Science education gets turned upside down

Yet science test scores, as measured by one global indicator, were largely stagnant from 1996 to 2000. While some argue that the scores show recent reforms have been ineffectual, others equate the past five years of effort to a revving engine that has yet to slip into gear.

That troubles those who say the leading edge of science is moving quickly away from the public's largely static base of scientific knowledge, producing a disturbing gap that schools should be filling.

"In this day and age, with the decisions that we have to make personally - about our own lifestyles, our impact on the environment - as well as collectively, through legislation and policymaking, we all need a firm grounding in scientific understanding," Mr. Pratt says. "The majority of decisions made in Congress have a science and technology dimension to them.... As citizens we need to understand those issues."

Reformers who support the San Diego effort say traditional science education does little to address that need.

"Today, science education in the public schools is still very much focused on memorizing facts, vocabulary, and formulas, rather than really trying to understand both what we know about how the world works and how we know it," says George Nelson, director of Project 2061, a science- and math-reform group named after the year Halley's Comet will return, and a space-shuttle mission specialist.

"Students sit there being bombarded with bits and pieces of data, but there's no opportunity to generate their own and try to make sense of it," says James Stewart, co-director of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science, based at the University of Wisconsin. Student participation in experimentation, a technique sometimes referred to as "hands-on, minds-on," is more in tune with "what makes science so exciting to scientists," he says.

The great teacher shortage in science has exacerbated the problem. In turn, inadequately trained teachers come to rely heavily on their textbooks. An analysis in recent years of some California textbooks showed them to contain many errors.

"An outstanding science teacher might be able to overcome a deficient textbook, but a teacher not sufficiently trained in science, teaching from a science book with too many topics and too many undeveloped concepts, just does not work," says Paul Kimmelman, a former Chicago-area school district superintendent, now an executive director of an education laboratory.

Although NSTA's Pratt sees the right elements in place for long-term science-education reform, he believes conditions may get worse before they get better. "We may actually see the quality of teaching go down, not because we're not doing the right things or that we don't know what to do, but because we're diluting the teaching ranks with unqualified teachers."

Mr. Nelson says that past patterns won't provide students with what they will need as adults. "In this century we'll see a rate of change that's unprecedented. Most of those changes will be driven by engineering and technology that in turn are being driven by science," he says.

"Science will play a much more central role in everybody's life than it has in the past," he adds. "None of us can afford to stand still."

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