kitchen table math, the sequel

In the Times:

Only weeks before a chemistry experiment sent a plume of fire across a Manhattan high school science lab, engulfing two students and leaving one with life-threatening burns, a federal safety agency issued a video warning of the dangers of the very same experiment, a common one across the country.

The agency, the United States Chemical Safety Board, distributed the video warning to its 60,000 subscribers, a spokeswoman, Hillary Cohen, said Friday, but it had no sure way to reach individual teachers at schools like Beacon High School on the Upper West Side. There on Thursday, Anna Poole, a young science teacher known for safety consciousness, used methanol as an accelerant to burn dishes of different minerals in the chemistry demonstration known as the Rainbow.

With about 30 students watching from their desks, a snakelike flame tore through the air, missing the students closest to the teacher’s desk, but enveloping Alonzo Yanes, 16, searing and melting the skin on his face and body, according to witnesses. He was in critical condition on Friday in the burn unit of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Myrna Manners, a hospital spokeswoman, said.

Another student, Julia Saltonstall, 16, saw her thin T-shirt burned off her torso in an instant as some of her long dark hair went up in smoke, her father said. Though she was no farther from the demonstration than Alonzo, she escaped with only first-degree burns.

[snip]

The safety board’s video, and an accompanying message, did not say the Rainbow demonstration should be banned, but warned that accidents have repeatedly occurred because of the volatile material involved.


“What we need to look at is why is this accident keeps happening across the country,” said Mary Beth Mulcahy, a former high school science teacher who is now an investigator with the safety board, which has documented at least seven similar accidents, including a 2006 case featured in the video that left a 15-year-old girl in Ohio, Calais Weber, with severe burns over more than 48 percent of her body. “What do we need to do to stop the cycle?”

As a 23-year-old teacher, Dr. Mulcahy added, she herself did the rainbow demonstration, unaware of the potential dangers. The visually exciting demonstration shows how different substances produce flames of different colors because of their varying properties. But she added, “I can’t imagine a teacher would do this demonstration if they knew the potential risk they were putting students in.”

Said Ms. Weber, now a pre-med student in Boston: “I read this article last night about the New York students and honestly, I cried. I can’t believe this keeps happening.”

NYTIMES

Headline and subhead in the March 31, 2010 issue of Education Week:

Added H.S. Science Courses Said To Yield Mixed Effect in Chicago
Policy did not boost college-going or grades, study finds

Critical thinking challenge: In the two lines above, which word seems out of place?^*


department of silver linings

Apparently, the term 'mixed' refers to the fact that after Chicago public schools required all students to take 3 science courses in order to graduate, many more students did indeed take 3 science courses prior to graduation.

Many students passed their classes with C’s and D’s, both before and after the policy was implemented, the researchers found. That suggests a low level of learning and engagement in the courses, they said.

Only 15 percent of students, the study says, completed three years of science with a B average or higher in those courses after the policy change. That was a modest 4-percentage-point increase compared with the period before the policy took effect.

Prior research, Mr. Montgomery said, shows that students who are truly gaining knowledge in courses earn grades of A or B.

“Before the policy, most students received C’s and D’s in their classes,” he said. “If they weren’t being successful with one or two years of science, why would we think they would be successful with three years of science, if we don’t pay attention to getting the students engaged?”

[snip]

In addition, the study found that students affected by the coursetaking policy were less likely on the whole to attend a four-year college, compared with their counterparts before the policy change. They were also less likely to remain in college.

“It seems clear to us that this was a first step. They now have students enrolled in these classes,” Mr. Montgomery said, noting the required science courses are the kinds that colleges look for on transcripts.

Effect of Chicago's Tougher Science Policy Mixed
By Dakarai I. Aarons
Education Week
Published in Print: March 31, 2010, as Added H.S. Science Courses Said to Yield Mixed Effect in Chicago

I'm sure college-going and grades will soar once they get students engaged.


^* answer: mixed

The Inner Life of the Cell

BioVisions at Harvard University

More here.

Dr. Novella discusses particular curricula, and then makes an observation based on his childrens' experience.

Another way in which a good sounding idea for science education has been poorly executed on average is the introduction of hands-on science. Ideas are supposed to be learned through doing experiments. However, textbook quality is generally quite low, and when executed by the average science teacher the experiments become mindless tasks, rather than learning experiences.

I have two daughters going through public school education in a relatively wealthy county in CT (so a better than average school system) and I have not been impressed one bit with the science education they are getting. Here is an example – recently my elder daughter had to conduct an experiment on lifesavers. OK, this is a bit silly, but I have no problem using a common object as the subject of the experiment, as long as the process is educational. The students had to test various aspects of the lifesavers – for example, does the color affect the time it takes to dissolve in water.

The execution of this “experiment” was simply pointless. They performed a single trial, with a single data point on each color, and obtained worthless results that could not reasonably confirm or deny any hypothesis. By my personal assessment, my daughter learned absolutely nothing from this exercise, and afterwards complained that she was becoming bored with science.

Remember the adults' explanations of metamorphosis they fed us during kindergarten to second grades? Somehow we were content with talk of how the caterpillar forms its chrysalis, "goes to sleep" and wakes up a butterfly.

Metamorphosis seemed to be taught on a really funny "spiral". I don't know how frequently other American elementary schools do it, but for 3 consecutive years my classroom teachers would run the growing-Monarch-caterpillars-on-milkweed experiment, with a multitude of variations (like growing several in the same lifebox).

Then they don't touch metamorphosis for 10 years (no, I'm not counting Animorph novels) and you rediscover its study in college in some neurobiology or developmental biology class.


Why is the popular image of evolution that of primates slowly transforming to humans? (Not to say how Lamarckian this picture is.) The picture to capture children's minds with is that childhood storybook of the tadpole and the frog.

It's intuitive to children. The frog starts out as a tadpole because it is an amphibian, and amphibians once came from a fish-like ancestor who had to come onto land. Every time the tadpole grows legs, loses its gills, and gains lungs, it is re-enacting that ancient evolutionary event. A shocking argument to first-timers -- and yet, they are pulled in -- because when you really think of it, some more pieces of the puzzle of the world suddenly seem to fall together.


As a child, I remember two thoughts about metamorphosis:

1. Wow, it's really cool! Flightless animals can gain functional wings! I wonder if I can learn a way to do it myself. Being able to fly would be pretty cool.

2. Wouldn't it be easier to just start out a butterfly?


I can't remember what my teacher said about 2), but I seem to have the impression that my inquiry was cruelly quashed. Luckily 1) was there to continue my interest in the life sciences.

Instead of cutting out paper butterflies or learning the umpteenth reading strategy, I wonder if it's possible to try out the following in the lower grades:

i. some more details you know, about the transformation. Young children learn what a heart and a liver is, as well as some of the details of gestation. It really expands your mind about what an individual organism is, when you learn that the caterpillar practically gets dissolved by its own pool of digestive juices, and a butterfly is reassembled from the soup of nutrients by special stem cells. (Kid-friendly explanation here.)

ii. some attempts at a why. It would be nice. It almost gets glossed over in the lower grades (or in high school, for that matter) that a caterpillar happens to be particularly good at eating, and a butterfly happens to be particularly good at mating and laying eggs in faraway places. I believe one of the comments to the Youtube video above is, "Why can't the strangler fig grow its own trunk?" It's even missing in Singapore's PSLE science syllabus -- you learn about complete and incomplete metamorphosis and the finer details of exotic life cycle archetypes, from spinning wind-borne angsana fruit to cockroaches -- but nothing about why it's advantageous to be so "weird".

iii. a greater exhibition of the plasticity of life. Fundamentalist resistance to evolution in school continues to persist for several reasons, some of which are because of the inflexible picture of life children get very early -- cows will always moo, dogs will always bark, the roles of each are fixed and immutable. Look at that cat! It's so different from a bird -- what ancestor could it possibly share with it?

iv. Some updates on cellular bio would be nice. I remember two pieces of "info" from childhood science classes: the cell is the basic building block of life. (Whatever that means.) Genes are blueprints. I do think children should deserve better than that. If you told them instead, that cells are tiny materials and machinery builders capable of producing more of themselves, and that genes were more like instruction "how to" manuals that cells read, a lot of things would make more sense. (A caterpillar doesn't "die" per se while its being digested in the chrysalis because some cells still carry its instruction manuals.) It would also have saved me a lot of the, "BUT where is the blueprint for our arms, teacher? What does it look like?" questions.

But we could also reject the idea that teaching content is teaching reading, and teach children how to make glittery power point slides instead.

I have a quote on my teaching room along the lines of .......

"There are three physics courses taught at most universities: physics with calculus, physics without calculus and physics without physics."

It sounds like Physics First could be a prerequisite for "physics without physics."

Speaking of physics without calculus, is this calculus without calculus?

I've been cruising this course for a long time....

New study out from the University of Virginia re: science education, which David Klein once told me is in even worse shape than math education. Gauging by the first sentence in Tai & Sadler's report, David is right:

Inquiry-based instructional practises are a mainstay of the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996) and Benchmarks of Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) in the USA.

Same Science for All? Interactive association of structure in learning activities and academic attainment background on college science performance in the USA
Robert H. Tai; Philip M. Sadler
International Journal of Science Education
Vol. 31, No. 5, 15 March 2009, pp. 675–696

Here's a nice summary of where things stand, drawn from O'Neill & Polman:

In recent years, a number of curriculum reform projects have championed the notion of having students do science in ways that move beyond hands-on work with authentic materials and methods, or developing a conceptual grasp of current theories. These reformers have argued that students should come to an understanding of science through doing the discipline and taking a high degree of agency over investigations from start to finish. This stance has occasionally been mocked by its critics as an attempt to create ‘‘little scientists’’—a mission, it is implied, that is either romantic or without purpose. Here, we make the strong case for a practice-based scientific literacy, arguing through three related empirical studies that taking the notion of ‘‘little scientists’’ seriously might be more productive in achieving current standards for scientific literacy than continuing to refine ideas and techniques based on the coverage of conceptual content.

Why Educate ‘‘Little Scientists?’’ Examining the Potential of Practice-Based Scientific Literacy
D. Kevin O’Neill, Joseph L. Polman
JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING
VOL. 41, NO. 3, PP. 234–266 (2004)

I have not read O'Neill & Polman's study as yet.^* However, a mere glance at the final section turns up the phrase "student-designed research projects," accompanied by a vote for Deborah Meir, "the principal who has led school reforms in New York and Boston [and recommended] that educators foster 'the capacity to hazard an opinion on matters of science that may pertain to political and moral priorities, and a healthy and knowing skepticism toward the misuse of scientific authority'^** (Meier, 1995)."

Rubbish.

"Student-designed research projects" and "the capacity to hazard an opinion on matters of science that may pertain to political and moral priorities" have nothing to do with each other.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the typical student-designed research project is likely to render a teen-aged student less able to hazard an opinion on a matter of science that may pertain to political and moral priorities than a solid, book-based, content-rich science course would do, while at the same time causing him to consider himself more able. Not knowing what he or she doesn't know: that's your little scientist.

In any event, Robert Tai and Philip Sadler's analysis of survey data from more than 8000 high school students produced the following conclusion, which will come as a surprise only to ed-school trained educators:

Self-led, self-structured inquiry may be the best method to train scientists at the college level and beyond, but it's not the ideal way for all high school students to prepare for college science.

This is the kind of thing parents and taxpayers do not need a peer-reviewed study to figure out, mostly because parents and taxpayers have a clue.

Data show that "autonomy doesn't seem to hurt students who are strong in math and may, in fact, have a positive influence on their attitude toward science" Tai said. However, "Students with a weak math background who engaged in self-structured learning practices in high school may do as much as a full letter grade poorer in college science," he said.

[snip]

According to Tai, many secondary science classes are turning to a self-structured method of learning with the notion that students will discover science on their own. "Advocates should be sobered by this study's findings," Tai said.

Sobered, hell.

Advocates should be overcome by guilt and remorse; advocates should get down on their hands and knees and beg forgiveness of parents and taxpayers for the countless thousands of young people lost to scientific and science-related careers because they arrived at college having spent 13 years pretending to be little scientists instead of acquiring the content knowledge they needed to study science in college.

But I don't see that happening.

^* If you'd like me to send you the study, email me: cijohn @ verizon.net
^** I guess pure research is out.

A news release from Stanford describing Bryan Brown and Kihyun Ryoo's research:

To talk about photosynthesis, you need to know a little Latin, a bit of French, some Greek, a word coined by a pair of French chemists in the 19th century, and a word of ancient origin that has been adopted and adapted by scientists around the world.

There's photosynthesis—New Latin. And glucose—a French modification of a Greek word. There's chlorophyll—coined by French scientists Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. And chloroplast—part of the so-called International Scientific Vocabulary.

Those words are just part of the scientific vocabulary teachers will soon be writing on whiteboards in fifth-grade classrooms across the country to explain the process by which green plants convert water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into carbohydrates and oxygen.

Usually, elementary school students are expected to learn the concepts and lexicon of photosynthesis—and other scientific subjects—simultaneously.

But according to a recent study by Bryan Brown, an assistant professor of education at Stanford, and Kihyun Ryoo, a doctoral candidate in Stanford's School of Education, students who learned the basic concepts of photosynthesis in "everyday English" before learning the scientific terms for the phenomenon fared much better on tests than students taught the traditional way.

Brown and Ryoo, who published the results of the study in the April 8 online issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, called their method the "content-first" approach.

Go read the whole release, and Link to original article, Teaching science as a language: A content-first approach to science teaching

Remember this observation from The Race Between Education and Technology?

It is clear that the farmer with a relatively high level of education has tended to adopt productive innovations earlier than the farmer with relatively little education.

Greenscaper Bob describes the same phenomenon in indoor plantscaping, where he says the U.S. is 30 years behind Europe:

If we don't understand the difference between capillary action and osmosis, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we don’t understand that plants have no intelligence to start and stop “drinking” water, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we believe a clay pot and saucer is the best way to maintain plants in containers, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we think the term “self-watering” is synonymous with sub-irrigation, it's a symptom of an education problem.

I see these beliefs expressed every day of my blogging research on the web. They lead to an opinion that our level of science education in the field of gardening and horticulture is woefully weak. Is this an anomaly peculiar to the field of horticulture or is it symptomatic of our overall education?

David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece yesterday titled The Biggest Issue and benchmarked our education decline around 1975. I’ve been an eyewitness to much of this in the field of “ornamental” horticulture, which attracted high school students to land grant colleges by the thousands in the ‘70s.

This was the time of the biggest houseplant boom of all time. Ferns in macramé hangers were everywhere. As a mid-life career changer from IBM and the business of data processing I was caught up in it too. I seriously thought of buying a plant shop in Southern California. Instead, I found my way into the field of interior plantscaping.

That was the beginning of my discovery about the techno-averse, anti-business character of the ornamental horticulture world. As I discovered the prevailing practice of “poke and pour” interior plant maintenance, I started looking for better ways to water and found them.

I didn’t have to look too far. Sub-irrigation planters were already well established in Europe by the 1970s. They were, however, essentially unknown here in the U.S. Over thirty years later, thanks to our woefully deficient science education they still are.

Our education system is the top rung issue that will most likely guide my vote in the coming presidential election. I believe it is the issue that will have the greatest impact on the quality of life of our young people and future generations. We simply cannot afford to have “flat earth” believers competing in a flat earth global economy.

Greenscaper Bob
It's Our Education, Stupid
Inside Urban Green

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

This week's Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, reports on a five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to Penn and several other institutions to establish a 21st Century Center for Cognition and Science Instruction.

In the Americas, the eclipse happens during convenient evening hours on Wednesday, the 20th, when people are up and about. In the time zones of Europe and West Africa, the eclipse happens during the early-morning hours of Thursday, the 21st.

Earth’s shadow will totally engulf the Moon from 10:00 to 10:52 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, or 7:00 to 7:52 p.m. Pacific Standard Time [ ]. The partial phases of the eclipse last for about an hour and a quarter before and after totality.

Find out more about the total lunar eclipse at Sky and Telescope here and here.


February 20th's Eclipse of the Moon
All of the Americas will have ringside seats . . . weather permitting.
by Alan M. MacRobert
Sky and Telescope March 2008

In a post below, Catherine questioned the value of laboratory time in science classes and implied that it was constructivist in the same way as "guess and check" in a math class.

"She was least behind in the sciences, which makes sense to me because science education became progressive many, many years ago and has remained so to this day. This is why science has always had 'labs.'"

I don't think this is inherently true. In fact, I think that well-conducted labs are crucial to a real science education.

When done poorly, labs take an hour to teach what could be taught directly by the teacher in 2 minutes ... and labs are often done poorly. One of the signs of a poorly conducted lab is that the lab is being used to teach the facts of science. You don't need to cut open a frog to learn that a frog has lungs.

Done well, though, labs teach several things that lectures do not teach well:

Lab Technique

Measuring difficult things, making notes, interpreting results, and producing a lab report that presents those results are useful skills. Like many other skills, they require practice. But I don't really want to do dissections on the dining room table and energetic reactions in the kitchen. The time and space required to learn these skills is only really available in a laboratory during school hours. Home is a poor substitute.

These skills are exactly the sort of skills that are broadly useful for life. I assert that they are entirely appropriate for a general education.

Accuracy and its Limits

Your lab results aren't going to match the ideal results. Oh, you might get lucky once and have your mean result end up fairly close to the mean expected result. But it requires good technique and a bit of luck. Without both, you are likely to end up proving that the third law of thermodynamics is all wrong. Understanding how this happens and what can cause it is pretty important.

But even if you do everything right, you won't end up with the precisely correct result. The canonical result is a statistical construct accurate only within some error band. Understanding that this is true for your experiments and for the experiments you read about in the newspaper is critically important.

Statistics and error bands are hard to understand, and a personal attempt that results in statistical results with a broader error band than you'd prefer can be useful. This must be followed, of course, with direct instruction of why this happens and what it means. But I think it best to begin with a practical demonstration.

Honesty

If your lab results do match the "expected" results too closely, your teacher should be questioning them. It's more likely that pristine results are caused by cooking the books than by cooking the chemicals just perfectly. Again, this might be a universal truth.

If your answers weren't right, and you report them honestly, your results should be treated with respect. Of course, any such result should include your best estimate of what went wrong. (It's probably not the science. 8-)

In too many cases, of course, the grade depends not on good science, but on a result that matches the canonical result. I consider that to be scientific malpractice.

Troubleshooting

On the other hand, if your answers are a complete mess, it can be very useful to run through the process of determining where you made your mistakes. To do this, you need to know what the expected result was and how experimental errors could have caused bad results. This requires a fairly deep understanding of the science, and probably requires direct help from a more knowledgeable source, at least in the beginning. Again, this sort of practice has significant real-world value.

Scientific method

Observe, hypothesize, test, theorize, identify falsifying criteria, test for falsification, modify theory. The process is both rigorous and useful, and not just in science. But to see it in action, you have to do it. If you only ever do experiments where you know what to expect, you'll never get to see this powerful tool in action.

Unfortunately, this isn't the practice in most HS labs. Some labs for every student should ask interesting questions and let the students find out the results. I view egg-drop experiments in this category, but not as they were done for C. When done well, a negative result is just as important as a positive result.

If you find that embedding an egg in jello is ineffective in dissipating kinetic energy, that's just as valid a result, and just as worthy of points, as finding out that parachutes work well.

Proof of the Unusual

Some concepts are very difficult to understand or believe. For at least some of these, a demonstration can be very useful. For example, torque is deeply counterintuitive -- until you've seen a spinning wheel supported only at one end and not falling over, you probably just won't get it. Once you do see it, you probably won't forget it. And, of course, for a visceral [1] understanding of what the inside of a creature is like, there's nothing better than a dissection.

Advice

As I see it, then, to get value for time in a laboratory, a teacher must do the following:

• Identify the course content that is best taught in a lab rather than in a lecture.


• Identify the goal or goals of each individual lab experiment.


• Evaluate your success in meeting those goals.


• Remediate the failures as soon as possible.


• Reinforce in lectures the lessons that you intended to teach in labs.


• Grade lab reports that have the wrong results the same as labs that have the correct results, as long as the student cogently discusses both the deviation from the expected results and the probable reasons for that deviation.

Let me reiterate that I don't think that labs are a good way of teaching scientific content -- with the limited exception of a few counter-intuitive cases. But I think that labs are crucial to teaching science.

[1] Sorry; couldn't resist.

Update: Added sixth bullet to "Advice" as recommended by Tracy. (Thanks!)