Science Education Standards: Can New Recommendations Help 'Mediocre To Awful' States?

This may come as a surprise to many readers, but the USA scores rather poorly in science and math education in comparison to many other countries.  And independent think tanks rank many states’ science standards as poor to awful. 
Several states present evolution as unsettled science—“according to many scientists, biological evolution occurs through natural selection,” say New York State's standards.  Such iffy, wishy-washy standards are a green light for some poor science teaching.  Good old Lincolnland gets a D for its science standards, which don’t even use the word evolution, although things are couched in statements like “describe processes by which organisms change over time using evidence from comparative anatomy and physiology, embryology, the fossil record, genetics and biochemistry”.  This was done “to be less controversial”, as if evolution is still a matter for debate. 

Standards are a very tricky thing.  If you remove standards and just let teachers teach, a lot of good things are going to happen, but a lot of bad things will happen too.  You’d be amazed at how many high school teachers are iffy to downright negative about evolution; many of them actually think in all fairness alternatives should be taught so students can make up their own minds, as if things like this are up to the individual.  In Missouri students may soon be able to avoid any subject, any topic, that might be troubling or bring them to question their core beliefs.  The GOP platform in Texas wants to abolish critical thinking entirely!  Is the USA on a path to pig-ignornance?

So high science standards are important because they determine how curricula and courses are shaped, however if you mandate too many things, then it becomes a check list for your average teacher.  Really good teachers will figure out how to educate no matter what.  In my youth the state of New York had regents exams, state-wide achievement exams in a number of subject areas, and if you were college bound you took these exams, and if you passed them you got a NY State Regents diploma.  We also got a regular high school diploma, but it was a consolation prize.  Our best teachers figured out how to push us along such that the regents exams were the easiest thing we’d done all year.  The worst teachers plodded along topic by topic to cover all the “necessary” things.  Terrible.  So science standards should present levels of knowledge, concepts, but not too many specifics. 

Still a great deal about science education rests with having really good teachers.  You see science is not just a subject area, it’s a process, but many high school teachers have never done science.  And if you don’t know how some knowledge is acquired, how we know various things, what is taught can begin to sound like “this is what we believe” to which others will say, “well, we believe something different”.  A science teacher that hasn’t done science is just like having a swimming coach who can’t swim.  Put that way it seems pretty ludicrous doesn’t it?  You may wonder why this is the case, and the problem is really quite simple, a 4-year education degree has so many education requirements that the amount of science students take is minimal.  There isn’t enough time in a 4 year degree to do anything else.  TPP was assigned to a blue ribbon committee to consider how to upgrade teacher education.  Since no one else was offering any suggestions, TPP suggested that all high school teachers get a regular undergraduate degree in their subject area, and then get certified by getting a master’s degree in education.  In other words, treat them and educate them like professionals, a radical idea.  The idea of having no undergrad degrees in teacher education was too much for this committee to deal with, and it has been reported that they continued to meet, to no apparent success, but you-know-who never found out about any subsequent meetings. 

If a professional educational plan were adopted students on their way to teaching science would have more courses in science and have time and the opportunity to do some research, to experience the process of science, and without question this changes how you view and how you teach science.  Our biology department actually looked into such a change, but we were told it was a state mandate that we have an undergraduate degree in teacher education.  Maybe that committee did have an effect! 

Botanical Santa

Ho, ho, ho! A colleague is teaching plant diversity and unless you can put the plant in students' hot little hands, it's not very good instruction, but you can't just run out to the local market, or even the local garden shop, and buy heterosporous ferns, or even more, esoteric plants, like the clubmoss quillwort. So the Phactor packaged up a care package (Psilotum, Isoetes, Marsilea, Regnellidium, Salvinia, Azolla). This is being done today because another colleague is going to be the mule and deliver the package. Oh those lucky kids. Now you may think, how generous, but now my colleague is in my debt, and the time will come when something he's got will be something the Phactor needs, and then comes the payback. Having specimens for students to study, to observe first hand, to take apart and examine, is what basic science teaching is all about, and if you ever hear someone say, "Why, Prof. Phactor, if we want them to see something like that, we show them an image", on a computer screen (!), well, run away, because this is somebody who doesn't know a bloody thing about teaching science. With an instructor like that, you don't get to make observations, you don't develop any observational skills, and your understanding of the organism will be limited, 2nd rate, and incomplete. Your instructor doesn't know, and can't be bothered to figure out, that real observation does not come from looking at an image obtained by somebody who did make an observation. And for these reasons botanists help each other out. By the way, he also wanted an Angiopteris, a modern day desendant of Carboniferous ferns, but they damn big (fronds 2+ meters long), slow to propagate vegetatively and difficult to propagate sexually, so he'll have to wait.

Generating student interest in botany

A long time colleague used to say, "I'm going to teach them ecology if I have to rip their little heads off and pour it in." Such practices are widely frowned upon among the more enlightened members of our profession, but short of pouring it in, you can't make students learn anything that they are not interested in. Therefore the first and most vital step in teaching, especially subjects like botany and ecology that are viewed by many students as "boring" is to generate interest. Here's a nice post about how an aquarium visit generated student interest in ecology (and a link to a freebe publication), but generalized there is a lesson for all educators. Put something interesting in their hot little hands. The most successful general biology lab for non-science students the Phactor ever constructed consisted of a series of stations each with some intriguing problem that posed questions to be answered via a simple investigation by a small group of students.

Bad day for biology teachers

Yesterday seems to have been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad day for a couple of biology teachers. However, in only one of the two events was what they taught relevant. A biology teacher here in Lincolnland admits that he was teaching creationism in his high school biology class, but odds are the school board will tell him to never ever do it again and he'll continue teaching a horrid version of biology, rolling his eyes whenever mentioning that some biologists actually think something as bereft of evidence and as improbable as evolution could be true, teaching that will do more harm than the blatant creationism that any half intelligent high school student can see clear through. Please, please, please, let him not be a graduate of our university. Of course there'll be the usual "evolution is just as much of a religion" comments, but creationism isn't just wrong, it's useless; you can't use it to do science, and that's lost on all the critics of science. In Kentucky a female biology teacher was caught messing around with a high school student in a car. Scheesh! Get a motel room. No dobut about it, she'll be fired, and in all probability she was the better of the two at teaching biology. Maybe she graduated from Northwestern?