If you could make one change to improve science education in the United States, what would it be? Science Times asked that question of 19 Americans — scientists, educators, students — with a stake in the answer. Their responses follow.
Carl E. Wieman
Nobel laureate in physics; [professor of physics and of education, Stanford University;] former associate director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
If there were one change I could make, it would be to require that universities become more accountable about how they teach basic science and math to undergraduates.
Doing this is important because we are currently providing many undergraduates — including this country's future K-12 teachers — with a deficient understanding of the basic sciences. At the same time, because of poor teaching, we're giving them a very negative view of these subjects — negative in the sense that they see them as uninteresting, irrelevant and unnecessarily hard to learn. After they take the typical undergraduate basic-science courses, they have more negative feelings toward the subjects than they did before.
The good news is that we know how to make introductory science courses engaging and effective. If you have classes where students get to think like scientists, discuss topics with each other and get frequent, targeted feedback, they do better. A key element involves instructors designing tasks where students witness real-world examples of how science works.
Right now, there's enormous pressure on the faculty to obtain research funding, and that drives them away from putting effort into teaching. I'd like to see federal research funding linked to universities' reporting and publishing information on what teaching methods they use.
Such a requirement would at the very least focus attention on effective science instruction and create an incentive to do better. Moreover, it would provide high school students with information that could impact their choice of college.
Paulo Blikstein
Director, Transformative Learning Technologies Laboratory, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University.
I'd love to see a once-a-week day in K-12 devoted to invention -- an "Idea Day."
Teachers would reorganize the school space, transforming it into a mix of design firm, engineering laboratory, fabrication laboratory and science center. And there the students would use scientific concepts to invent something.
Because of their projects, the kids would become more curious about physics, math, science in their normal STEM classes because they would use this knowledge to get their projects right. For them, the STEM subjects would be much more interesting, because the basic concepts would be part of useful projects they themselves created.
We want kids in school to have that experience of seeing how science and math lead to making things. In a controlled study conducted in our lab we found a statistically significant increase of 25 percent in performance when open-ended exploration came before text or video study rather than after it.
We'd like kids to learn how to solve hard problems and what it takes to pull off a complex endeavor, how to plan, collaborate, fail and not give up. In other words, we want them to see what science and math can do when they are used by a creative mind.
To see a video of Blikstein and to read the 17 other ideas, please visit the story at the Times website.
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