Adam Savage of the Mythbusters (the second most easily recognized scientists in the US, right after Bill Nye) has a short article up on Popular Mechanics on how to fix US science education. He only has 3 suggestions, but they’re really just two.
The first is to let students get their hands dirty. Instead of just telling them what science is about, make them do it and work at it and see it being done. Working through an actual experiment is a very different experience from being told what the cleaned-up, simplified results are.
The second is to actually spend more money on science education. Weird, huh? It works, though. Science isn’t cheap, and especially if you’re going to put students to work breaking stuff and using up reagents, it’s going to have an ongoing cost.
The third is a bit obvious and a natural consequence of his first: students will make mistakes, and that’s OK. If they’re actually doing experiments, science class is not like home ec class, where you’re supposed to follow a recipe and get a perfect outcome every time.
Of course, all of these suggestions are already being implemented by good public school science teachers (except maybe the second, since you can’t spend money if you don’t have it), but you’d be surprised at how many creationists think science is a matter of rote memorization.
As a former teacher I would completely agree with this approach, and not only for science education.
Students must learn to think and discover things for themselves. Rote learning won’t produce self motivated adults capable of thinking for themselves and acquiring new skills in a changing society.
Unfortunately the trend with No Child Left Behind in the US, and similar ‘back to basics’ approaches in the UK and Australia is in the other direction – away from creative teaching approaches to rote learning.
There is no dichotomy between good teaching, high literacy, and high critical thinking and creative skills as well. The educational conservatives are endangering the quality of the education our kids are getting.
You mean like their “understanding” of the Bible?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I’ve got another suggestion. Teach actual science no matter how squeamish the parents get over mentions of topics they don’t like. If its the prevailing science and is relevant to the discussion it should be taught.
Support of teachers that aren’t afraid to teach the required subject matter needs to increase.
Exactly, Glen. To the fundies, “Educated” means simply that a pupil (not student – “Student” implies actually studying the material) has managed to memorize enough to be able to answer more than 65% of the questions on a Scantron, no matter if they actually understand the material, or have the ability to put that material into practice.
Adam is great. Here he is talking about (second half of video) shows now competing with “Myth Busters.”
This is a scientist!
The first is to let students get their hands dirty. Instead of just telling them what science is about, make them do it and work at it and see it being done. Working through an actual experiment is a very different experience from being told what the cleaned-up, simplified results are.
Huh? This is exactly what we did when I took science in school. Has science education changed? Do courses no longer have an lab portion these days? Or are the lab exercises too “canned”?
I am kind of appalled that it has gotten to the point where this is even a suggestion. That is, how is it possible to teach science without experimentation? My science education in Middle and High School was all experimentation, or probably the only thing I remember was the experimentation. And that is exactly my (and Adam’s) point, experimentation is going to be far more memorable and beneficial to the students than lecture and memorization (or even demo’s).
It’s not just creationists that think science is just about memorizing facts. Unfortunately many people have that misconception, including many K-12 teachers. And mandatory testing only makes matters worse.
As a college science professor, I’m constantly battling students who think all they have to do to pass my class is memorize a bunch of definitions. Then they fail the exam and can’t figure out why. Fortunately, after that dose of reality, most of them figure out that I want them to do more than regurgitate the facts. I want them to think – for some, it’s the first time any of their teachers have asked them to think for themselves in a science class!
I agree wholeheartedly.
My son and his science partner had a great entry in their science fair last year: they examined basic aerodynamics. TO do so they had to build a wind tunnel, craft different aerofoils, create a demo, and document their method & findings.
They were worried because their apparatus was ‘less than perfect’ so they couldn’t replicate the ‘textbook answers’.
They needed a lot of support for that – because they were under the impression that their project had to be able to provide results identical to the textbooks!
Eventually – they understood that science is about the process, the methodology, honesty, and repeatability. IN discovering thier ‘divergence’ they discovered a lot more about designing experiments, and about isolating environmental factors – so that you can measure just the variable of interest.
The point here is that their apparatus was not so expensive – but would not have existed if I had not purchased the materials for them. Without the apparatus, they would not have been able to study and examine this topic ‘for real’.
Luckily – I can afford this. But many people could not!
Why should my son be ‘privileged’ to pursue real experimentation just because I can afford to support it? Such access should be available in the school and to every student.
This – along with UHC and a more equitable tax code – are reasons I’ll be supporting Obama this November.
Your comparison with home Ec. class wasn’t very kind. I don’t think it was accurate, either. If science means anything, it’s that it’s reproducible. If you follow the same “recipe” for a given test or experiment and use the same materials in the same conditions, then it should turn out the same. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean a mistake was made. It may mean you discovered something new.
I like the point that it is ok to make mistakes. labs that are graded for results become a test and not a learning experience.
Having worked my whole career in electronics and optical engineering I can second the need for students to learn through experimentation. However, the necessary lessons would be ponderously slow and extremely costly, if demonstration were the primary teaching method. Book learning is still the quickest and cheapest way for budding scientists to gain knowledge.
Actually, cooking can be very experimental.
In fact, a more scientific approach to teaching cooking/baking – one that involved chemical reactions, etc. – might not be a bad idea, especially since it’s a popular trend among chefs these days. Just a thought.
I’m not sure whether to strangle Kristin for saying what I wanted to say, or hug her for actually saying it first.
Too many school boards think it’s about teaching the test, rather than teaching a passion for inquiry, and the kids pick up on this.
Au fond, we need better school boards. (I.e., staffed with PZ Myers clones…)
I’m sure it was irony you used there, but in case anyone missed it – Creationist Science IS rote memorization.
“but you’d be surprised at how many creationists think science is a matter of rote memorization”
No, I would not.
I spent Kindergarten through fourth grade at a religious private school. They downplayed the importance of science, and of the scientific method. We were told that science will never have all the answers, and therefore we should turn to the one source of all truth: Scripture!
Luckily, I didn’t buy any of that crap because I was too inquisitive. By 4th grade, I was doing experiments at home in my spare time that most kids didn’t even see in high school.
Fifth and sixth grade were spent at a different private school, where the curriculum was significantly more secular (and the uniforms more formal). In sixth, I had a chemistry class that really rocked. In addition to having plenty of time to do experiments and plenty of financing to support them, it was taught by a teacher who (I kid you not) was named Ms. Krypton.
On Fridays we had to wear more formal clothes than the rest of the week, and for males that meant suit and tie. One Friday I borrowed a kitschy tie from my father that had the periodic table on it. That happened to be the day that Ms. Krypton planned a pop-quiz on the first 25 elements. Unfortunately, she made me take it off for the quiz…
For seventh and eighth grade, I went to a public school. While I didn’t have any teachers telling me that science couldn’t be trusted, I did have science classes with a conspicuous lack of financial support for the curriculum. It was failing the students’ minds just as severely as the creationist nonsense, and I always felt sorry for those kids who never found out how exciting science can be.
(.)(.)
Today my hubby took some icky pond water into his classroom so his kids can look at the “Pond fleas” and then will add some coffee so they can see their metabolisms sky rocket!
(or something like that – I wasn’t paying attention very well) – but that sounds like fun! :-)
Here is an alternative view. I hated labs in high school, which was most of what chemistry class was. They were tedious, seemed pointless, and bored me to death. Admittedly, I never planned to be a scientist, but I was fascinated by science. Labs would be interesting to me if we had much chance of discovering something new, but obviously that is unlikely to happen in high school.
What worked for me were interesting lectures, especially when they covered things that were cutting edge science that you are never going to be able to do in a high school chemistry/biology lab.
To make an analogy, imagine if history class just consisted of having archeological digs in places where the best you are going to discover is artifacts from 50 years ago. Sure, you may learn some skills if you really want to be an archeologist, and you will certainly learn that archeology is a painstaking process, but I don’t see it getting many people interested in history in the way a good lecture on, say, the roman emporers might.
This past spring I volunteered at the local engineering society’s science night at a nearby school. It warmed my heart that hundreds of 7 to 12 year old kids came out (both M&F) to have an evening of hands on fun with everything from paper airplanes to pasta towers. There were no lectures on how it works or demonstrations from the adults, just a rough outline of what could be done with the materials and easily available folks to talk about what was going on with the “experiments” as they proceeded. Three hours of messy, screaming and sometimes ballistic fun ensued.
I took away from the night several observations:
1. Kids want to have fun with science, just like they want to have fun from sports. My observation is that most successful engineers, chemists, biologists enjoy their field of endeavor.
2. Many parents see it as a worthwhile effort to get the kids out after supper to enjoy science. And are willing to stand back while the kids go at it.
3. Kids and parents both enjoy meeting folks whose job is to work with science as a tool. It’s something that school guidance staff do not really provide except as a lecture or a “Let’s listen to Jimmy’s dad tell us about pharmacy” session.
But…. but… if you fail to get the exact textbook answer it means Big Science failed and so God must be true!
Ouch, my head hurts after trying to behave like a creotard. And Kimpatsu pointed out
to which I make the rejoinder “forget school boards, so far as I can see the entire educational ministry in UK seem to think that”
Let me add something that sort of goes along with more money.
Let students try experiments more than once.
Most experiments, in my experience, do not go right the first time. (Plugs don’t get plugged in. Water gets spilled. Dials get read wrong. All sorts of bad things happen.) The only thing most students learn in these get-’em-right-the-first-time labs is that the experiments are just a lot of crap.
If students had the opportunity to get more experience with experiments they might have more respect for labs.
Obviously there will not be discoveries that are new to science made as a result of scientific experiments done in schools, but the discoveries made can be new to the kids.
One way experiments could be made more interesting is to not tell the kids what the results should be. Let them carry out the experiment and work out their results. Then tell them what science says the results should be. If the results do not agree with what should be expected have them try and work out where errors may have been introduced.
It would be nice to have some scientific results about what pedagogical methods work best for what goals. I like science as much as the next non-scientist, but I didn’t really enjoy all those dissections I did in high school. They smelled bad and it was hard to make out what was what. Maybe figuring it out what good for me, but it didn’t spark any interest in me. I just put up with it. Nor did those distillations or titrations or checking samples in an IR spectrometer get me interested or excited about science. Those things didn’t do it for me and more of the same is probably not the answer.
Take another example to which many can relate. I teach history and philosophy of science at a small liberal arts college. It’s always a challenge to get students interested in philosophy, but I don’t think the answer is having them read original works of philosophy or to have them grapple with philosophical issues. You have to find issues that they care about.
So, maybe another dimension of improving science education, is finding science that students care about. Maybe things like forensic science. But, those who care about science should probably first and foremost want the issue explored scientifically.
You could also add “fear of litigation” to the list. Many schools have hamstrung chemistry classes in fear of being sued by over-protective parents who will call in the lawyers every time their precious little babies get a splinter.
If I’ve learned anything about real science from Mythbusters, it’s that safety is key, but sometimes you lose an eyebrow.
Oh now, that’s just crazy talk… [rolls eyes]
The best science teacher I ever saw in action did an enrichment program with 3d-4th graders. To start she gave each of them a tray of items, they almost looked random, but far from it. A c-cell and a light bulb were prominent, and the kids got the idea (from their “theory” of electricity) that somehow those items were related and they decided to try an make the light light. It took at least two other items, e.g., short length of wire (to short to reach the bottom of the c-cell on its own) and a paper clip.
Once they had lit their bulbs, she told them they had made a circuit. Opening and closing the circuit turned off and turned on the light. Where do we have circuits around our houses? The whole notion of light switches took on new meaning. They went on to observe what worked in their circuits (yarn and popsicle sticks didn’t)(coins and foil did) and examine conductors and non-conductors, and many other phenomena. It was brilliant, and the kids loved learning this way.
Of course the critical thing was that they made observations and manipulated things before anyone attached a label or defined anything. Having the cart in front of the horse is a major problem in science teaching in this country. Second, this woman really understood the basic concepts of science so she knew how to direct their learning effectively. Sorry but in my experience not one in a hundred elementary education teachers could do this. And so this tells you where the change has to begin.
#6 Lab exercises do seem to be less common. And where done are indeed even more canned than the ‘old days’ (how much so will depend on how old you are; then again, if you’re even older, however, the lab work would be new w.r.t. your ‘day’).
#9 Sometimes I’m a science fair judge. One of my favorite experiments was done by a kid who’d built himself a wind tunnel out of cardboard, a home fan, tape, etc. The airfoil’s lift and drag were measured in terms of standard paper clips. Why paper clips vs. a calibrated weight set? Because he could afford the clips, they were of a standard weight, and what he was doing was comparing relative effectiveness. Any standard measure would work, as long as he could get enough of them and they went light enough. Yay! He knew what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what the important aspects of the experimental design were. Much better science than the kids who showed up with satellite data they’d processed from NASA GSFC (summer student programs, and such), but didn’t know why it should be done that way rather than some other. Cardboard wind tunnel wasn’t as pretty as the glorious NASA pictures. But I would definitely want the former kid than one of the latter. Every so often one of the GSFC interns would also know what the project was up to, which was great to see. And sometimes the homebuilt apparatus was nonsense. But the cardboard wind tunnel probably totaled under $20. Having a fund for science projects like that would be an excellent thing, and not be a major school district budget item.
One important thing, often lost (and sometimes beaten out), is the fact that the key to science and doing science is a passion about finding stuff out. The business about reproducibility, formal approaches, etc. is a later and lesser matter. First, last, and most points in between is trying to figure out something about the universe. The rest about reproducibility, documentation, testing, etc., is dressing up the fundamental goal. It’s important dressing, since when you get to professional level you are trying to show the world this great new thing you’ve found out. And to make it stick, and be useful to others, you have to apply the dressings.
At the elementary through high school level, though, it is the finding things out idea that is far and away most important. Knowing something about what has already been found out helps, don’t get me wrong about that. A biologist friend found something interesting because she knew that bees weren’t known for digging through sand. So when she saw one do so, she knew she had a discovery. But memorizing big lists is nonsense, even if that’s what school ‘standards’ are written for. Get out and watch what bees do. Look at a bunch of plants and see how big they get, whether the size differs depending on shade/nearness to building/… Do some science.
If students came out of school knowing only these two things about science, I’d be happy:
1) The universe is a very interesting place
2) You can figure out how parts of it work.
If they’ve got these two, they’ll find out for themselves that some experimental methods are better than other, some kinds of theories aren’t good, that the boiling point of mercury is (whatever it is), that the Cretaceous ended 65 or so million years ago and how we know that, and so on.
One could build on the success of something like CSI, by pointing out how real-life forensic scientists never get the results as quickly as they do on the show, and, again unlike the show, how results can be ambiguous.
One technique my physics teacher used to teach us critical thinking skills was to get us to watch a science program such as horizon and then discuss whether the ideas presented were plausible and how we could tell if they were correct or not. When there was no suitable Horizon he sometimes picked a news story that had some relevance.
What ? Creationists don’t do experiments ? But what about John Clayton’s electric pickle, hmm ?
Sure, but we knew that such discoveries had already been made, and they could just TELL us in 2 minutes rather than waste our time fiddling around with test tubes for a couple hours.
Now, if we were trying to grow new rat hearts with stem cells, that would be interesting. But we weren’t.
When I was a senior in high school, I visited my sister in college (Auburn) and attended a “physics for non-science majors” class. This was 26 years ago and I still remember a ton from that fascinating one hour lecture. Chemistry class in high school? Not so much.
I guess different personality types learn differently.
Huh? This is exactly what we did when I took science in school. Has science education changed? Do courses no longer have an lab portion these days? Or are the lab exercises too “canned”?
I had a similar response. Back in the 1980s we did all sorts of stuff in the science classes, including trips out to local tide pools and other outdoor locations on interest. I saw my first squid in the wild stuck in a tide pool (the squid was stuck, not me).
I always liked hands on anything, so I took various shop courses as well (wood and metal… liked wood better). Which, of course, invariably led me to being an engineer sitting at a workstation for 20 years. Wait. Huh? Crap! What happened?!
That would certainly fix science education, but the whole public school system is a bit screwy. Especially homework. If you’re going to school for seven hours a day, why do you need to come home and do more work? And the homework never teaches you anything; it’s all review! Why should a high school student spend two hours a night doing bullshit assignments that don’t teach them anything? Doesn’t make sense to me.
I am reminded of two things:
1) One good experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions.
2) The definition of a “failed experiment” is NOT that got unexpected results, its when you don’t learn something from the experiment. Lay people have a huge misunderstanding in this regard to science.
You’ve got to have good demos and experiments to get science to stick. I’ve always been an experiement-oriented science nerd, and thus somewhat prone to causing spills/fireballs/etc in the lab, but I count on one hand how many times such things failed to interest my classmates and get them thinking. If nothing else, they were usually trying to figure out how not to do those things to themselves.
It also solidified my hypothesis that, when you see the geekier kids taking up positions behind the normals during an experiment, something cool (and likely dangerous) is about to happen, whether it is supposed to or not. This was best observed in my college physics course where the prof accidentally melted through the gas hose to his burner. He couldn’t figure out why his flame had dropped, while we attributed it to the four-foot jet of fire going strong behind him. Glad I sat in the back on that one.
Yeah, just imagine! That sounds freakin’ awesome!! If my history classes had been like that, maybe I’d be an archeologist or paleoanthropologist now. Mind you, I’m not unhappy about how I turned out, but what you described, meaning to show us a bad class, sounded to me like the Best. Class. Evar!! “‘To each his own,’ said the lady as she kissed the cow,” eh?
OT – SRRY —
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I recognize that it would be a poor substitute for the real thing, but is there a market here for some sort of virtual experimentation software? Perform the experiments in a virtual environment? Make it real enough that the student can make mistakes if they are careless?
Again, a shadow of the real thing, but it might be better than nothing. Put in some user preferences for graphical options (such as “turn off environment reflections on the glass test tubes and beakers”) and you could support even modest hardware.
If I was education tsar, I would put off most of the specific sciences until much later. Even in college I would do away with bio, physics and chemistry and just teach the methods of science and the great theories of the day (e.g., cell theory, QED, evolution). Have labs that practice critical thinking, observation and hypotheses genesis.
Not to mention the fact that this underscores the difference between science and faith. In science, you do not need to trust authority. You can test others’ results to see if they stand up to scrutiny. It could be a highly effective way of defusing the accusation that our “faith” and “belief” are of the same kind as religious faith and belief.
This article by John Aloysius Farrell, September 1, is rather silly, but he does close with rationality.
http://www.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Author/j/john_farrell/index.html
“5. Finally, can someone please tell me why (aside from rank political opportunism) bright, college-educated folks like Palin and McCain insist on putting Biblical mythology on an equal par with biology, physics, and astronomy? Evolution is science. Genesis is superstition. Casting a vote for the GOP ticket this year is endorsing ignorance.”
Not only do different people have different learning styles, but the business of getting science to happen requires variety. Some people are adept at experiments, while others are better at pushing symbols; the person in the lab who is the clearest communicator — the most proficient writer or lecturer — might not be the top-notch experimentalist or the best theorist.
As always, we come back to the fact that teachers have to be highly trained, much more so than they are now. A good science teacher has to be at least competent with all these skills, and moreover, they have to recognize how those skills manifest in their students. “All right, Alice, you did well in building the roller-coaster project. And Bobbie, your data analysis of your team’s speed measurements was very good. For the catapult project, why don’t you two work together?”
Working with something as stupendously complicated as the developing human mind requires flexibility, and you can’t be flexible when you only know how to do one thing.
“If they’re actually doing experiments, science class is not like home ec class, where you’re supposed to follow a recipe and get a perfect outcome every time.”
You mean you can’t experiment with ingredients? You have to FOLLOW the recipe?!
This is what happens when scientists try to cook…
What worked for me were interesting lectures, especially when they covered things that were cutting edge science that you are never going to be able to do in a high school chemistry/biology lab.
Well, now, that just lends support to my virtual lab idea. It could allow experiments that would be cost prohibitive even at the 99.9% tax rate that I think some fantasize about (I tease). Instead of demonstrating particle collisions with ping pong balls, you could fire up the virtual Large Hadron Collider. :)
I have forgotten almost everything about my science ed except the classes where we did experiments – like extracting eugenol from cloves.
That was fun!
I have forgotten almost everything about my science ed
At the end of the year in a Junior High science class, for fun, we had snail races. I painted little numbers and racing stripes on mine. :-) Mine took 1st *and* 2nd place because I was the only one to put a little water in their jar to keep them moist.
I released them back into the wild of my backyard again, and I was surprised to spot them (thanks to the bright paint colors) once in a while for over a year. I hadn’t known at the time how long they lived, so I was still learning things due to the Snail Prix.
One problem is that good science education is hard. I see this as part of the financial oversight for town government and from talking with science teachers.
The teachers dread advanced science (e.g. High School) because
1) The parents are crazy. Real science involves danger. It uses fire, hot things, cold things, potentially toxic things, smelly things, moving things, etc. This causes irrational fears beyond belief. Irrational parents leads to problems with administrators, legal, insurance, etc. (Chemistry also involves learning to make things that could go bang. Don’t say this too loudly or Homeland Security will close all chemistry labs.)
2) At that level the students are conceptualizing for the first time. This is hard for students and very time consuming for teachers. Parents typically hinder the process through a fanatical obsession on planning for careers and college without regard for learning.
3) This is when students start to learn the difference between observations, facts, and theory. The current reading of a thermometer is a observation. It is related to the “fact” of the current temperature, but subject to observation errors. Thermodynamics is a theory. These are all related but different. It’s a hard concept that is very rarely learned. For instance, on this blog there is near universal belief that evolution is a fact. It is not. It is a theory that explains the observations.
Parents who do not understand this fight with teachers that do. But many teachers do not understand this. Actual scientific understanding is quite rare in the elementary teaching community.
Very few teachers feel that the fight is worth the cost. It’s so much easier to use computers and videos where everything goes according to plan and the students can remain passive receptacles for imparted knowledge. That is the model that parents and administrators like, and it is something that any teacher can manage.
You don’t need religious crazies or “No Child” issues to have these problems. We get all these problems without any religious involvement and above average test results. Parents and social pressures are sufficient.
In my final year of my BSc my lab partner and I absolutely could not make the X-ray crystallography experiment work after umpteen tries… equipment failure, user error, bad luck, all of the above… it just wasn’t happening.
Faced with the possibility of turning in a blank lab report and getting a goose-egg on the report we started seeking creative solutions… and noticed that the film used was dental x-ray film.
So we marched off to the dentist (military college) and explained the problem and convinced him to allow us use of the dental x-ray machine. We x-rayed our teeth (about 5 pictures each) and submitted the results with a lab report that tried to explain these weird “crystals”.
We were given 100% with a note that if you’re willing to irradiate yourself for the marks you win… but don’t do it again :)
FCATS. The entire Florida school system is based on teaching to the test. The FCATS are the focus of the entire school year, events are organized around them, etc.
Disgusting.
I was, until recently, part of a Physics Education Research group (PERG). We were studying how using a more hands-on approach in the labs and recitation sessions would work. The idea being that if students were thinking and doing things themselves, it would help them learn.
Unfortunately, the majority of these students were already used to the “rote memorization” approach to physics, and I’m afraid only few of them really got out of it what they could. (Meanwhile, I had had the “recipe-style” labs and would have loved to do some real honest experimentation on my own when I was in intro physics.)
The problem was obvious to me. To a large degree, they just didn’t want to think. It was more of “occupational therapy” than actual science. If only they’d have been used to DOING stuff and thinking about it from earlier on, maybe they would have understood the importance of actually trying something for themselves instead of just skipping straight to the bottom line answer.
“To make an analogy, imagine if history class just consisted of having archeological digs in places where the best you are going to discover is artifacts from 50 years ago. Sure, you may learn some skills if you really want to be an archeologist, and you will certainly learn that archeology is a painstaking process, but I don’t see it getting many people interested in history in the way a good lecture on, say, the roman emporers might.”
One day in the dirt path area underneath the BART tracks in West Oakland, I spotted a little piece of concrete in the dirt that looked odd.
I dug it out, and it had a few letters and numbers on it that after cleaning I recognized as a patent number.
I hopped on the next BART train into San Francisco and went into the Patent Depository section of the library. I looked up the patent, which took a little work because not all of the numbers were there, but part of the name and date were.
I found it finally, it was for a cast-iron sidewalk fixture – one of those old things you used to see with the purplish glass in them, that let a little bit of light get into the dingy basements under the sidewalks of old strofront and office buildings.
I wrote down the name of the foundry and looked them up in the city directories.
Long story shorter, I spent the day exploring and by the end of the day I had learned about the cast iron industry that had served the bay area (a subject which fascinates me), and I had learned about the character of the neighborhood where the overhead BART tracks are, a character totally different and unimaginable just looking at the area today.
I was time-traveling, and all in my spare time because I have a habit of looking at the details of places around me and spotting little things.
You CAN do interesting and engaging things with students doing digs in any city… you just have to know how to guide them into finding out what the artifacts they find MEAN… discovering the world that was your city in 1930 can be as exciting as discovering 1100.
The Myth Busters paint Mona Lisa.
rjh wrote “For instance, on this blog there is near universal belief that evolution is a fact. It is not. It is a theory that explains the observations.”
Well, yes and no. Evolutionary theory is a theory that explains observations, makes predictions, and so on. But there is also evolution the process (what the theory is attempting to describe), and using standard assumptions about what a fact is, there is an actual evolutionary process (e.g., that population of bacteria changes over time). That process of change in a population (whether by drift, natural selection, etc.) is a fact, as much as anything is. (Or if you like, you can say: it is a fact that evolution has occurred, and is still occurring.)
So I don’t think people here are as confused as you think. It is no more odd to say that evolution is a fact than it is to say that “electrons exist and have such and such properties” is a fact.
Oh, and that was over ten years ago, and I still have that little finger-sized piece of concrete as a reminder.
I do not agree with you here.
Evolution is a term than covers many things.
In biology it is used to refer to the theory of evolution. It also refers to the fact that species change over time. If we were to be really pedantic we should probably refer to the fact of evolution as “evolution” and the theory behind it as “the theory of evolution”. However referring to “The theory of evolution” all the time is rather cumbersome.
Steven Gould wrote rather a good essay on the subject.
Has science education changed? Do courses no longer have an lab portion these days?
I honestly don’t remember doing much in the way of experimentation in school at all – in the seventh grade, we dissected a squid (purchased from the seafood counter by the instructor – it wasn’t on the curriculum) and a frog (on the curriculum, but we had to do it with scissors because most of the class wasn’t trusted with a scalpel), and in the ninth, I seem to recall that a balloon may have been set on fire. And that’s it. I will admit that I was on a home schooling program most of my last years, but it was managed through the system and I assume that if there had been lab work, I would have been told to come in as I occasionally was for other classes. (My anatomy teacher apparently did want me to come in to dissect a fetal pig, but couldn’t reach me that day.)
I didn’t meet the math requirements for any of the other science classes (like chemistry), but I really don’t recall coming across anything that would suggest lab work or experiments were going on in that school. The fact that we had to cut up frogs with children’s scissors is very telling, to me…
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a student at the University of Colorado, and in our ITLL (Integrated Teaching and Learning Lab), we have a quote painted all over the place that seems fitting:
I hear, I forget
I see, I remember
I do, I understand
I thought Batman was the most easily recognized scientist in the country?
Maybe this is just a Texas phenomenon, but all through jr. high and high school (6th throuh 12th grade in the mid 1980s), I never had a science teacher whose name wasn’t “COACH Something”. Same with history. It was always like science and history were just “afterthought” classes, so they foisted them off onto the people who had the most free time during the day, regardless of qualification.
I did have one coach/teacher who actually enjoyed teaching history, and so his class was great. But apart from him, my entire public school history education consisted of nothing more than names and dates, and science was even worse. Any time the teacher could find something suitable for memorization (note: memorizing the periodic table solely for the sake of having something to memorize is an excellent way to kill a 14 year-old’s interest in science), that’s what we did. It’s almost like my teachers worked really hard to make it as dry an uninteresting as possible. The textbooks were always old as hell, and in the rare instance that there was actual hands-on stuff to be done, there was only enough equipment for 2 or 3 kids in the class to actually do it.
You can rest assured that the athletics dept. (read: football team) wanted for nothing, however.
Adam’s a really smart guy and does a great job informing people about science with his show.
Glad to see him publish an article on science education, because he’s got alot of knowledge to share.
Also, he lives right near where I grew up, and he’s personally a really good guy.
A long time ago a standard experiment in high school general science class was the making of oxygen. I was in Latin class when there was a terrible explosion in the science lab next door. Something had gone terribly wrong and a student (one of the best and brightest who knew he wanted to be a doctor since he was little), lost his eyes as a result. That experiment was never allowed to be performed again. The young man did eventually distinguish himself as an attorney and the world probably lost a fine surgeon.
So I guess I understand parental paranoia, but in this case, carelessness caused the blindness, as the student was not wearing protective goggles. I guess my point is that experimentation can be done successfully (a) under the right conditions, and (b) when the teacher is properly qualified (as they so often aren’t). I taught science for two years to middle schoolers (as an English major I certainly wasn’t qualified), and did perform some basic experiments, but I never allowed a student near the bunsen burner or the reagents. Still, some students became interested in science. I held a science fair in June, announced at the beginning of the school year. There were no rules, just follow your nose and turn something in at the end of the year. Oh, there were the usual deadbeats who did nothing at all (and who failed for not even trying), but there were some impressive attempts. Two 7th grade girls, knew where there was a corpse of a dead dog buried. They dug it up, bleached each bone separately and lacquered and reassembled the skeleton and presented it on a hanging mount. They said the work was pretty disgusting but with the help of anatomy books, they produced something they could be proud of. I often wondered if either of them went onto pathology.
You know, I’ve only been out of high school (I think it’s called high school in the US…the thing before University? I went there from ages 11-18…I managed to have to repeat my LAST year) for 3 years, and I don’t remember a lot of what I supposedly learned in chemistry or physics, and slightly more of math – but that’s probably because I still have to use that math in university now.
What I DO remember very clearly from my science classes however, is what is called the ‘scientific method’ – how to properly conduct an experiment. Well, I still have to use that too, of course. But I think I wouldn’t have forgotten even if I didn’t.
I think it’s very important to know. Often, when I’m reading about the results of some kind of ‘research’ in the papers, or hearing it on the news, I’m very skeptical. I often find that the quality of the ‘experiments’ that underly this research is questionable at best, and often just plain bad.
(I’ll admit to being less skeptical when the results are what I’d expected them to be…I could never be wrong ;) )
Oh, and people here are all going ‘US science ed needs change!’ Well, from what I’m hearing, yes, it certainly does. But, don’t go overboard. Here, in the Netherlands, education as a whole has gone through far too many changes in far too little time. And now our education is just crap. (But still better than yours ;P) So, if you make changes, give them some time to take effect, don’t make MORE changes when there’s no results in the first 2 years or so.(Which is what happened here)
science class is not like home ec class, where you’re supposed to follow a recipe and get a perfect outcome every time.
I wish my old undergrad Ochem lab instructor would have taken that to heart.
I kept trying to impress upon her the educational value of tracking down sources of contamination…
so many botched experiments, so little time.
:p
In final year of secondary school in New Zealand for biology we went away for a whole week. We stayed in a surf life saving building (it was off season) at the mouth of a river. There was the estuary, a sandbar beach going from bare sand to marram grass to scrub and a rocky headland with lots of rockpools. We spent the week learning how to do quadrats and transcepts and how to measure the stuff we found and then in the evenings we did the stats to show not just differences along the line but between line and line and from year to year (they went there every year so had records for more than a decade). We lived in dorms type rooms with bunks (sexes separate of course) and cooked our own meals and cleaned the place etc, etc.
When I got to university I not never did another transcept (didn’t do that sort of biology) but it was good to know about t-tests and Chi squares and how and when to apply them. Also to know that you could do it.
Darn site better than 2nd year Biochem at University, spend two hours doing poorly explained cookery then have no idea why you have negative extinctions. In physiology we got to string the still beating hearts of pithed toads up to strain guages and wrap electrodes around them and drip acetycholine on them and everything! Guess which subject my degrees are in?
I think it’s a little charitable to call Savage a scientist. Mythbusters, while providing a good example of empiricism, does not teach good science with its continual “proofs” and “disproofs” of things based on the results of one ad-hoc experiment.
He’s more of a glorified engineer.
My Middle and High Schools always did hands on experiments in science class. The fact that there are schools that don’t seems odd to me, but it helps me understand why there are so many Creationists in our country.
There’s a church by me that uses the Mythbusters logo for some Bible study nonsense. They even have the pastors dressed up as Adam and Jamie on the sign outside. Topics include “MythBusters: Does God Want You Happy?”
If the Mythbusters were dead, they’d be rolling in their graves. Makes me want to smack ’em.
Mythbusters is unscientific?
Hadn’t really thought about it for 25 years but…
My middle school (6-8 grades) science classes were “experimental” where we did actual experiments involving Bunson burners and beakers and whatnot. In high school (9-12) all our science was “theoretical” (i.e.: district was too cheap to provide us anything but blackboard, chalk and erasers).
#6 & #7 –
I went through junior high and high school in the second half of the 1980’s, and beyond a few dissections and the required science fair project each year, I don’t remember doing anything I would call an actual hands-on experiment until 11th grade chemistry and physics. And that was at a state residential high school for kids “gifted” in science and math…I suspect the lack of hands-on instruction would have continued had I stayed at my regular home public high school and taken chemistry and physics there.
Until someone funds an alpha particle beam selector and a position sensitive detector for my gen chem students, I will have to continue to teach them about the structure of the atom in the old fashioned way: show them the clip of Venus Flytrap from WKRP in Cincinatti.
Boy, really going out on a limb there!!
More hands on stuff and more money. Imaginative.
Here’s an idea for starters,…how bout let’s all start from the begining and agree on what the scientific method is?
Sounds silly?
Grab any three science textbooks that describe the scientific method, two might be pretty close, but none will completely agree. Some will be linear, some will involve returning to steps, etc.
My biggest complaint to the textbook authors is that they continually list parts of an experiment as if they are seperate from and on the level of an experiment. Like hypothesis, data collection/analysis and conclusion.
And another problem involves the number of texts that say the scientific method begins with a problem. This is simply noy true and extremely limits science’s scope. Science involves the investigation of disinterested wonder every bit as much as it involves making products.
So anyway, it’s tough to have students appreciate what connects their science classes amid so many unclear, inaccurate and incorrect formulations of its basic principles.
My humble suggestion is this
Observe, Question, Experiment (Hypothesis, Data collection, Data analysis, Conclusions), Theory
The least we could do for the kids is to get something short and sweet and stick to it, like the above idea.
The least we could do for the neo-know-nothings is to clarify a bit exactly what they are on such a harumph about. I bet many would be suprised to find out just how unobjectionable the scientific method was, if we somehow found a way for the idea to actually get some legs.
From the point of view of this retired science teacher, Adam has it right. I’d like to add that real science education needs to start as early as possible. Most schools are the reverse of Rob’s experience #70.
This past June and July I tried contacting my now long retired 1st year Geology prof…. he was out in the field getting his 13 year old grandson interested in the rocks!
When he finally got back home last week and called me, he asked when was the last time I had taken “my kids” out into the field…..
I could proudly say 2 months ago – all 35 of them (I’m also a Scout leader) at the annual Prospectors Camp I help run. Boy, did they get dirty…. but they all found lots of different minerals (one even found a small bit of gold), found and observed lots of wildlife and learnt more and remember more about nature in one weekend than they had the previous couple years in school!
If we want them to learn life skills and science, we have to let them get dirty and have fun along the way.
I think that the problem may be that our children are not being taught to read, therefore getting their hands dirty isn’t the issue. They memorize because they regurgitate for the test and don’t process the infomation. If kids learn to read then they will figure out hoe to get their hands dirty and learn things. I know – I raised 2 great kids that know how to read and are both amazing in their ability to grasp new concepts. After all, isn’t reading the ultimate science?
I enjoyed science at school, and I was good at it (at least in the sense that I understood what they were talking about and scored very well in the tests).
But for me the experiments were usually a waste of time. It was rarely explained clearly enough for me why precisely we were doing the experiment we were doing the way that we were doing it and not some other way.
[One experiment I learned the most from was measuring the same effect more than one way. That taught me a lot about experimentation.]
Worse still, unless they were so simple as to be useless, the experiments often went wrong… and there was no second attempt. On Mythbusters, they often get it wrong over and over, until they learn what they’re doing – and they generally *know* what they’re doing and why. We never got that chance. I think there needs to be time to get stuff wrong.
I learned more from “assisted demonstrations” – where the teacher set up an experiment that we gathered around and participated in setting up and running. Sometimes we then did some additional work in smaller groups, which tended to go better than experiments generally did.
I think you’re mistaken. I hear a lot of whinging about how teh kidz are not learning to read and write because of teh intertoobz… but guess what? Between Facebook and IM and texting on their phones, pretty much all they do is read and write. If my daughter’s friends are any gauge, teens these days spend way less time watching TV than we did when I was a teen (despite having way more TV to choose from), and way more time reading and writing. I know for sure my daughter is incredibly better read — in terms of “real” literature, popular books, and general news — than I was at her age (Hell, she’s better read than I am now, I fear).
Of course, my daughter and most of her friends are honors students… but then, so was I, and so were most of my friends, so it’s at least arguably apples-to-apples. Kid’s may not be reading in the same way, but I think it’s a mistake to assume they’re reading less. And BTW, I don’t think surveys on youth reading are taking into account all the nontraditional text they’re processing. This is a generational thing, similar to the fact that polling has caught up with the growing segment of the population that doesn’t use land-line phones.
Not for nothin’, but try telling Scholastic Books or Jo Rowling that kids don’t read.
That was quite decent, I agree with him that people need hands-on experience. I remember when I was at high school, people always seemed more engaged when it was about applying knowledge rather than simply learning facts.
It amazes me that science funding isn’t a priority in schools. Behind English, there is no greater tool to learn; and certainly none more practical. I’d say that in the latter years of high school where English becomes about critical analysis of texts (at least in Aussieland), science becomes a far more valuable tool.
Arrrgh!!! I don’t know whether to bite off my offending fingers or gouge out my eyes. Maybe both… hmmm, gotta’ be careful about the order… [sigh]
Does my Myers here know what science?
Students are useless in doing science. Memorizing factsa or experiments, like kids on the david Letterman show, is not doing science.
Science is a actual process with a purpose and a conclusion. In fact science only takes place where something new needs to be settled.
Children or degrees on the wall is not science.
Therefore the way to interest people in science is to interest them in the achievment that comes from successful science. To desire to discover and be rewarded. To understand the more complicated details of how things work in the universe. A worthy thing to achieve and therefore a reward. I notice science folk like the Noble (sp) prize as much as the actual discovery/achievment. Fine and so push that human motivation.
However first the censorship and absurd state rejection of origins based on God and Genesis must come to a end.
This V.P nominee is a step forward. It quickly credits the political agenda to bring creationism into American schools.
The censorship of creationism at the least reduces margins of the population in interest in science. At the most it smothers students innate leanings to free thought.
I’m sure allowing the search for truth in origin subjects would increase amongst sections of the population more interest and worthiness of science as a career.
So teaching a completely unscientific worldview that flies in the face of all known facts about the world is a way to strengthen insterest in science? Pull the other one, I hear it plays jingle bells.
Absolutely! Learning by doing is so necessary in science and practical/lab components are too often neglected in K-12 especially now with so much emphasis on passing standardized tests.
I also agree with the idea of allowing more leeway for mistakes in science classes as it can create more lessons on the scientific method itself and learning the ability to go back and figure out what you did wrong and even on how a “mistake” can sometimes result in a practical new application. One cool way I envision classroom methods such as this being implemented is having an initial group of students design an experiment using gained knowledge (and teacher input in some cases, especially when dealing with chemicals) and then having other groups use their methodology to try to replicate it. Lesson in peer review!
Most kids are fascinated with science in their early years and I think that if science continues to be about exploration and is made to be relevant and exciting and fun (without being patronizing) throughout their schooling, more will look to careers in science. At the very least more kids will understand and remember what they learn, which, considering the attitudes and misunderstandings of too many people today, is the most important thing IMO.
Yeah, as a science teacher, I work hard to keep inquiry in the classroom where standardized testing is pushed on us.
I am ecstatic that I teach an 8th grade Jurassic Park elective class where I reference evolution every day…and its the most overpacked elective classes in school.
I really don’t get how teaching something so anti-science in the science classroom would actually help get people to think about science. Maybe one of the reasons why science is progressing so well in the rest of the world is that we don’t have to worry about the creation / evolution controversy.
I really couldn’t think of a worse way to get people into doing science than teaching them not-science as science. It may help people enrolling into the course, but you are training a bunch of people to be idiots. If we took creationism into the classroom, then we’d have to take astrology, and palmistry, and everything else pseudoscience and mythology. There is NOTHING scientific about Genesis, and the question of God is beyond science as there’s no empirical way to test the supernatural. Bringing them into the science classroom destroys science and allows superstition and myth to rule. That won’t help America’s standing, it’ll only serve to allow real scientists to make practical advances elsewhere in the world.
There’s a reason why the US falls so low on education standards globally, and it’s not because they are teaching Genesis elsewhere…
#66:
Indeed, much of Mythbusters is engineering rather than science. Is that bad? The same is true of the LHC (a marvel of every kind of engineering). Indeed, most modern science depends on engineering at some stage, whether for apparatus or in using computers for analysis of results. Science, engineering and mathematics are partners in knowledge generation and discovery. Engineers are not some lower life form that don’t amount to scientists even when “glorified” and slagging us off while using a computer is as hypocritical and stupid as the creotards taking vancomycin for their MRSA infection while rejecting evolution.
Less of the engineer-bashing, please: we’re on the same side… yeah, it’s my concern-troll issue :o)
Bad analogy – historians are not archaeologists. Historians dig in documents, archaeologists dig in the ground.
To Quiet Desperation – such things do exist, and I recall using them in high school chemistry classes (It might have been something like this: http://modelscience.com/products.html?ref=home&link=chemlab – those screenshots look somewhat familiar).
“Between Facebook and IM and texting on their phones, pretty much all they do is read and write.”
Well, I’ll agree with you on the reading, I guess, but on the writing side, they may be producing a lot of written communication, but from what I’ve seen the *quality* of most of it is *horrendous*. I’m not saying that text messages should be written like academic research papers, I’m saying they don’t seem to know that more formal writing *shouldn’t* be written like text messages.
Don’t trust Popular Mechanics. And where the hell is my flying car?
Oh, and that’s how the Towers collapsed?
Educated voters tend to vote Democratic. Ergo, Republicans must destroy higher education to stay in power, and to provide gullible consumers for their business pals.
I always hated experiments but I knew a lot of science that others didn’t. Why bother with experiments if that’s not my cup of tea? I say better if I reserve experiments for college since there’s a lot to learn before then.
Because I have a different opinion.
Here’s a different idea: force students to learn stuff that the rest of the class doesn’t know — pop sci reading or periodicals — relevant to the currently studied topic. If you had good students then they could chime in with some other points of view.