Tell Me Again: the Problem with Science Education Is?

The colloquium speaker was eloquent in his description of the myriad problems facing education and science education. His litany of symptoms was a familiar one. His list of solutions was idealistic and sweeping.
During the talk, I wondered if the many who describe various crises in American education are talking about the same thing. Do we have so many crises that their symptoms and any proposed solutions are bizarrely convoluted in a way that makes it hard to decide what we are really talking about.

Are we talking past one another? Are the problems in science education as perceived by physicists quite different than the problems perceived by the governors of our states? If physicists were to list behavioral and intellectual traits to be instilled in our students, would the public recognize these traits as solutions to a crisis?

The eminent colloquium speaker who addressed the faculty and students listed a set of traits that we should instill in our students. Students should develop, he said, traits such as curiosity, skepticism, faith in rationality, questioning, searching for simplicity and beauty in nature, humility about our understanding of nature, and a strong sense of ego. Too many students go through our schools without an appreciation and awareness of the scientific processes that instill these skills and perspectives. How could one disagree with such an eloquent set of process skills as objectives for the education of all students?

Then I wondered about the many employers who reportedly complain about the inadequate skill levels of the people they try to hire. Your graduates, we hear, can’t read; they can’t write coherently; they surely can’t reliably add or divide; they don’t know how to work with percentages.

This is another view of the crisis in education, but it is clearly a different crisis than the one cited by the colloquium speaker. Here we are talking about our schools’ graduating students who are functionally illiterate, to say nothing of their lack of appreciation of science. While a successful educational system might inculcate reading and writing skills along with a mature understanding of scientific thinking, the absence of which component constitutes a crisis in American education?

Then, of course, we get faculty in our research institutions for whom the crisis of the day is the difficulty of recruiting graduate students to work in research labs and in undergraduate classrooms. The number of non-U.S. students applying to graduate programs is falling; more are matriculating at institutions in other nations because the process of visa approvals is a big barrier. Our science and engineering programs have long relied on the energy, skills, and enthusiasm of students from other nations, yet U.S. students seem reluctant to apply to fill the posts left empty by the absence of foreign students.

Anyone interested in education, defined very broadly, is surely concerned about the crisis in education, in all its manifestations. But as long as we have such disparate descriptions of what is wrong with education, can we expect a coherent approach to any solutions? What can any one, or group, of us do to help address these issues?

Well, let me suggest the first step that virtually all physicists and physics teachers can take to begin addressing this crisis, or these crises. We first need to acknowledge our own contributions to the problems. Then we need to change our behavior in some way. Until we do that, we will remain members of the cacophony that blames others and calls for someone else to change his or her behavior.

If you teach physics in a high school, have you ever felt good that the students in your senior level physics class were the best students in the school? And that you preferred to teach this select group, filtered by a succession of math and science prerequisites, than you were to teach a larger group of students, including those with a wider range of skills and interests. What contribution are we making to scientific literacy if we inappropriately focus our attention on the top echelon of students to the exclusion of the majority?

If you teach at the college level, have you ever designed and given an exam intended to produce a class average of 40% or 50% to display that your students still had a lot to learn? Have you participated in the process by which schools of engineering expect physics classes to winnow the number of students who proceed to advanced engineering courses? Have you ever discouraged one of your top physics majors from pursuing a career in high school physics teaching because he or she was too good not to go to graduate school? Have you ever avoided teaching physics to students in the school of education? Have you wondered how, without a good grounding in physics, prospective grade school teachers would be able to instill in their young students an appreciation of the wonders of science?

As a faculty person in a research institution, do you focus more on interacting with faculty at your peer institutions than on the quality of education for the undergraduate students in your own institution? Have you ever devoted a sabbatical to improve the effectiveness of your undergraduate teaching? Have you ever wondered how to measure, in some objective way, how effective you are as a teacher?

If each of us accepts some responsibility for at least “one of the crises in education,” we might be able to make some progress or improvement in this miasma.