Four days ago I completed my last day of employment at the National
Science Teachers Association. For the past 21 months I have been directing
the SS&C project and serving as NSTA director of Special Projects. For the
15 years from 1980-1995, I was NSTA’s Executive Director. I taught high
school physics and mathematics for 6 years and was a college physics
faculty member, department chair, and dean for 17 years. For the three
years before joining NSTA in 1980 I was a program officer in the division
of science education development and research at the National Science
Foundation. I have been PI, project director, or provided oversight to
some $100 million in private and government grant projects.
Now having time to peruse TEECH, I am reminded of the vast chasm between
image and reality in teacher professional development and its “leadership.”
I am appalled at the extent to which jargon-filled language so pervades
this leadership, language almost totally devoid of depth of meaning or
significance. I read strings of words placed together so that they are
grammatically correct, but convey nothing.
Schools are organized so that specialists can be given part of the school
day to help young people learn knowledge, skills, and understandings in
various specialities of natural science, mathematics, social science, the
arts, home economics, technologies, languages, the humanities, and health
and physical education. There is precious little time for each of these
specialists to achieve their goals. Yet we have science educators exuding
with arrogant confidence the call for science teachers to accomplish goals
for all of these specialties, when in point of fact such teachers not only
lack competence in most such areas outside of science, they are not even
competent in science. Sadly, many of our science education leaders today
also show little evidence of being competent in their knowledge of science,
and like the dilettante, flutter among the non-science fields which they
would impose upon science teachers and their students in ours schools.
The National Science Foundation, which once provided a strong link between
research scientists and science teaching, has lost that link. NSF science
education staff are now largely drawn from the ranks of science educators,
or even from the ranks of other non-science government agencies. Much of
the support for science education, once targeted to specific problem areas,
is now directed toward so-called “systemic” reform. In truth such funds
are largely political, and little of this support ever reaches the levels
or problems where it might help improve science or math education. The
SI’s constitute a colossal waste of federal funds, with minuscule evidence
of achieving anything worthwhile. NSF administrative inconsistencies and
incompetent substantive interference assures that those SI’s that might
have a chance of succeeding also fail.
I was one of those who initiated the development of science education
standards, and I was the strongest advocate for having those standards of
natural science set by the National Research Council (I served on the
Chair’s Advisory Board). My goal was for the science content to be
specified by scientists, not by the educators who do not know science.
Then let science teachers and competent science educators specify how and
when the science would be learned by students. When leader after leader of
the NRC standards effort quit in frustration, and when it was clear that
huge sums had been spent with little achieved, a few key scientists,
including Bruce Alberts, took on the task of dealing with the science
themselves. But then they turned the rest over to the science educators.
The result, although a compromise, still is heavily weighted toward the
non-science. The relationship of the Benchmarks to the NSES is another
interesting story, but not appropriately told here. Only recently did I
find my personally recorded audio tapes of the organizing meeting for the
NSES. When these are transcribed they will add a notably different view of
the history of the development of the NSES.
The real challenge in science education is to find a way to provide depth
of understanding of the fundamentals of science to science teachers.
Without those understandings, all of the jargon-filled statements of goals
are futile aspirations.
Let me give a few examples of reality. There are many more such examples
I could also provide, but let these suffice for the moment.
I have observed science teachers who aspire to teach higher order
thinking, and aspire to teach science in the context of global, societal
and personal issues, and who would interrelate the sciences with all other
areas of thought and human activity, and would do so to spur social action
for the good of humankind. But when given a block of wood and a metric
ruler, these science teachers ask, “What do I do when the edge of the block
falls between two numbered marks on the scale?” These science teachers
cannot even make a simple linear measurement! They have no idea whatsoever
of what it means to calibrate an instrument, or the difference between
precision and accuracy. But they want to teach higher order thinking! And
they want to look at situations where the science is so complex and
confounded, no sense can be made of it, even often by teams of competent
research scientists.
I have observed such science teachers struggle to find a way to make a
light bulb light in the classic situation described so eloquently by Arnold
Arons in his classic paper of June 1973, “Toward a Wider Public
Understanding of Science” (American Journal of Physics, Volume 41, p.
769-782).
I designed a test, multiple choice with justification, consisting of 20
items with 5 choices each. This test measures what any student should
understand in the natural sciences at the end of grade 9. It was created
to reflect the knowledge called for in the NSES, and with depth of
understanding. A person must tell which answer is correct, and why. And
he or she must tell why the other answers are wrong. When this test was
administered to 47 science teachers who had taught all of the content in
this test, much of which reflects laboratory activity, the average score
was 4 out of 20, and the high score was 10 out of 20. If you think you can
do better, then I challenge you to download the test from our web site:
(http://www.gsh.org/nsta_ssandc/pdf/assessment/test300.pdf)
This is an adobe acrobat reader file, and you can download the reader free.
It will work on any platform (MAC, UNIX, PC, Windows, etc.)
Two other examples. Before going to NSF, I taught science in summer
institutes. One such institute was designed for science faculty at
colleges. It was for a college science faculty member who had fewer than
16 credit hours in his or her subject field. These colleges were leading
sources for science teachers. We filled our institute every summer.
Finally, I wrote a paper awhile back in which I used sophomore level
calculus (A Taylor’s series in several variables, so that it used partial
derivatives). When I submitted the article to JRST, the major publication
of researchers in science education, it was rejected for the following
reason: “95% of our readers would not be able to understand the mathematics
used.” Such, apparently, is the level of PhD scholarship among leaders in
science education research!
What do we really need to do?
We need to provide the opportunity for science teachers to learn the
natural sciences in the context of situations that help them see how
students can best learn that science. Thus, we need to merge the best hard
and undisputed empirical evidence on how students learn science, with an
experience of learning what is fundamental and important in those sciences.
This means that we do not approach reform from the standpoint of
theoretical frameworks of every kind, most offering no predictions subject
to experimental test. Nor do we proffer non-science philosophical garbage
that denies the universality of natural law and by its very character
proudly proclaims that it cannot be subject to such empirical test. Nor do
we focus on social action in areas WE personally value, imposing our
personal, political and social values on students for whom we have been
entrusted to teach the natural sciences with a reasonable measure of
objectivity inherent to the process of good science.
For those of you who know me, you may well find this statement to be to
mellow and mild, and worry that I have lost the aggressive and abrasive
fire I once exhibited. Well, it happens to all of us as we get older.
Bill Aldridge
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