Changing Course: Improving Interest in STEM
Abstract (TL;DR):
Our current convention for teaching children the sciences is ineffective. The rigidity of school curricula causes a decline in interest, in multiple different countries, due to the lack of real-world relevance and/or a low quality of education. In order to fix this, we have to break out of the belief that children are not capable of learning complex topics and, instead, meet the desire that they naturally have for an intellectual challenge through creative instruction.
Happy 2020!
A young boy at the age of ten used to think that science wasn’t interesting at all. It was that thing that doctors used to cure people. It was pretty hard, requiring tons of memorization of vocabulary and the most annoying attention to detail. But a year later, he himself was considering becoming a doctor. The difficulty was a thrill – a challenge to him to see how deep he could go. It turned into a respect for the scientists that came before and managed to discover all of these things, sometimes by themselves. Before the boy knew it, he was fourteen, knowing facts not only about the human body, but also the physical world. Somehow the experiences of high-school gave the adolescent a greater awareness of the veil between the technical and real; the numbers and the world that uses those numbers. It wasn’t too long before the pursuits of science led to a desire for a deeper dive. After educating himself on the requirements of becoming and practicing as a doctor and looking at the various fields within science, he decided on a new path. Upon moving on to college, he decided that engineering would give him great satisfaction…even though there would be many difficult nights afoot.
No matter your age or your affiliation with the sciences, you have likely asked the question that this young man asked: why is science so hard?
The question, from some, is a hypothetical one. They might implicitly understand why science is difficult, but can’t explain it. But for most, that answer doesn’t come easy. But the answer can be explained in simple terms.
Science is a collection of study since the beginnings of our practice of utilizing the scientific method. We collect new knowledge every day. As such, the depth of information that exists makes it hard to widely communicate and even harder to learn.
This is a problem – one that will catch up to us sooner than later if we do not start putting priority on reviewing how scientists, educational institutions and science communicators educate the masses.
With that said, I want to make the argument that splitting the sciences into multiple disciplines, such as chemistry, biology and physics, is not the most effective way of educating the most people and will reduce their interest. Instead, I believe, that keeping the sciences as unified as possible, explaining the difficult sciences in simple ways at first and scaling that difficulty up with mastery, is the best course. In fact, overall, it could make both communicating and learning science significantly easier and more enjoyable.
Convention vs. Convenience
I said earlier that priority should be put on reviewing how we do things, or, in other words, how we organize. But before I explain, what I feel, is a more effective method of organization, I want to define organization itself.
When we organize something, we give it “order”. But what is the best way of ordering something in a way that makes sense to as many people as possible - as is the goal in educating a large populace? The answer is in adhering to “convention”. Convention, in fact, could be defined as the order that makes sense to a general population. For example, if you are organizing freshly-washed socks, then you could organize them according to color, size, brand, etc. Most would not organize them, say, by mixing different colors and/or sizes. In this, the former method of organization is seen as “conventional”, while the latter is “unconventional”.
In this case, our current convention is that the science is best taught through multiple related subjects. I believe that this convention is effective, but only to individuals that benefit from focusing on particular disciplines, like researchers, who painstakingly advance a particular discipline of science, or teachers, who, often, only teach one discipline at a time. It, unfortunately, is far less effective for the high-school student, for example, who suffers through at least six different STEM classes in their four years.
That time could be spent much more efficiently by teaching real-world applications of those STEM theories and laws (introductory engineering) and crucial non-STEM classes (economics/civics). Worse, in the process of focusing on one or two disciplines instead of a holistic view, learners can’t grasp one of the most important things about science - its continuity.
Science is not only vast, but it builds on past science. Chemistry, biology and physics didn’t exist until there was enough potential, from past theory, for researchers to build the disciplines of chemistry, biology and physics. This is not to say that, before these disciplines, everyone was operating from a solitary line of scientific thought until they didn’t. In fact, there were still many schools of thought. However, in 2020, we have collected knowledge, created new disciplines and organized a global scientific community. It is now time to figure out how to bring those disciplines together to create a convention that is beneficial to the education of the general populace as well as streamlining that process for communicators and educators.
Order and Chaos
So, with my thoughts established, I want to demonstrate how things are done now. Take a proverbial walk with me for a second and let’s see how things work in mathematics and science.
When teachers begin educating a child in mathematics, they usually start with simple counting and arithmetic. This turns to algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Then comes pre-calculus, calculus, multivariate calculus, and differential equations.
For general science, on the other hand, children begin developing basic critical thinking based on what they observe. As they question the natural world and develop their curiosity and ideas, they become more amenable to receiving answers to their questions in the form of general science. This, eventually, develops into biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences. Next, divisions of those categories result, such as physiology, anatomy, genetics, organic chemistry and geology.
But then something interesting happens: mathematics, which, originally, was built as a tool for the sciences, returns home and combines with the sciences. This results in the specialties of the modern era, such as engineering and quantum mechanics. And guess what? These have their own disciplines, such as mechanical, electrical, computer and biomedical engineering and theoretical physics.
As science grows, there is no reason to doubt that more disciplines will be created. There is beauty in the sequential branching of easier subjects into harder ones…but does that sound like “order” to you? In our current convention, many might answer that it does seem ordered. But, without a doubt, this lineup of classes is intimidating, especially to someone without that much interest or motivation.
“Developmentally Appropriate Practice”
While science is implicitly hard to teach due to its own depth, its even harder to learn because what was once simple in elementary school magnifies in difficulty by the time one is in college. However, as I said in the beginning, science is naturally difficult. We should not be shying away from difficulty and avoiding the education of complex scientific content. But, when we’re educating children, we do. And that’s a problem.
Specifically, the problem is not the start of science education, where children build critical thinking skills. Here, a child’s natural curiosity and hunger to know new things extends a proverbial baton to any educator. The problem is the inflexible curricula used to teach them.
Curricula before and including the Next Generation Science Standards are based on the belief that a child’s cognition develops in specific stages. “At this age, a student should know this”, “in this grade, students can learn that”. In other words, the argument that informs our current convention is that children can’t learn certain things because they are “not developed enough” to learn those things until, suddenly, they are developed enough - the phenomenon known as “developmentally appropriate practice” (DAP).
Adhering exclusively to DAP, I believe, is a grave underestimation of children and factually wrong. Research by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham finds that children do not learn in discrete stages. That is, a child doesn’t suddenly attain the ability to understand something according to their age. There is far more variability than that. For example, a child can understand something on one day and not understand it the next. Furthermore, for topics they do understand, they might provide many different explanations. This means, any method of teaching that is inflexible risks a significant percentage of children missing out on the learning process. It also means that children have far more potential than is appreciated.
In moving away from a strict, developmentally appropriate practice, we can introduce more complexity. My sentiments are mirrored in Willingham’s research: there is no content that is inappropriate for a child to learn. In fact, there are multiple reasons that a child may not understand something, not just difficulty, as many today might think. Given the necessary background knowledge or the proper presentation, then there isn’t anything that a child can’t learn (Willingham, 2008, p. 39).
Children are the Key
So, why am I emphasizing childhood education so much? Because children seek an intellectual challenge rarely seen in adults. However, as children grow, the quality of their education and whether they see real-life relevance in what they’re learning can make or break how they look at science as teenagers and adults. In the cases where the education does not adequately meet the challenge they seek or they see science as irrelevant toward their personal development as they grow into adolescence, interest in science naturally declines (Potvin & Hasni, 2014, p. 787).
Sourced from Potvin & Hasni, 2014, p. 786
According to this research, the conventional methods of education are causing interest in the sciences drops like a stone among multiple nations. The important note to take from this is that timing matters. If motivation is not established early enough through flexible, challenging curricula, that motivation may never be established.
“If you wait until you are certain that the children will understand every nuance of a lesson, you will likely wait too long to present it.”
Can it be done?
So the only question now is the elephant in the room: “Has teaching children complex topics been tested before?” As you might (or might not) have expected, yes! In fact, an experiment done in Australia brought one high school chemistry teacher in to teach children in fourth grade, from three different schools, about atomic theory (Haeusler & Donovan, 2017, pg. 8). This teacher skirted the conventional way of teaching atoms, focusing first on matter, and, instead, used the Periodic Table. By allowing children to interact with samples themselves, they were able to make first-hand observations about the weight, size, valency and even the electrical conductivity of elements.
The results after the fact? Only one child in each of the three schools thought that science was too difficult (Haeusler & Donovan, 2017, pg. 12) and their retention of the information, after approximately eight weeks had passed, was strong (Haeusler & Donovan, 2017, pg. 20). Moreover, the instruction by this teacher was only for ten hours total, with one hour per week of instruction. This displays a massive amount of potential; years and years of this type of creative instruction can begin to stack and lead to a greater foundation for science education. Better foundation leads to less work teaching and less work teaching allows for resources to be allotted elsewhere, such as applications of STEM and non-STEM classes.
But, even beyond these researched examples, there are examples in popular culture. Wired, for example, has a series called 5 Levels, which takes one concept and explains them at 5 different levels of increasing difficulty, often starting with children that have little to no knowledge of the concept. Shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Bill Nye Saves The World feature Bill Nye, a well-known science communicator, as he attempts to impart knowledge of complex topics to a general audience, including children. This, of course, says nothing about all of the literature and study guides that have been made to help children learn any number of things.
Flux’s Role
Creativity and flexibility are keys to effective education, even if your audience are already adults. In this, I see Flux as a place of opportunity. I approach education by starting with the nanoscopic. Atomic theory forms the foundation for all science, which is why I’ve began there in 2019. In 2020, I plan on expanding further on these topics and moving closer to the things in the world that we can see, such as the planets and stars.
So, to close, Happy New Year! Look forward to an address, providing more specific plans for this year. But, above all, don’t underestimate your ability to learn. Science communicators and teachers will always be on your side.
Citation:
Haeusler, C., & Donovan, J. (2017). Challenging the Science Curriculum Paradigm: Teaching Primary
Children Atomic-Molecular Theory. Research in Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-017-9679-2. Retrieved from https://eprints.usq.edu.au/33762/14/Haeusler_Donovan_AV.pdf.
Potvin, P., & Hasni, A. (2014). Analysis of the Decline in Interest Towards School Science and Technology from Grades 5 Through 11. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 23(6), 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-014-9512-x. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10956-014-9512-x.pdf.
Willingham, D. T. (2008). Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice? American Educator, 32(2). Retrieved from https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/willingham_1.pdf.