Seminar offers further thoughts on scientific literacy
by Irma S. Jarcho and John L. Roeder The Columbia University Seminar on Scientific Literacy heard a presentation on Wednesday, 18 December 1996 from two science teachers in the Danbury, CT, public schools: James Bacus, who teaches in the elementary school, and Helga Jensen-Ruopp, who tea ches in the high school. Each discussed the practical problems encountered in efforts to make an extremely heterogeneous student body scientifically literate. Serving as moderator was J. William Maben, also of the Danbury public schools as well as a devoted member of the Seminar.
Bacus expressed the belief that, despite attempts to pare down the curriculum, it is still "overstuffed." Attempts are being made, he said, to align the curriculum with State and Federal standards. The curriculum offered in Danbury is termed TIMM -- Teaching Integrated Math and Science. Students write in journals about such topics as "the most important thing you learned in science today" and "why it was important." There are also strong attempts to involve the family -- e.g., Saturday sessions for parents and siblings -- and parents are asked for their assessments.
Members of the Seminar were provided a list of science courses offered students at the Danbury High School -- an impressive list including not just the introductory courses in each discipline but also such offerings as marine biology and "The Human Body in Health and Disease" (in the biological sciences); and astronomy, "Science and the Environment," honors physics, honors chemistry, and environmental chemistry (in the physical sciences).
Jensen-Ruopp detailed the increasing difficulty levels of the courses. Where reading levels are a problem, the class is team taught with special education teachers. The difficulties in reading comprehension are great: as Jensen-Ruopp said, "They can read the words, but they do not understand what they mean." Community pressure forced the purchase of textbooks for each child. "After all, that's how you learn, isn't it, with books!" the parents must have thought.
These are schools struggling to be innovative and effective against tremendous handicaps and apparently succeeding. Honors students tutor other students and also learn how to handle ESL students. Teachers are paid to stay after school and tutor stude nts in a specific subject -- Tuesday is science day. No effort can possibly be wasted in a city where its students speak 52 languages!
UFT Supports Reform in NYC
Reporting at an earlier Seminar -- on 23 October 1996 -- on their efforts to reform science education in New York City were John Soldini and Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). According to Soldini, a UFT Vice President, today's stan dards are too low: what was acceptable in the past is no longer so, and improvement will not come when teachers lower themselves to students' standards. Now that the UFT has become part of the establishment, Soldini went on, it is past the stage of confr ontation, working for such reforms as school-based management. He added that it made no sense to reform science education in New York City's high schools without making comparable reforms beginning at the first grade as well.
According to Casey, whose specialty is the social sciences, yesterday's large, specialized, and impersonal high schools succeeded in training factory workers but are not functioning well today. He cited the UFT goal of reducing the size of schools to develop educational communities with better student-adult interactions (especially by reducing class size and using interdisciplinary approaches).
French Criticizes Standards
While some are busy reforming science education, using the National Science Education Standards as a framework, the Seminar's speaker on 21 November 1996, Physics Professor Anthony P. French of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was highly critical of the Standards, terming them "not practicable." French was critical of the Standards both pedagogically and scientifically. He found the argument mandating the need for scientific information to make daily choices to be specious and questioned the realism of expecting everyone "to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena." He also questioned whether "Scientific literacy . . . expands and deepens over a lifetime" and wondered whether listing things that "must" happen to achieve the vision of the Standards is the most attractive way to appeal to various groups for compliance. Concerning the Standards' emphasis on learning by inquiry, he lamented that this precludes learning from a textbook or teacher.
Regarding the science content of the Standards, French expressed amazement that K-4 students should develop "an understanding of light, heat, electricity and magnetism," only to find magnetism oversimplified as "attract and repel each other and certain kinds of other materials." The only "other mater ials" he could cite are diamagnetic, which he noted were not an example of everyday experience. He was similarly critical about the writing on an otherwise well-developed experiment on pendulums. Although later discussion refers to "six swings per 15 seconds," he berated the earlier reference to "six swings per second" (p. 146) as unrealistic. More generally, he criticized the Standards for not being written by professional scientists and lamented that many errors like this were caught in the draft version but not corrected. It's just as well that the authors of the Standards don't have their names on it, he said, expressing surprise that the National Academy of Sciences associated itself with it.
Questioning the realism of a body of science "all students will come to understand," French found himself agreeing more with Morris Shamos' Myth of Scientific Literacy (reviewed on page 27 of our Fall 1995 issue). In designing his own curriculum, French felt that he would not set his sights as high as those of the Standards. In fact, from his own view at MIT, he doesn't even feel that entering freshmen are scientifically literate in the sense of the Standards. A test extracted from the Force Concept Inventory of physics (David Hestenes, Malcolm Wells, and Gregg Swackhamer, Phys. Teach., 30(3), 141 (Mar 92)) shows considerable misconception about the forces acting on a projectile in flight in the absence of air resistance, he said.
A more severe problem than science literacy, French concluded, is literacy -- for both our science students and the writers of the National Science Education Standards. He seemed at a loss for easy answers to remedy the situation.
Gerardi Criticizes Lack of Understanding of Public
The first Seminar speaker of the 1996-97 season criticized scientists for not understanding the public. On 25 September 1996 Donna M. Gerardi, Director of the National Academy of Sciences' Office on Public Understanding of Science, chided scientists for not being knowledgeable about pop culture icons in terms of which people on the street define their culture -- and this, she said, doesn't include science. In general, she urged scientists to go out to the people they are trying to reach.
She also urged them to have a vision of the world as it ought to be, then address how present practice is geared toward achieving this vision. This involves working around the problem of celebrities proclaiming inaccuracies, she observed, and becoming aware of what is "out there" and sharing what works with others. One example of scientific outreach cited by Gerardi is the National Academy's newly-initiated Beyond Discovery program, which has published two- and eight-page handouts on such applied science topics as ozone depletion and the Global Positioning System.
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