the hundreds; however, for reasons of space, we shall mention here only the most important contributions of Chinese civilization to the West in the areas of science and technology.

From Confucian China, "The Way of Great Learning"
http://fireside.designcommunity.com/topic-8353.html

See also - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Learning