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Re: SPECIAL REPORT: America's Failure in Science Education (Business Week)



What was I thinking....Thank you, Richard Hake. In my haste I said what I
certainly do not believe. We are obviously not doing a good or even adequate
job in the classroom in high school and college, though the elementary
schools may be doing a fair job.
I do think, however, that we might not be measuring the right things, at
least in the gen. ed. courses where students should get a broad view rather
than an arcane slice of some part of a course designed for majors. And I am
convinced that we are allowing our curriculum do be driven by the back end,
the test, rather than the front end, the plan. When everything becomes test
driven, we end up teaching to the test rather than to the plan, and that
makes all the difference.
I do agree with what Richard says in his post.

Fred Bucheit

From: Richard Hake <rrhake@EARTHLINK.NET>
Reply-To: Forum for Physics Educators <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: SPECIAL REPORT: America's Failure in Science Education
(Business Week)
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:55:46 -0800

In his Physhare post of 19 Mar 2004 02:40:10+0000 titled "Re: SPECIAL
REPORT. . .[Business Week (2004). . .: America's Failure in Science
Education," Fred Bucheit wrote:

"Interesting, but one must ask, do we send kids to school in order to
increase our gross domestic product or to produce people who are
capable of communicating effectively, thinking rationally, and
recognizing BS when they hear it? I do not think we are failing at
all. We are measuring the wrong things."

I AGREE with Fred on two counts and DISAGREE on a third:

COUNT 1. I agree that the purpose of schooling should NOT be, as
implied by Business Week (2004), to increase our gross domestic
product, although it certainly does no harm to have the bottom liners
on the side of more effective education.

In my opinion, rather than the gross domestic product, we should be
more concerned with the science illiteracy of the general population.
This illiteracy tends to exacerbate certain life-threatening
science-related societal problems.

In Hake (2000) I listed some of those as:

A. POLITICAL-SCIENTIFIC (a few of many examples):
1. Overpopulation (doubles about every 35 years).
2. Threat of weapons of mass destruction.
3. Human welfare (starvation, homelessness, unemployment, drugs, epidemics,
AIDS, etc.).
4. Environment (pollution of air, water, land, food; global warming; ozone
depletion; deforestation; loss of biodiversity).
5. Long-term energy crisis: man-made waste heat approaches Sun's input heat
to Earth; depletion of fossil fuels.
7. Third world crises.
8. Superstition.
9. Terrorism.

B. ECONOMIC-SCIENTIFIC (a few of many examples):
1. Natural resource waste (fossil fuels, forests, grasslands, rivers,
ecosystems).
2. Widening gap between the rich and the poor.
3. Lowering of living standards in many countries.
4. Human resource waste (minorities, lower castes, women).
5. Unemployment.


COUNT 2. I agree that the purpose of schooling should be to produce
people who are capable of communicating effectively, thinking
rationally, and recognizing BS when they hear it. But I would add
that we need to produce people who have at least a rudimentary
knowledge of science and mathematics (and even the humanities, arts,
and economics).

COUNT 3. However, I DISAGREE with Fred that we are not failing. If
Fred is correct and we are indeed successful in producing "people who
are capable of communicating effectively, thinking rationally,
recognizing BS when they hear it, and who have a rudimentary
knowledge of science and mathematics, then how can one account for
the manifest science illiteracy of the general U.S. population?

In Hake (2000) I gave some evidence for such science illiteracy:

A. From "Science and Engineering Indicators" (NSF, 1998): ". . . . it
appears that only 11 percent of Americans can define the term
'molecule.' . . . A large proportion of the population knows that a
molecule is a small piece of matter, but is unable to relate it to an
atom or a cell, which are also small pieces of matter. And, despite
substantial media attention to deep space probes and pictures from
the Hubble Space Telescope, only 48 percent of Americans know that
the earth goes around the sun once each year. . . ONLY 27 PERCENT OF
AMERICANS UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY WELL ENOUGH TO
BE ABLE TO MAKE INFORMED JUDGMENTS ABOUT THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF
RESULTS REPORTED IN THE MEDIA. Public understanding of the nature of
scientific inquiry was measured through questions about the meaning
of scientific study and the reasons for the use of control groups in
experiments." (My CAPS.)

B. Jerome Epstein (1997/98)]: "While it is now well known that large
numbers of students arrive at college with large educational and
cognitive deficits, many faculty and administrative colleagues are
not aware that many students lost all sense of meaning or
understanding in elementary school. . . . In large numbers our
students. . . [at Bloomfield College (NJ) and Lehman (CUNY)]. . .
cannot order a set of fractions and decimals and cannot place them on
a number line. MANY DO NOT COMPREHEND DIVISION BY A FRACTION AND HAVE
NO CONCRETE COMPREHENSION OF THE PROCESS OF DIVISION ITSELF. Reading
rulers where there are other than 10 subdivisions, basic operational
meaning of area and volume, are pervasive difficulties. MOST CANNOT
DEAL WITH PROPORTIONAL REASONING NOR ANY SORT OF PROBLEM THAT HAS TO
BE TRANSLATED FROM ENGLISH. OUR DIAGNOSTIC TEST, WHICH HAS BEEN GIVEN
NOW AT MORE THAN A DOZEN INSTITUTIONS SHOWS THAT THERE ARE SUCH
STUDENTS EVERYWHERE. . . .(even Wellesley! - see Epstein (1999). (My
CAPS.)

C. Woodie Flowers (2000):
Slide 42, 43: BBC videotape "Simple Minds" showing MIT graduates
having trouble getting a flashlight bulb to light, given one bulb,
one battery, and one piece of wire. This is the MIT counterpart of
Harvard's "A Private Universe," [Schneps & Sadler (1985)] a videotape
showing Harvard graduating seniors confidently explaining that the
seasons are caused by yearly variation in the distance of the Earth
from the Sun! And if such occurs at MIT and Harvard, how about Podunk
State? For an equivalent of the "Simple Minds" videotape go to HSCFA
(1997).

Slide 44: a large percentage of juniors in mechanical engineering at
MIT cannot correctly decide whether a large or small radius pulley
attached to the shaft of a motor will allow more force to be applied
to a string wrapped around the pulley.

d. Slide 45: seniors in 6 of the top 12 mechanical engineering
schools in the country where asked "How much energy in a 9-volt
transistor battery?" Their estimates range over 9 orders of
magnitude. They have "not a clue about a joule."

Of course, the above deficiencies in MIT students:

(a) are in consonance with physics education research showing that
passive student lectures, recipe labs, and algorithmic problem sets
are nearly useless in increasing students conceptual understanding of
physics [for a review see Hake (2002)],

(b) were at least partially responsible for John Belcher's (2003)
conversion of his traditional MIT course into a studio course.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>


REFERENCES
Belcher, J.W. 2003. "Improving Student Understanding with TEAL" [TEAL
= Technology Enhanced Active Learning], MIT Faculty Newsletter Vol.
XVI No. 2 October/November; online at
<http://web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www/fnlEditedLinks.pdf> (176 kB).

Business Week. 2004. "America's Failure in Science Education," 16
March; online at
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2004/tc20040316_0601_tc166.htm>:"Because
the quality of a nation's workforce has such a huge influence on
productivity, effective school reform could easily stimulate the
economy more than conventional strategies, such as the Bush tax cuts.
Consider what would happen if the U.S. could raise the performance of
its high school students on math and science to the levels of Western
Europe within a decade. According to Eric A. Hunushek . . .
.[<http://edpro.stanford.edu/eah/eah.htm>]. . . . , a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, U.S. gross domestic
product growth would then be 4% higher than otherwise by 2025 and 10%
higher in 30 years."

Epstein, J. 1997-98. "Cognitive development in an integrated
mathematics and science program," J. of College Science Teaching
12/97 & 1/98:194-201.

Epstein, J. 1999. "What is the real level of our students?" unpublished.

Flowers, W. 2000. "Why change, Been doin' it this way for 4000 years!" ASME
Mechanical Engineering Education Conference: Drivers and Strategies
of Major Program Change," Fort Lauderdale, Florida, March 26-29;
online as PowerPoint plus video at
<http://hitchcock.dlt.asu.edu/media2/cresmet/flowers/>. (Download the
free RealPlayer.)

Hake, R.R. 2000. "The General Population's Ignorance of Science
Related Societal Issues: A Challenge for the University," AAPT
Announcer 30(2): 105; online as ref. 11 at
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>. Based on an earlier libretto
with the leitmotiv: "The road to U.S. science literacy begins with
effective university science courses for pre-college teachers." The
opera dramatizes the fact that the failure of universities throughout
the universe to properly educate pre-college teachers is responsible
for our failure to observe any signs of either terrestrial or
extraterrestrial intelligence.

Hake, R.R. 2002. "Lessons from the physics education reform effort,"
Conservation Ecology 5(2): 28; online at
<http://www.consecol.org/vol5/iss2/art28>. Conservation Ecology is a
free "peer-reviewed journal of integrative science and fundamental
policy research" with about 11,000 subscribers in about 108 countries.

NSF. 1998. "Science and Engineering Indicators," Chap. 7, "Science
and Technology"; online at
<http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind98/start.htm>.

Schneps, M.H. & P.M. Sadler. 1985. "Private Universe Project"
(Harvard -Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Science Education
Department); online at
<http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/cfa/sed/resources/privateuniv.html>.

HSCFA. 1997. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics "Minds of
Our Own: Can We Believe Our Eyes?" online at
<http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html>: "Why is it that
students can graduate from MIT and Harvard, yet not know how to solve
a simple third-grade problem in science: lighting a light bulb with a
battery and wire? Beginning with this startling fact, this program
systematically explores many of the assumptions that we hold about
learning to show that education is based on a series of myths.
Through the example of an experienced teacher, THE PROGRAM TAKES A
HARD LOOK AT WHY TEACHING FAILS, EVEN WHEN HE USES ALL OF THE
TRADITIONAL TRICKS OF THE TRADE. The program shows how new research,
used by teachers committed to finding solutions to problems, is
reshaping what goes on in our nation's schools." [My CAPS.]

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