The challenge of STEM education
Sometimes nothing can kill children’s curiosity in science and technology more effectively than schools.
But that’s what many have done in California, first by starving the curriculum, then by dumbing it down with memorization.
That was the consensus of panelists at a forum last month on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education, sponsored by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and Citizens Schools.
“We have killed the joy of discovery,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, president of California State University, East Bay, by making what goes on the classroom “boring and disengaging.”
Stephanie Couch, program director for the California STEM Innovation Network, observed the truism that schools teach to what they measure. Students are given statewide STAR tests in science only in fifth grade. It’s no coincidence then that a Bay Area study found that K-5 teachers spend less than an hour per week teaching science.
And, noted Julie Dunkle, Intel’s U.S. education program manager, especially in underserved areaa, many teachers don’t have enough knowledge and materials to teach STEM effectively.
Kids must have the time and the tools to experiment and develop a passion for science and engineering. In the near term, that will probably have to take place in after-school programs. Citizen Schools, which operates in 37 sites in seven states, including four Bay Area communities, brings in volunteer engineers, scientists and engineers to engage middle schoolers in hands-on learning.
Couch pointed to the collaboration between teachers and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During the summer, teachers work beside lab researchers. During the year, their students conduct experiments while teleconferencing with the scientists.
Couch is leading a statewide STEM initiative that will point to successful STEM projects in and outside of schools, with a goal of taking them to scale. Click here to hear her talk more about it.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
John,
There are so many problems with your short post, that I don’t know where to start. Perhaps I should start with a bit of data.
I don’t know what that “Bay Area study” studied, or how it studied it, but its findings make absolutely no sense. NCES has been surveying instructional time in elementary schools for many years and the most recent data indicates an average of 2.3 hours of science teaching per week in grades 1-4 (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2007305) If you are trying to convince me that in the Bay Area we allocate less than 40% of the national average for teaching science, you will need to provide much more than some nameless “study.” In fact, the whole claim that the curriculum has been “narrowed” because of NCLB has little substantiation. That NCES publication shows that there has been no significant narrowing. A more recent and yet-unpublished 2006-7 data collected by the US Dept. of Ed shows the same — no significant narrowing. Just last year the GAO tried to find such narrowing in the Arts and had to conclude that there is no such narrowing (http://portal.ers.org/content/657/pdf-ebulv36i19cra.pdf ).
Yes, I agree that we killed the joy of discovery for many kids. But much of it probably because they don’t have sufficient grounding in math or science to understand, appreciate, and be carried away by science. We teach science to children as it were magic–we show them “nifty” phenomena but we do not prepare them to actually comprehend them; we try to excite them in early grades rather than systematically teach science. Then, when they grow up a bit and the magic becomes mundane–but still incomprehensible–we are surprised and disappointed that many stop caring about science. Hey, if it is only about magic, girls and sports have much more of it when you are a teenager.
“Dumbing down [the curriculum] by memorization”? Memorization does not necessarily mean “dumbing down.” It depends on what, and how, one memorizes. Have you ever met a successful scientist that did not memorize large amount of meaningful information? Have you ever met a scientist or an engineer that needs to reach for a calculator to calculate 7×8 or 12×5? Shown me a child who is forced to memorize *useless* factoids–not the multiplication table or the list of halogens–in science or math, and I’ll show you a teacher who doesn’t understand science or math, or how to teach them. If there is a lot of foolish memorization in math or science, it is not the curriculum or the testing, but clueless teachers.
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Ze’ev: The study, which I should have cited, was done by WestEd for the Lawrence Hall of Science. It was based on a survey of elementary teachers in the Bay Area. To cite its conclusion, “Eighty percent (80%) of K–5th grade multiple-subject teachers who are responsible for teaching science in their classrooms reported spending 60 minutes or less per week on science, with 16% of teachers spending no time at all on science.”
The post was a brief, but, I believe, accurate report on the forum on science education. The panelists would not disagree with you that teachers’ lack of knowledge of science is a cause for poor science education. But some would disagree with you about the role of memorization and argue classroom instruction has become all facts, no magic.
Clearly, a subject needing another forum.
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John,
Thanks for the study citation. The link provides bits and snippets of the study claims, but the methodological information is minimal. For example, it says researchers interviewed a lot of districts and county people — how much do those know about the actual time spent on science in the classroom? Further, there is a reference there to “923 exclusively elementary teacher respondents” but we have no idea how were they distributed among the various bay area schools, how they were selected to begin with, and what was the response rate. In other words we have no idea how representative they are, how were the weighting procedures done (if at all), etc., etc. And the study instrument itself is not described. I wonder if there ever even was an actual report produced, given what seems like a rather badly done study. It speaks rather poorly of Lawrence Hall of Science and of West Ed to publish this kind of “study.”
Interestingly, the study also quotes couple of times another 2007 study (Choices, changes, and challenges: Curriculum and instruction in the NCLB era. Center on Education Policy) that did find a large curriculum narrowing and, as a consequence, got a lot of publicity at the time. Later it turned out that study gathered its data by asking “district Title 1 coordinators” to “recall” whether the district reduced instructional minutes over the previous 5 years. Extremely poor design, to put it mildly. But that came out long after CEP results already got the publicity they never deserved.
Bottom line, I completely mistrust both this study as well as the CEP study on the issue. In particular because there are other professionally done studies of exactly this question that find diametrically opposite results, and they have been asking the same question for a very long time. And they did not have any ax to grind, as opposed to CEP or LHS.
Regarding memory and memorization, I agree they are worth a separate discussion. Before we do, however, you may want to read the (long) Dan Willingham web link touching on this issue: http://blog.coreknowledge.org/author/dan-willingham .
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