Scientists Should Become Active In Education

Date: May 11, 1998 Author: C. Subah Packer and Nancy J. Pelaez Current pressure on science teachers may have little to do with science as an endeavor. Science curricula have become many isolated small topics with low demands. According to A Splintered Vision: An Investigation of U.S. Science and Mathematics Education (W.H. Schmidt et al., eds., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), the average United States science textbook at the eighth-grade level discusses between 50 and 65 topics, compared with seven topics in Germany and five to 15 in Japan. Teachers often choose to cover the entire textbook because it is easier to follow the activities and schedules marketed with the text than to write a uniquely tailored education program. One popular high school biology textbook (K.R. Miller, J. Levine, eds., Biology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1993) has 1,077 pages in 49 chapters with about as much vocabulary as a foreign language class. There is little time for meaningful problems that motivate, make science intriguing, and provide a glimpse of the "big picture." Indianapolis Public School (IPS), like many urban school districts, is scrutinized by the media. IPS teachers feel political pressure to keep all students in class, whether or not they want to learn. A statewide competency-exam requirement for students to graduate from high school in Indiana means that science teachers are teaching more reading, writing, and arithmetic and there is less time for science. One solution in Indiana, the Purdue University Instrument Project, provides high-tech equipment to classrooms so that students can work on real-life science problems. The National Science Foundation initially funded the program. However, the NSF grant expires in August. Committing for the long haul is crucial. Typically, federal fund availability changes like the breeze, and teachers can become disheartened each time school goals change with each new grant. Teaching programs that depend on having access to grant-funded equipment suffer when funding is discontinued. Young teachers may get excited about new grant-funded projects, but older teachers wonder whether it is worth the time and effort when their experience has been that each program is cut off whenever the grant expires. The public needs to be aware of the value of these programs, and scientists must help lobby for support. Teachers have supported two recent science education reform efforts. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), while the National Research Council (NRC) issued the National Science Education Standards (NRC, Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1996). Some states revised their science curriculum guidelines based on these documents, but school districts cutting administrative positions have not always kept pace. Coping with the bewildering differences between national and state standards is hard enough, but teachers face another problem when local standards conflict with state or national standards. Scientists can help teachers choose from among these conflicting guidelines on behalf of their students. First, scientists must become familiar with Benchmarks and Standards. Scientists might help identify priority goals and offer to act as a resource. Teachers need the scientists' seal of approval on goals in Benchmarks, such as one that states that "students should be actively engaged in learning to view the world scientifically, asking questions and seeking answers, making qualitative observations, organizing collections and observations, discussing findings. When students observe differences in the way things behave or get different results from repeated investigations, they should suspect something differs from trial to trial and try to find out what." Interestingly, Kevin Beardmore, science coordinator for the Indiana Department of Education, is unaware of any state that has provided either guideline to all teachers or all schools. Some 2,500 copies distributed in Indiana have reached 10 percent of the teachers. The key, according to Beardmore, is to train teachers to use the guidelines. In 1993, we were paired in the American Physiological Society (APS) Science Teacher Summer Research Program. Funding was provided for high school teachers to spend one summer doing research with host scientists in basic medical science laboratories. The program led to a long-lasting teacher-scientist relationship that opened a number of doors. The teacher became more of a scientist and the scientist became more of a teacher, with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship to support the teacher's scientific endeavors, and the formation of an Indiana University School of Medicine Frontiers in Physiology Local Outreach Team (LOT) supported by APS, NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and Indiana University School of Medicine. The LOT grant funds the outreach program for one year, but connections will be maintained indefinitely. Many outreach activities require little funding. For example, E-mail networking, laboratory tours, and guest scientists in the classrooms require only time and interest. Of course, government or private funding can enhance outreach efforts by supplying equipment and instructional media for motivational classroom activities. For science teachers, the pressure is to make students "successful" with little effort. However, answers made easily available remove the joy of scientific inquiry. According to the late Lewis Thomas, "The normal [science] attitude is a disquieting sense of being wrong. The work is open-ended, the results uncertain, and decisions are 'curiosity-driven.'" Scientists thrive on uncertainty and problem-solving. How will we attract the scientists of the future? Will the next voting generation of nonscientists appreciate science and fund scientific endeavors? Outreach efforts are becoming an important approach in supporting teachers in conveying the joy of "Ah-ha!" discovery to students of today. C. Subah Packer (right, in photo above) is an assistant professor, and Nancy J. Pelaez is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow, both in the department of physiology and biophysics at Indiana University School of Medicine.

Scientists Should Become Active In Education

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