Apr 25 2008
The Quality of Science Education
Yesterday I discussed the proposed Florida “Academic Freedom” law, one aspect of which is to specifically protect the inclusion of criticisms and competing theories to evolution. I pointed out that no such law is required – good science education can and should already include legitimate criticisms of any theory. It is entirely a fiction of ID/creationists that evolutionary theory is a dogma protected from such criticism.
In response to this post several commenters pointed out that their experience in high-school science class did not include much discussion of competing theories. For example, Blair T wrote:
My recollection of high school biology class was it was mostly rote learning with lots of memorization. The idea that students are discussing or debating competing theories at that level seems a bit unlikely, since they have no fundamental knowledge to ground such a debate.
Blair is unfortunately correct in that this is all too commonly the experience. My own experience was mixed. I do remember some mindless memorization in biology class regarding evolution, and certainly almost everything I have learned about evolution I learned on my own outside the classroom or in undergraduate school.
But this is not a problem of academic freedom – it is a problem of the quality of science education. Ironically, the creationism movement has consistently eroded the quality of science education with regard to the teaching of evolution. Perhaps we can use the recent controversy regarding evolution and ID/creationism in the public schools to focus attention on the real issue – the quality of science education.
Before I describe what I think is wrong with science education in the US today, let me say that there are many excellent science teachers out there. I have heard from many of them, who have a genuine passion for science and take it upon themselves (regardless of what materials are provided for them) to provide a quality education to their students. I have also lectured to science teachers and have found many of them to have a good understanding of the need for critical thinking and to teach their students how to think about science. But I have also seen science teachers who don’t have a clue. As with any career or profession – there is a spectrum of individual quality.
While I think we should demand much from our teachers, we need to provide for them a better infrastructure so as to raise the quality of education across the board. One aspect of that is the textbook industry. I previously interviewed Bill Bennetta of the Textbook League, who has a sorry tale to tell about the state of science textbooks in this country. The best thing science teachers could say in their defense is that they do not use the terrible science textbooks supplied to them. The primary problem with the textbook industry is that they cater to the large states, such as Texas and Florida – two states among the most affected by the creationist movement. This aside, there is simply a fatal problem of quality control in science textbooks.
I think the solution to this is to create an open source wiki style science textbook on the web free for anyone to access. I would love to spearhead such a project – but I would be happy if anyone can do this. The world’s best scientists and science educators could then collaborate to create a full curriculum of science education, bypassing the insanity of the textbook industry, and focus on quality and keeping up to date with the latest science. This will happen eventually, I hope sooner than later.
The other core problem with science education is simply one of approach. Again – individual teachers may get this right, but there is no consistency. Science education focuses too much of feeding students pre-digested facts they are to memorize. We should be teaching students not only the findings of science but the process of science. Most students get through high school without having a clue about what constitutes the core of scientific methodology, or how to tell real science from pseudoscience.
Over the last couple of decades the education culture has offered up as their solution to the “rote memorization” problem hands on experimentation. Unfortunately, they completely blew it. What students are made to do is follow along with experiments cook-book style. This teaches them nothing – it is little more than a distraction. Correction – it doesn’t teach them nothing, it teaches them the wrong thing. It leaves students with the notion that if you are measuring stuff and writing it down you are doing science. It therefore prepares them, if anything, to accept pseudoscience – because they are being taught that the trappings of science make science. But the pre-determined “experiments” they are made to do are not teaching them that real science involves hypothesis testing.
I think the entire science curriculum from K-12 has to be torn down and remade. Let me give an analogy from my medical experience. I teach medical students at all levels, as well as residents and fellows who are continuing their training after medical school. In the first two years of medical school students learn all the basic facts of physiology, anatomy, pharmacology, etc. In their third year they then begin their clinical rotations. When I teach third-year medical students – sometimes in their first clinical experience – I tell them that now they have to relearn everything they thought they had learned in their first two years of medical school. They have to reorganize all their medical knowledge to make it clinically relevant – relevant to what doctors actually do in practice. Their first two years did not actually teach them any medicine, it just prepared them so that they could begin to learn medicine.
The same should be true of science education in general. In the early years – grade school – children need to be taught the basics of how the world works, as well as some basic skills required for scientific thinking. For example, they should learn about categorization and naming. They should also be taught that it is good to question, that nothing is certain, and they should be exposed to thinking about how we know what we know. As science education progresses they should learn more logic and critical thinking, more about scientific methodologies, and even epistemology and the philosophy of science. High school level science classes should organize knowledge to maximize scientific and critical thinking. One good way to do this is to teach science in the context of the history of science – how were concepts discovered over historical time. Ideally students can be challenged to actually reproduce the pathway of discovery taken historically by scientists.
Hands- on experimentation should be real, meaning that students should have real unknowns and should go through the process of figuring out how to ask a scientific question – one that can be tested – then designing a test and carrying it out. When students ask questions, teachers should constantly reflect back on them – “how do we know?” and “how can we test that?”
Imagine if we had a society of critically thinking scientifically literate citizens. Let’s make it happen. Increasingly, we cannot afford not to.
34 Responses to “The Quality of Science Education”
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I graduated high school not too long ago, and had the good fortune of learning from some truly exceptional teachers. But the amount of material covered in classes nowadays (especially AP classes), makes it extraordinarily difficult to find time to learn about how we know what we know. I didn’t really understand that until I started listening to the SGU.
How do we balance the need for critical thinking so crucial to science against the ever-increasing volume of information generated by science?
There/their/they’re* is much discussion of science education on the blogs I read. I think that there/their/they’re* could be some discussion of the obvious lack of English language education, too.
*Although the proper choice of one of these three words should be completely automatic, many people seem satisfied to choose one at random.
Dr. Novella is dead on.
My own experience in high school (1969-1973) was hopelessly shanked by too many of those new agey young teachers of the era, fuzzed out in shades of postmodernism and relativism. It didn’t help that slackers like me were permitted to pretty much avoid tough sounding courses – and none sounded tougher than the science courses.
Dr. Novella’s online wiki-style science encyclopedia is an excellent idea. In lieu of that, and in the face of pretty lame public school science curriculi for my kids as they came through the system, I did take it upon myself to ‘home school’ critical thinking and scientific methodology, albeit on a basic level – but the basics are huge in import. #1 child is now a techie, #2 is a teacher, and #3, just 14, has enrolled in the science career track for high school next fall and wants to become a zoologist. I wish more parents would teach and support science in the home.
Great post, sir.
I completely agree with everything said here.
Maybe another factor, I think, that effects the quality of science education is the fact that it’s human nature to take the path of least resistance. To operate at the minimal energy state. Do the experiments stated in the book. Write some stuff down. Get it over with. C+. Good enough. You pass.
I’m speaking more of pre-college education. At the college level there is a bit more rigor in standards and expectations. From elementary through high school though, in my experience, the education system is treated more as a fast food service than as an institution designed to cultivate curious minds. Get all of our nation’s children in and out, as smoothly and quickly with as little struggle as possible. And we’ve become very efficient at this.
I think in this type of environment, it’s up to the kids to really have a desire to learn about science. Without that desire to really push forward, they will simply get swept through the educational system with grades that are “good enough,” while completely lacking in the critical thinking skills so desperately needed in this world.
I’d never appreciated science until after I’d left the public school arena. Maybe it was the particular schools I went to. But, judging from the state of America’s scientific literacy, I don’t see how it could be possible that every other school in America is completely different from my experience. (Arguing from personal incredulity?)
But then the problem becomes a struggle against human nature. And that’s another story altogether.
Sadly, it’s not just science education that has this problem. I’m taking a British History class this semester (darn gen ed requirements!) and recently spoke with my professor about the high school education issue. She bemoaned the enormous disconnect between how history is taught in public school and how it is taught in college. And it’s exactly the same thing – in high school, for the most part it’s about memorizing exact dates, dry historic facts, and learning directly from a text book. Taking a college history course is like hitting a wall, almost. Suddenly it’s no longer about memorizing… it’s about looking at the various causes behind events, and about understanding and critically thinking about source materials. (I was actually very shocked just how much critical thinking comes in with a good history course.)
So I’m thinking it’s more a general educational malaise that pervades public schools. Part of it might be a funding issue – it’s not like most public schools have the funds to go beyond a single text book. But the real question is why there’s an emphasis on just memorizing information rather than critical thinking and problem solving. Maybe with large class sizes, it’s simply easier to teach that way? I think that’s why we’re losing a lot of smart kids before they make it to college, generally. School as a whole isn’t intellectually engaging when it boils down to an exercise in memorization.
You mentioned elementary education… I’m not sure if you’ve seen just how scary the situation is. No Child Left Behind has really screwed up elementary education in some places. For the most part, it really effects the poor (Title I) schools that are so desperate for Federal funding. So basically, since all funding depends on is reading and mathematics, that’s all the children get taught. I have a friend that works in a poor school, and she’s been very distressed by the fact that she doesn’t get to teach the kids science, because they have to worry so much about getting good test scores out of children that are already severely academically disadvantaged because of their home environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s working out that way in a lot of underfunded schools across the country, and if there’s a lack in the elementary science education, the high school teachers are going to have their work cut out for them…
Stephen,
This is an excellent post on an important topic. Given that many science teachers apparently already direct their students to what they consider to be superior resources online, it’s encouraging to see the concept being moved forward. I suspect the one limiting factor to widespread adoption would be the continued emphasis on the job performance of educators rather than benefits for students, and the effort would be met with usual refrain of “how do we test for critical thinking?”
As a 40-something with no kids, my frame of reference is limited to my own experiences, and about all I can think of that wasn’t rote learning had to do with trying to deduce the contents of a box without opening it (I’m not kidding, that’s the best I can come up with). The sense I get from you and some of the other posters is that the situation hasn’t much changed in the intervening decades. As a biologist, my primary interests are in science education, but it seems safe to presume that the case is much the same in other realms. Is this accurate? Do we still teach history and government courses that are at best designed to cultivate only the most provincial perspectives, and at worst, tacitly encourage xenophobia? If this is the case, how then could we integrate the social, cultural, and historical disciplines into the broader context that is proposed for the sciences, which as the path of critical thinking shows us, is ultimately intertwined with them all?
fontinalis
Coincidentally, someone sent me this link this morning which fits in well with your open-source science high-school textbook suggestions;
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/index.htm
A wiki is an excellent idea from a technical standpoint. However, care must be taken to ensure “quality control.” Cruft builds up, trolls have to be beaten down, good articles can die the death of a thousand cuts, etc. (Consider the Wikipedia article on Calvin and Hobbes: everybody has to mention his own favorite strip, never mind any notion of overall organization or flow.) When your project runs on volunteer effort, everybody contributes in their spare time and writes what they feel most like writing that day. The stuff which has to get written but doesn’t excite anybody that much — definitions of basic terms, and such — suffers in neglect.
An approach I have considered, but not tried, is the old “gun to the head” idea. Once the infrastructure is all set up and the basic website policies have been established, the project managers declare, “In a year, we will have a product we’ll be proud to put on a DVD or publish in a book.”
I’m an avid reader of this blog and this post has hit me closest to home. I couldn’t care less about “science” in high school but once taught the critical thinking aspect (separation of science from pseudoscience, application of the scientific method to discover the inner workings of our natural world), I fell in love. I was lucky to discover everything I’d been missing, from Sagan to Dawkins and onward, but it happened nearing the end of my university term.
Just imagine if we could get kids that turned on in high school instead? I think we’d breed a much more informed king of citizenry, and a much more passionate kind of scientist.
Furthermore, I should note that textbook materials for some subjects and some grade levels already exist online. MIT has high-school OpenCourseWare, as Roy Niles pointed out; there are also Farabee’s Online Biology, Matter & Interactions and some others. What these projects are missing, I believe, is community. PZ Myers and Rebecca Watson can pack a pub with the mere announcement “let’s get together,” but nobody meets up for drinks because they’ve all read an online biology book. To put it rather grandiosely, if you’re not engaging people and forming social connections among them, you’re not shifting social structures, and you won’t be able to get your text used and appreciated.
“Imagine if we had a society of critically thinking scientifically literate citizens.”
Yeah — no more war, pollution, addiction, poverty, no antagonistic presidential campaigns. It would be heaven on earth. Imagine.
Unfortunately, it’s all too true. I just finished my BS in Biology last month, and really never understood exactly how science worked until last fall when I did some research of my own under one of my professors. It made so much sense, and it’s not that difficult of a process, but even when they taught us “THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD” in high school, all we did was memorize a few steps without thinking about what it was actually saying. It’s straightforward, but there is so much emphasis on the things we know (which are, of course, extremely important). I don’t think enough people realize that there are scientists creating new knowledge every day. Like you all say so often, scientific literacy is almost unheard of outside of the scientific world.
But I’m really digging that idea of a wiki textbook. I don’t know that I would be able to contribute much at all right now, but I would definitely check it out and wouldn’t be surprised if I learned quite a bit that I didn’t know. Awesome idea.
pec, no. Learning to be a skeptic and to apply the scientific method is easy. Abandoning pseudoscience, faith, wishful thinking and delusion is what is hard. It is so hard that most people simply can’t do it.
I think a wiki for textbooks is a great idea. I’m not sure how many people would be willing to volunteer enough time not just to provide the information, but to organize it, but I’d love to help out on it.
I’m pretty sure it could be done on top of MediaWiki, just with some customizations to keep some more structure in place, and then maybe adding some features so that “releases” can be put out in better digital formats (instead of just the plain wikipedia-style pages).
Email me if you’re interested.
Um, Dr. Novella, may I assume you aren’t aware of the Wikibooks project, an offshoot of Wikipedia?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
You are so right here it is almost painful. First up, the open source textbook is a great idea. Second, I too went to a good highschool and a good undergraduate program for college and it wasnt untill doing a summer research program my junior year of college that i really learned how science worked. I was your typical science loving nerdy kid, Edison was my hero, growing up, I always excelled in my science classes, and still I went through 4 years of highschool and 3 years of college before learning what scientists actually do for a living.
Now I am a PhD student, and I call myself a scientist, I wish I had someone explain me this whole business from the beginning.
I think you are assuming that all scientists are atheists. That is totally false. There are many who are religious or agnostic. Religion has nothing to do with science. They have learned to separate their personal beliefs from science and do not mix the two. I don’t see how you can construct a hypothesis without observing first. Observation is as easy as looking.
In point of fact, one thing science often does is disprove common sense. Rocks really do fall from the sky. We’re made of tiny specks of matter in vast expanses of empty space filled only with immaterial energy fields. Killing cats causes the plague. Multivitamins are unhealthy.
None of those are obvious, but they turn out to be true.
“I think you are assuming that all scientists are atheists. ”
Of course not! I said “you,” meaning the person I was quoting. And most activist “skeptics” are atheists.
“where does that leave room for any education, which inevitably involves learning that some things you thought you knew were not quite as reliable as the newer things you are now getting to know?”
Well, obviously, when people learn new things that contradict what they believed before, something has to give.
Maybe you learned in Sunday school that Jesus is god, and believed it because you had not reason to suspect it could be wrong. Then maybe you had a biology teacher later who said religion is just wishful thinking and superstition and science can explain the origin and evolution of life. So you decide who to believe — maybe the science teacher seems more intelligent and experienced than the Sunday school teacher. As your life goes on you take in lots of information and some of it contradicts something you knew before — when that happens, you re-evaluate.
We keep on learning and revising our beliefs. Most Americans believe in God, partly because they don’t buy the idea that life happened by accident. Nothing in biology has contradicted their belief.
Others are religious because they sense there is more to this world than what science has discovered so far. Yes of course wishful thinking can be involved — but wishful thinking seldom survives clear contradictory evidence. Not for sane people anyway.
pec, it’s clear to me that you came to this site in part to be aware of contradictory evidence. Can you honestly say you haven’t yet found any? And if you have, that you won’t find any more?
Pec today: “Science is a creative process, …”
Pec a few weeks ago: “The mistake is in thinking science is something it is not. Science is NOT a way of generating new ideas, …”
Which is it? I suppose you could say that science can be creative without actually generating new ideas, but then what is it generating? And don’t say electricity.
Also, Pec, just saying again and again that people who “believe” in materialism based on the evidence are somehow fundamentalist dogmatists DOESN’T MAKE IT TRUE. I swear it’s like you say it over and over with your fingers in your ears. Materialism is the model that makes the most sense to me based on heaps and heaps and more heaps of evidence. If, due to future evidence, it ultimately doesn’t hold up, then yippee I won’t be a materialist anymore. Can you say the same for your beliefs?
You won’t get an answer for a bit, Potter; he’s too busy hiding under his bridge, waiting for billy-goats.
The wikibooks is a good start, but has some serious shortcomings. Anyone can edit those and there is no unified curriculum.
What I imagine is a wiki-style setup, but modified. Each “book” would have an editor that is in charge of overall quality and completeness. In order to become an author you would have to register and then be approved – the goal is to approve scientists with relevant expertise.
There should also be a curriculum committee to plan out the overall K-12 (or equivalent) curriculum – so that is has one cohesive strategy.
That really sounds great, Dr. Novella. I wish I had enough expertise in something to feel like I could help, but I’m not. I’m a decent math teacher, but no expert.
And for the record, I know everyone’s different, perhaps most of all me, but when I look at science books today what bothers me is it’s TOO much directions about how to conduct experiments and not enough actual information. I’m a big fan of a solid core of knowledge presented in a creative way–but clear, understandable facts first.
[Pec today: "Science is a creative process, ."
Pec a few weeks ago: "The mistake is in thinking science is something it is not. Science is NOT a way of generating new ideas, ."]
I’m sure I said that the steps of the scientific method do not generate new idea. That is different from saying scientists don’t generate new ideas — of course they do, or at least they are supposed to.
I meant that you cannot simply apply the steps and think you are doing science. Science is a creative art, and depends on individuals who dare to disagree.
Simply following in your advisor’s footsteps is not being a real scientist, as I would define science. You have to think beyond what is currently the accepted standard.
pec, you allege that I misunderstand you and then confirm you are doing almost exactly what I expected you were doing. Which is not a bad thing at all.
You might work a bit more on the self-contradictory aspects of your discourse, however.
May I suggest everybody look at the supercourse?
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/assist/sum.htm
This is an effort of the public health community. They are concerned that distribution of information to education institution and good lectures take ages to get around. Meanwhile new docs are released into the world without up to date knowledge.
The archive is held at the Library in Alexandria, Egypt. Totally gorgeous. It consists of ordinary power point slide lectures. Very simple, very effective. Content made by teachers, for teachers. They will eventually put in a rating system like Amazon’s. It isn’t a textbook but it points to a part of pedagogy that is neglected when we think of textbooks as being a primary delivery vehicle.
Ummmm, it was presented in Boston at the AAAS annual meeting.
Pec, you keep talking like you know all about atheists/materialists, and you make many bold pronouncements about how we think religious people are stupid, and you say that we’re some kind of ideologues. Well, that’s just sloppy straw-man thinking. I absolutely don’t think religious people are stupid, nor do I think you’re stupid for disagreeing that materialism is the best model we have for understanding reality. I think ideas and opinions can and should be looked at separate from personal attributes. I strongly disagree with plenty of great, brilliant, nice, and likable people whom I respect.
And, again, I am not an ideologue, nor can I be understood or categorized based on your history of studying materialism or atheism. I try to talk to you as an individual, and I listen to what you say. You’ve specifically made assumptions about me on this blog (such as saying that I was brainwashed by materialist ideologues when I stopped believing in psychic phenomena), knowing virtually nothing about my history or experience, yet you jump on us for being closed-minded.
And in fact Dr. Novella and others have made strong cases for the fact that we’re absolutely not being judgmental or ideological, and you simply ignore those arguments. You seem to only pick the arguments that you think you can target and ignore all the others that seem to discount your views. I realize you can’t take the time to break down every argument point-by-point, but you’ve established a steady pattern of ignoring the strongest arguments against your positions while addressing minor ones.
Steve- I think that education on the methods of science cannot be emphasized enough and I am glad you focused on it. My mother had an extensive science education in college. We have extensive conversations about science, particularly what I have learned in my classes (I am in my first year of college). I find that she can engage well and even exceed my knowledge in some areas of chemistry (basic things like the periodic table and various common compounds) and is well beyond my level of knowledge in A&P and other fields related to medicine (she loves poking holes in the plots of house MD). However despite this knowledge when we get into discussions of alternative medicine she seems to fall for it hook line and sinker because, despite the solid background in blocks of knowledge she memorized in college she does not know how to evaluate the evidence and for her “my friend told me that her chiropractor works wonders on her headaches” passes for evidence. As the astronomy casters say, it’s not just what we know, but how we know what we know.