Making Science Make Sense

Bayer Facts of Science Education Survey

America's education system is currently involved in myriad efforts to strengthen science teaching at all levels, from elementary school through college. These efforts have arisen out of the realization that after the last great reform effort in science education - the so-called post-Sputnik era of the late 1950's and early 1960's - pre-college science education languished, and many of the improvements of that era lapsed or were abandoned.

Fresh concerns about America's science education performance have come from a series of national commissions and studies over the last decade. Reports like 1983's A Nation At Risk have criticized this neglect and strongly urged a new emphasis on science and mathematics education. Reinforcing these criticisms are often troubling results from periodic national tests of our children's science knowledge, and from international studies comparing their science ability with that of children from other developed and developing nations.

Scientists, business leaders, and educators now agree that more effort should be placed on K-12 science education, with increased emphasis at the elementary school level. They concur that the skills and techniques of pre-college science teachers should be strengthened and expanded, and that science teaching resources, including laboratory equipment and information technologies, should be renewed and improved. Most importantly, they want the teaching of science itself to move from fact-intensive, textbook-based, lecture-driven science to idea-intensive, experiment-based science learning through project teamwork that is overseen and orchestrated by a skilled professional science teacher well schooled in and comfortable with science. This shift in approach is often called hands-on, inquiry-based science education, and it is described by the National Research Council's National Science Education Standards as follows:

• Student inquiry in the science classroom encompasses a range of activities. Some activities provide a basis for observation, data collection, reflection, and analysis of firsthand events and phenomena. Other activities encourage the critical analysis of secondary sources - including media, books, and journals in a library.

• In successful science classrooms, teachers and students collaborate in the pursuit of ideas, and students quite often initiate new activities related to an inquiry. Students formulate questions and devise ways to answer them, they collect data and decide how to represent it, organize data to generate knowledge, and they test the reliability of the knowledge they have generated. As they proceed, students explain and justify their work to themselves and to one another, learn to cope with problems, such as the limitations of equipment, and react to challenges posed by the teacher and by classmates. Students assess the efficacy of their efforts - they evaluate the data they have collected, re-examining or collecting more if necessary, and making statements about the generalizability of their findings. They plan and make presentations to the rest of the class about their work and accept and react to the constructive criticism of others.

• At all stages of inquiry, teachers guide, focus, challenge, and encourage student learning. Successful teachers are skilled observers of students, as well as knowledgeable about science and how it is learned. Teachers match their actions to the particular needs of the students, deciding when and how to guide - when to demand more rigorous grappling by the students, when to provide information, when to provide particular tools, and when to connect students with other sources.

• In the science classroom envisioned by the Standards, effective teachers continually create opportunities that challenge students and promote inquiry by asking questions.

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