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Hi all-
Perhaps a couple of people who don't bow to the crushing weight
of authority will have the time to review the FAST program for us?
Regards,
Jack
I'll take that on, briefly. For several years I worked with a group
of middle schools that used the FAST program for its science
curriculum, and my overall impression of it was far less glowing than
Jane's recent posting. However, it is entirely possible that in the
intervening years between my last exposure to that system and the
present, the designers of the FAST program have seen the error of
their ways and vastly improved it, so my impressions may well be of
an outdated program, and if so, I'm sure Jane will tell us.
Anyway, here is what I saw of the fast program at the time I was
working with it. First the good stuff: it seemed to be a
well-designed integrated science program, covering all of basic
science in the three-year program. There was some of each discipline
incorporated into each year's program, and the intention was that the
students would get some introduction to the unity of science while at
the same time seeing how the disciplines differ in their
methodologies. It also worked fairly carefully from the basic to more
advanced level material and used a lot of "discovery" techniques. It
has been informed by a lot of recent PER.
However, and this is a big however, the devil is in the details. The
edition we had listed the committee that prepared the materials
(beware of committees bearing curricula). There were professors of
physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, as well as professors of
education, all well represented on the committee. What were
conspicuous by their absence, were any middle-school teachers. This
was exactly the situation I railed against in an earlier post--the
experts in suits and carrying briefcases coming down to the lowly
middle school teachers and telling them how to do their job. It
certainly got things off on the wrong foot to my way of thinking, and
once I got into the details, it was obvious why they needed some
middle school teachers on the committee--to give the "experts" a
large dose of reality therapy.
My general impression was that, although the material progressed in a
logical fashion through the subject, far too much of it was at a
level of complexity well beyond the capability of most middle school
students, and certainly beyond a lot of the trained instructors who I
watched in action during a summer program in which the middle school
teachers were prepared to use the FAST program in their schools.
Let me give an example: In a unit on density, starting with solids,
and progressing through liquids and ending with gases, the students
were continually asked, before doing any experimenting to "predict"
the results of their experiments. They had had no preliminary
information given them to help them inform their predictions and so
what the text called prediction were in reality only wild guesses and
by personal observation, the students had no idea why they chose the
predictions they ended up making. Then they would do a little
experiment, using materials that could be contained on a classroom
table (not a bad idea, in principle--most schools are not in a
position to be able to afford large and expensive equipment). One of
the experiments had them measure the volume of some irregular objects
by adding them to full overflow cups and measuring the overflow in to
a graduated cylinder. The objects being measured had volumes of a few
cubic cm, and they were given a 50 cc grad. cyl. with which to
measure the volume of overflow. Well, as everybody knows, the
effectiveness of the overflow method of volume measurement depends on
the volume to be measured being large enough that the error
introduced due to the surface tension of the water as it enters the
overflow tube becomes small enough to enable realistic measurements
to be made. In this case the error was of the same order of magnitude
as the volumes to be measured, leading the students to get data which
they could make no sense of whatever.
At another point, they were asked to determine the relative buoyancy
of several objects and to construct a graph of their results. My
memory is vague here, but I observed this experiment done by the
teachers who were going to have their students do this expt. in
class, and what I recall is that the joint graph that the class of
teachers came up with made no sense whatever. The instructions for
constructing the graph were so muddled that I could not figure out
what was being asked for. The certified FAST instructor leading the
class thought the results were just dandy and praised the group for
doing such a good job. I was going ballistic and it was all I could
do to keep from jumping up and objecting, but I was just an observer
and it would have been inappropriate for me to do so. Although I did
take it up with the instructors later, they didn't understand my
problem at all.
The unit concluded with a series of activities in which the students
were to investigate gas pressures, using plastic syringes connected
with plastic tubes, and ultimately, to discover the principle of a
Cartesian diver. The first thing the program got wrong was measuring
all sorts of volumes and pressures without letting the temperatures
return to normal, so as they compressed a volume of gas and it
inevitably got hotter, this effect was ignored. Furthermore, the
volumes they were working with were small enough that errors in
reading the volumes on the walls of the syringes were inevitably
large, and of course, varying as the temperature returned to ambient.
Actions the teachers were asked to perform using the syringes often
required that they exerted forces on the syringes that were difficult
for the teachers and would have been impossible for the students.
The Cartesian diver was not just a simple qualitative demonstration
of the device, but a full blown experiment attempting to show how the
density varied in a syringe as it was made to float or sink, by
reading the change in volume by the motion of the plunger inside the
tube of the syringe. There were typically 10 cc syringes, and the
volume change between floating or sinking seemed to be about .1 cc,
which change had to be read through the water in which the syringe
was floating. This was another disaster in which an hour was spent in
getting absolutely no meaningful data.
Examples like this, where the scientific principles were to be
investigated by directed activities which proved to entirely
inappropriate for the students involved were spread throughout the
program. Either the sizes of the objects or volumes were too small,
or the errors inherent in the procedure were so large as to make it
impossible to discriminate among the possibilities.
A lot of effort was spent on graphing. This is good. Since graph are
important tools in science, it is worth while that the students know
how to do it. Frequently the students were asked to created a graph
that would, if things went well, prove to be linear, but little use
was ever made of this linearity. Nowhere was the idea of the slope of
the graph introduced as a means of predicting results, intercepts
were often gotten by inappropriate extrapolation. And worst of all,
too many of the teachers had no concept of the purpose and value of a
graph. I kept seeing instances in classes where the teacher would
simply tell the students to "connect the dots" on their graph,
eliminating any possibility of them being able to use the graph as a
predicting device. On one occasion, the teacher even carefully showed
the students how to mark the axes on the graph and in the process
managed to change scale twice in the length of the axis drawn! This
isn't the fault of the FAST developers, but it indicates that they
neglected to include any meaningful instruction on graphing
techniques in their training materials, instruction which was
desperately needed.
It was my impression that, in their effort to make the materials the
students used as simple as possible, they ignored the fact that not
only does it have to be simple, but it also needs to be large--large
enough that the errors inherent in the abilities of the students are
small enough that the results will show what the authors of the unit
wanted them to see. Typically this was not done.
And finally, I will mention one further problem that was not
necessarily the responsibility of the FAST designers, but which is so
endemic in our classrooms that no curriculum designer should ever
neglect it. That is the problem of trying to do laboratory work in a
class of 32-36 high energy middle school students with one teacher.
Unless the lab activities are so designed that the large majority of
the students can figure them out for themselves and keep themselves
busy while the teacher deals with those who have problems, the class
descends into bedlam with some confused students (usually the boys)
clamoring for attention, usually in disruptive ways, and other
confused students (usually the girls) quietly sitting and trying the
best they can but having no clue as to what they are trying to do.
Since they are being quiet, they don't get the attention of the
harried teacher and remain lost somewhere in space. I suspect that
this condition may have something to do with the decline of interest
in science among girls that has been documented to occur during the
middle school years.
As I said, the condition of the classroom is not the responsibility
of the designers of FAST, but to ignore this fact and design lab
activities that require the intensive supervision of the teacher is
irresponsible, given what we all know will be the conditions in most
middle school classrooms.
So, my impression of FAST is that it is a well-conceived program gone
seriously awry in the execution, and I suspect that is in some part
due to the absence of middle school teachers on the design committee.
The designers, probably in response to pressures to improve the
science content of the MS curriculum, spent all their effort on that,
and completely neglected the nature of the MS classroom. A fatal
error, IMO.
Hugh
--
Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>
(919) 467-7610
Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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