You Graduate More Criminals Than Scientists

Let me toss out some ideas on what might be called the "myths for teaching science." 1 am bound to slaughter some sacred cows. But this barbecue will provide nourishment for the trying times we now face in education. Clearly, these are not the best of times for science teachers. Students, the ultimate curriculum consumers, tell us that our courses stink. Parents tell us to teach the basics, to leave out evolution, and to keep away from bioethics and societal issues. Science educators are penning liberal prose about radical new thrusts for the profession, but these ideas don't jibe with what we traditionally trained science teachers think. Such conflict could generate a philosophical vortex the ultimate storm from which the future of science education will precipitate.

Everyone involved-administrators, teachers, parents, and students-is looking for a magic elixir, a solvent for scientific illiteracy. Money is a simple potion that may help some schools improve their programs to some extent. But it will hardly cure all the problems. Perhaps a more potent tonic would be for us to sit in front of a mirror for a few hours and engage in a little reflective thought.

Do they need you?

We all have our reasons for teaching science, and we all try to impose our values onto our students. Let's look at the myths by which some of us justify our jobs.

"My students are going to need my course when they get to college."

Only 40 percent of students who go on to college actually graduate in 4 years. So we are now down to about 17 college graduates out of 100 high school freshmen.

Eastern Illinois University is a pretty typical school in terms of types of degrees offered. We have an enrollment of 10 000 students, and, in the spring of 1983, 7 percent of the degrees awarded were spread among 8 programs in the sciences and science education (the same as the national aver-age, according to the National Center for Education Statistics). Seven percent of 17 students is 1.2. There are other types of colleges; and, of course, some of the 60 percent of college dropouts eventually graduate after taking off a few years (or decades) to work, parent children, and do life's other chores.

Obviously, all college students will need at least one kind of science course to satisfy their general education re-quirements. Your course might help some of the college-bound students. It might not. One thing is certain-8 years after you teach those freshmen, there is a good chance that more of them will have been in jail or state prison than the 1.2 percent who will have a degree in science.

It's a good thing you can't see cognitive scars. Many of our students could have us arrested for child abuse if the bruises to their self-concepts were visible. Students learn from us whether they are smart or not. For the most part, science teachers, with their incredible cognitive demands, teach young people that they cannot succeed in science. Science enrollments are low because we have alienated our students. A large majority of the students with whom I deal are female, science- shy elementary education majors. Once, after two field trips to see the effects of acid rain and a lab that involved blowing through bromothymol blue solution to test for the presence of an acid, 1 wrote this equation on the board: H2O + CO2 = H2CO3

A woman came up to me after class and was obviously upset. "Gosh, Dr. Leyden, I know that equation should be pretty simple to understand, but when you wrote that on the board I just froze. All I could hear was my high school chemistry teacher telling me how stupid I was," she said. Wouldn't it be ironic if that student moved back to her home town and taught science poorly to the children of her former chemistry teacher?

We reap only what we sow.

Perhaps the key word in Myth 2 is "exposure." It makes us sound like exhibitionists who "flash" science facts in front of our students. In a teacher workshop I conducted, one of the participants disagreed with my view that the SI unit of the Newton should be omitted from junior high texts. Our conversation went something like this:

He: "The Newton is very important for the kids to know . . . especially in discussing the Space Shuttle and all."

Me: "Do your students understand the concept?"

He: "No. They mess it up on the test, but at least they have been exposed to it."

Me: "What is your precise weight in Newtons?"

He: "I don't know."

If the Newton is so important, why doesn't the teacher understand it?

"Studying science will help my students make logical decisions."

Those who do not study science are irrational. There is no evidence that high school students who take science are any more logical than those who take business, vocational, fine arts, or humanities courses. There is a considerable body of knowledge that shows that science teachers are among the most illogical people in the world. Try this "Logic in Life Test." Answer yes or no to the following questions.

Do you

• wear a seat belt 100 percent of the time you are in a vehicle

• go for a physical checkup as frequently as you should

• go to the dentist twice a year

• smoke

• drink too much

• subscribe to some type of consumer digest

• vote in every election

• eat too much sugar

• use dental floss every day

• read the daily horoscope

• own a hand gun

• participate in a fitness regime?

Most of life's major decisions are based on emotion. Could you afford the home you bought? "No," replied a science-teacher friend of mine, "but I just loved the birch tree in the front yard and the screened-in porch out back"

You can fake your way through many high school science courses by memorizing gobs of material; but you cannot memorize how to wire a house or overhaul an engine.

Smart enough

It's my own feeling that the most rational thinkers, the best problem solvers, in any high school are the kids WQ won't let take science courses. They are the noncollege-bound students who aren't "smart enough" to take such "hard courses" as chemistry and physics and are put into such "menial courses as auto mechanics, house construction, home economics, and woodworking. In such courses the students work with concrete activities and use science processes to a much greater extent than do our science students. You can fake your way through many high school science courses by memorizing gobs of material; but you cannot memorize how to wire a house, overhaul an engine, or plan a week of nutritionally sound menus. In vocational courses you often have to use what Piaget called formal operational skills: "if then . . . therefore

"My course is tough because I wont to find out what the kids ore made of"

Many of us pride ourselves on the difficulty of our courses: pop quizzes, penalty points for bad behavior, long tests, research reports, and the like. If those are the methods you use in your courses, then your behavioral objective is not seeing what the kids are made of, but how they respond to tyranny.

If you truly want to find out what your students are made of, there is only one way for you to behave. When the students enter class the first day, tell them there will be no assignments, tests are optional, lab reports won't be graded, and all students will receive A's regardless of what they do. Then sit back and see what the kids are made of. Watching a person's behavior when there is a gun to his or her head does not give you an indication of the person's true self. Remove the gun, replace it with freedom, and then watch.

"Science teachers are scientists."

Perhaps Myth 5 is the nucleus of the science education problem. Quite often, science teachers I meet

• are not proud of what they do. They are not proud of their positions as science educators if they were, they'd join NSTA or their state science education organization.
• have no knowledge of learning theory. Their lessons don't adhere to the tenets of Piaget, or Gagne, or Ausebel, or anyone. It isn't important whose philosophy they support, but shouldn't lessons be constructed along some pedagogical framework?

• have no self-concept. So many teachers seem to believe that the pur- pose of their teaching is to prepare their students for the next course. What I am doing in this course, a student comes to believe, isn't as important as what I will do in the next one. This is sadly comical. The truth is that most students won't take "the next course" because "this one" is so terrible.

In reality, 40 percent of the 9th graders didn't take any science, so what good was the 8th grade objective?

Another 35 percent of the students did not go beyond freshman science.

Eleven percent took 2 years of high school science but no more.

So 86 percent of the student body did not need the primary course objective.

Six percent (18 students) took 4 years of science. Another 282 students said, "No thanks."

I wish I would meet a teacher who had enough faith in what he or she was teaching to say, "This is a neat course all by itself. It doesn't prepare my students for anything more than enjoying our physical and biological environment during the 23 hours a day when they are not in science class."

De-mythtifying

Let me now rush to the defense of those of you whose egos I may have bruised. The five myths owe their existence, in part, to unreasonable demands placed on us for accountability. In the years ahead this pressure will become even stronger: "Pass your students who know the basics on to the next teacher." We are caught in a system that measures knowledge by short-answer tests.

What I am doing in this course, a student comes to believe, isn't as important as what I will do in the next one. But most students won't take 'the next course' because 'this one' is so terrible.

Tests test nothing. If they tested something, we would be willing to give students their final exam for freshman biology in June of their senior year. After all, if they really learned something from us, they could recall it 4 years later. That's what learning means. Given the present testing scheme, there is no hope of our students remembering any concept longer than 2 weeks after we discussed it in class.

Students don't flunk out of college because they are stupid. Most students flunk out because they have never had to budget the use of their freedom. High school is all programmed; clocks and bells ring every 45 minutes. Very few schools run like a college, so when students are faced with decisions about time management, they don't know what to do. A lack of knowledge about the endoplasmic reticulum is not what makes a grade point average suffer.

All tests should be open book. School is the only place in the world where you cannot open a book to find the answer. In the real world you are to use all the reference materials you can acquire. Wouldn't you feel uneasy if the mechanic didn't look up the exact size of the parts needed to repair your car, but relied only on memory? The sign of an educated person is that he or she knows where to find information. Why do we lie to our students and pretend that memory is the chief source of information? With open--book exams, students' grades would not change. Those who don't have to look up the answers will get AÕs; those who didn't do the reading will waste time looking for the answer.

Only oral exams test for true conceptualization. On a paper/pencil exam, a student would receive full credit for the following:

Q: "Why do things float?"

A: "Things float if they are less dense than water."

On an oral exam you would find out how little the student knows when you ask him or her to explain why things float without using the words density, buoyancy, or displacement. These are the "buzz words" that students banter about in an attempt to get partial credit for things they do not understand.

Every test should be completed by two students. In the real world we cooperate with each other. In school we teach competition. Students learn that if they are secretive about their knowledge, they can cause their friends to flunk, and they will get a higher grade. Why can't there be some tests that reward cooperation? The ultimate test may be a 3-minute writing exercise. Right in the middle of one of your lessons, stop and have the students write you a letter about what they are thinking. When I do this, I find out that one of my students is worried if her car will start, another likes my tie, and another is wondering if he is going to get a letter from his girlfriend today. I am going through the motions of quality teaching, but I find very few of my students actually have their minds on the lesson. What a shock! Few students mention what has been happening in class. Testing is tied to the belief that the transmission of knowledge is the major goal of schooling. The NSTA publication What Research Says to the Science Teacher lists four criteria for the curricula of the 1980s 2) The application of science to everyday life and the integration of science and society are the authors' first two priorities, and rightly so. Number three is the acquisition of knowledge, followed by career awareness in the sciences. This is almost the complete opposite of the way most of us perceive our mission. It is pleasing to see that some of our students take an interest in science. If they earn a degree in science, that is even more rewarding but also quite rare. Most students learn not to like science. Many hate it. Many students have their self-images destroyed because most of the courses are filled with esoteric abstractions by a teacher who pretends to be a scientist and thinks of students as future Nobel laureates. Let us take blame for our many failures as well as for our few successes. We can decrease our percentage of failure if we reorganize our science education goals to agree with those set down by NSTA and if we allow students to see science as a real-world concern, not an endurance test. By taking a new look at what we are trying to do, perhaps we can see our- selves more honestly as educators and behave accordingly.

1) "Almost 28% Don't Graduate From High School." Charleston, IL, Times-Courier, April 8. 1983

2. Yager, Robert E. and Norris Harms. What Research Says to the Science Teacher, Vol. III. Washington, D.C.: National Science Teachers Association, 1981: