In their article "Improving Science Teaching in the United States" (51, Winter 1993), E. A. Marek and Wayne Rowe certainly have their hearts in the right place when they praise the values of hands-on, constructive laboratory science experience over the traditional read-the-chapter-and-answer-the-questions-at-the-end syndrome. Unfortunately, there are good reasons to suspect that the "learning cycle" experience they encourage so strongly can have, at best, only limited success and that, moreover, to concentrate on this panacea is to miss a much bigger piece of the problem.
The reason most teachers use the antiquated, didactic method is that they are poorly prepared both in teaching and (more important) in science. A great number of teachers were pushed into teaching science: first, by growing student populations and, second, by shrinking ones that provided less demand for classes in Latin, German, Art, and so on. Younger teachers were let go, and senior ones were given the option of retiring or learning a new field--on the job. And, although there are notable exceptions, a majority of elementary school teachers have poor to nonexistent backgrounds in science; developing a good science program in the face of all other demands on their time and resources cannot be their first concern. Because so many teachers themselves have never had coursework or experience in science, it is optimistic to think that they can transmit science effectively to students. Marek and Rowe begin by setting up the didactic, read-the-chapter teacher as an all too real straw man. The aphorisms that extol the effectiveness of doing over telling teaching strategy are generally valid. But Marek and Rowe do not say how to ensure that hands on activities will not be mindless, irrelevant, time-wasting, and expensive. Without this assurance, "hands-on" becomes only the latest in a series of pedagogical fads, destined for doom within a decade.
The key element here is the quality of educational materials, and I will argue that improving them is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to improve learning standards for science in the United States. Why? Because most teachers learn their science from the books in their classrooms. (I do not include those with strong college backgrounds in science, but those are mostly high school and some junior high science teachers.) We could improve science education in three ways: we could send all teachers back to school for two years; we could give every teacher in the country extensive inservice training; or we could require educational materials to meet higher standards and be written by people who actually know something about the field. Of the three options, the first two are impractical and prohibitively expensive. The third is necessary.
My characterization of the problem appears to slam the competence of an entire industry. But as Harriet Tyson Bernstein (1988) points out, the fault lies with a system driven by the marketplace and fueled by the need to turn out copycat versions of the pabulum that is not only expected but mandated by a host of Byzantine and often conflicting local and state regulations and tastes. Her book is an excellent overview of the situation; here, I want to comment on the competence issue. The relevance of this to Marek and Rowe's article is that it won't matter how hands-on any new instructional program is if it turns out to be like the present crop.
I am not a specialist in science education; but I have taught science from sixth grade through graduate students, and I was one of the writers and editors of the new California Science Framework K-12. I served last year on the panel that adopted science materials for grades K-8 in California and am a director of the National Center for Science Education. In these capacities during the past ten years I have had the opportunity to review a great number of science materials and to do a lot of rewarding work with teachers, publishers, and state offi cials. I have been glad to see considerable improvement in the quality of prose for students and in assistance for teachers whose specialty is not science. But the content is just as terrible as it ever was, mostly because the people who write these books don't know the field and don't seek the advice of those who do.
How else would you explain a sentence like "Many scientists believe that large scaly animals called dinosaurs lived on the earth millions of years ago?" (Right: the first three words function as a disclaimer for the last four, which offend Christian fundamentalists.) Many textbook writers can't tell heat from temperature, force from energy, or reptiles from amphibians. They have no concept of the history of the universe, the earth, or its life, and they think that there are three "kinds" of rocks. (These should not be taught as "kinds of rocks," but as processes that account for the formation and change of rocks.) In virtually every lesson on fossils from kindergarten to high school, students make an arts-and-crafts "mold" of something in plaster or jello, instead of learning or doing something useful or interesting. Textbook writers create new points in geologic time ("near the end of the Devonian at the End of the Pernian" [sic]). They divide organisms into "simple" and "complex," and into "cold-blooded" and "warm-blooded." One life-science text even says (three times!) that a fish has scales so it won't leak. Where did these people go to school, and in which century?
These are simple errors, but we are not talking about simple problems here. Space does not permit explication of how out of touch typical textbook writers are with the overarching ideas of science and how the work in its various fields is done. This is the real problem: the people developing these books are clueless. Look at the masthead of a typical science textbook. How many names are of real scientists, familiar with the field? Generally, none or a couple at most. Today I received a major publisher's 7th-grade life-science book written by seven authors, only one of whom holds a college post. There are five "contributing writers"; three are professional writers, two are "science instructors." Thirty-six "content reviewers" are listed; none are scientists, all are "science instructors." This is not to say that these people are not knowledgeable, but they are writers and science educators, not scientists. Theoretically, they could know science very well. But if they do, why are the books as bad as they are? And, given this, why don't they ask for help from real scientists?
My colleagues and I once ran an informal check on a few names of known scientists that we recognized from mastheads. When we talked with these people, the typical story went like this: A publisher contacted the scientist and asked for a review of a chapter or two. The manuscript was sent, and the scientist pointed out some serious faults and suggested changes. The publishers sent their thanks and a check, and the suggestions were ignored. The scientist's name turned up on the masthead--and, we sometimes found, on the masthead of other books by the same publisher that the scientist had not even seen.
Make no mistake that the putative authors of textbooks are responsible for the final product. The published version is a committee effort by in-house writers, as discovered more than once by William J. Bennetta, pub lisher of The Textbook Letter (P.O. Box 51, Sausalito, CA 94966), which is well worth perusal.
The point is that we can hardly expect new, activity-centered curricula to be any more effective than the old ones have been, especially if they are developed by the same people--although they may be more fun for students and more user-friendly to some teachers. But all this activity comes at a price, and the price is time, space, effort, and money. A larger price is the loss of opportunity to transmit better material in a shorter time. When students spend two class periods making plaster casts of sea shells, what have they learned? Most fossils are not molds and casts, and they don't form that way anyhow. And "molds and casts" certainly have limited relevance to any ideas, con cepts, or issues in historical geology. Activity centered learning is a fine idea, but such programs require careful scrutiny. Marek and Rowe point out that using activities merely to demonstrate an obvious point, "cookbook fashion," is not an effective use of hands-on time. Open ended inquiry is preferable, but not all concepts lend themselves well to it, and it requires teachers who can knowingly and sensitively guide students in their inquiry processes while ensuring that some real concepts are being transmitted. I must admit considerable disappointment in these efforts submitted to the California science panel for adoption in 1992.
Another challenge is that about half of science (astronomy, geology, meteorology, oceanography, and much of biology) is not experimental, but historical. Designing experiments and activities for these fields is harder to do effectively. Much of the knowledge is not experimental, but experiential. It comes from reading, watching, observing, and thinking. This does not mean it can't be as much fun or as rewarding to learn; it simply means that no monolithic formula of the "scientific method" will be able to accommodate it.
For example, some "hands-on" programs teach concepts of predation and cryptic coloration to students by having them strew green and yellow buttons on a lawn and see which color is better represented when students have one minute to collect as many buttons as they can. This is fun, but obvious, and scarcely merits the time to do it, except that students may internalize cryptic coloration (if they're not having too much fun). But does it increase the students' knowledge of nature? Perhaps it would be more rewarding to watch a nature show in which actual animals had been filmed. The teacher, of course, would need to stop the video frequently, ask questions, stimulate discussion, in volve written or group activities and problem solving, and so on. The benefit here would be that students would engage in far more than one activity with a single point and they would probably learn about more than just cryptic coloration.
Marek and Rowe stress the "logical system" of constructivist science generally embodied in the "science processes" (observing, measuring recording, inferring, controlling variables, and so on) that have become the bread and butter of science education. But these processes, as important as they are to working with science, are only tools and must not be mistaken for ideas. The "whole real guts" of science, to paraphrase C. H Waddington, is the theories, theories, the overarching ideas that unite facts and concepts and set the program for real investigation. Until the people which write instructional materials and educate teachers learn to center on the theories of science, rather than those of pedagogy, we can probably expect little improvement in science education.
The last point is especially important to CSICOP, because there are an alarming number of people in this country who cannot distinguish science from astrology, religious belief, crystal healing, or occultism. This is not because they have not had enough hands-on activities dropping objects of different densities off tabletops or making plaster casts of seashells. It is because they have no sense of the construction of science.
They do not realize how energy is conserved and transformed and what this means to physical phenomena. They do not know why tectonics explains nearly all geological phenomena, from mountain-building, earth-quakes, and volcanoes to the distribution of plants and animals on earth and even to the existence of oceans and atmospheres. They have no idea that evolution explains not only the relationships of living and fossil organisms but also why the structures of organisms are built as they are and how their functions have changed over time. And they do not understand the relationships among these overarching theories and the fields that they innervate. And that is because science is not taught this way in the United States of America. If it were, we would have a scientifically literate citizenry, and we would have classrooms of students filled not only with the anticipation of activity or the anticipation of discovery but with the anticipation of understanding.
Science for All Americans. Washington, DC.: American Association for the Advance ment of Science, 1989.
Science Framework for California Public Schools, K-12. Sacramento, Calif.: California Department of Education, 1990.
Tyson-Bernstein, Harriet. 1988. A Conspi racy of Good Intentions: America's Textbook Fiasco. Washington, D. C.: Council for Basic Education.
(Sysop Note: Any strange or incorrect hyphenizations can be attributed to our OCR program, not the author.)