16 Mar 2006 - 03:18

declining science enrollment explained: noone is happy

From the Belfast Telegraph, an article on sex differences in preferred topics for science class:

Boys want their science lessons to be about weapons of mass destruction and the effect of chemical weapons on the human body while girls prefer to learn about how to deal with anorexia or bulimia or the significance of their dreams.

The stark contrast in what pupils look for from science has prompted researchers to call for curriculum planners to consider drafting separate syllabuses for each sex.

"The responses of the boys reflect strong interest in destructive technologies and events," say the researchers. Boys opted for alternative therapies as their most dreaded topic. Girls, by contrast, would prefer to learn about their own bodies. They wanted to know how to deal with eating disorders and they were also interested in how to beat cancer and what to do to keep fit, leaving teachers with a daunting prospect for teaching a mixed-gender class.

This is just Rousseauianism (if that's a word) in yet another guise. What if kids want to learn astrology -- does that mean we should teach it? I look at it this way; both sexes are going to be equitably bored by a lesson on the Bernoulli principle. Fair is fair.

And just because we don't make destruction the topic of lessons doesn't mean that it can't form the foundation of a lifelong love of science. I'm reminded of conversations at family get-togethers with my ex-husband and my Dad, an organic chemist and biochemist respectively. You'd think the dinner conversations would be about scientific principles, but they were more generally about explosions and biohazardous messes each of them had been involved in down the years. You don't need to teach about nuclear weapons; the first explosion during chemistry lab will hook many of the boys for good.

But for your amusement, here's a summary of the results, making it clear once again that men are from Mars, etc.:

Boys like ...

• Explosive chemicals.

• How it feels to be weightless in space.

• How the atom bomb functions.

• Biological and chemical weapons and what they do to the human body.

• Black holes and other spectacular objects in outer space.

• How meteors, comets or asteroids can cause disasters on earth.

• The possibility of life outside earth.

• How computers work.

• The effects of strong electric shocks and lightning on the human body.

• Brutal, dangerous and threatening animals.

Girls like ...

• Why we dream and what it means.

• Cancer, what we know and how can we treat it.

• How to perform first aid and use basic medical equipment.

• How to exercise to keep the body fit.

• How we can protect ourselves against sexually transmitted diseases.

• What we know about HIV/Aids and how to control it.

• Life and death and the human soul.

• Biological and human aspects of abortion.

• Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

• How alcohol might affect the body.

-- CarolynJohnston - 16 Mar 2006

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Comments

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At my single-sex girls high school we really liked the lesson where we set off hydrogen-powered rockets down the hallway.

Or tried to set up a system by which an egg could survive being dropped outside from the 5th floor science room's window.

-- TracyW - 16 Mar 2006

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Sign me up for the boy's curriculum,

go figure.

-- JoAnneC - 16 Mar 2006

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Sign me up for the boy's curriculum

Me too. Not the the "life and death of the human soul" doesn't sound positively riveting...

I have a feeling a lot of girls would like the boy's curriculum better.

-- SusanS - 16 Mar 2006

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Not to mention that "life and death of the human soul" has no place in a science classroom. We may have covered it at some point in Chapel in my Episcopal high school, but in science classes in the same school we mixed dangerous chemicals and dissected fetal pigs (after worms, crawdads, and frogs).

-- GoogleMaster - 16 Mar 2006

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"... the first explosion during chemistry lab will hook many of the boys for good."

While I'm sure this will come as a surprise, this can be taken too far. I understand that my Jr. High Chemistry and "Earth Sciences" teachers were fired for too many pranks (their classes shared a door). When I was there, I remember citric acid in sandwiches and smoke bombs, but I suspect this might have escalated after I left.

-- DougSundseth - 16 Mar 2006

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life and death of the human soul?

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

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This is hilarious.

boy, this is the article to give to ANYONE carrying on about gender neutrality....

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

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boys really are amazing

I remember one Palm Sunday, we were supposed to be parading around the church carrying......fronds, I think

one of the boys took his frond and turned it into a machine gun and sprayed the congregation with bullets

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

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I love boys; I really do.

But I just wanted to say to this kid: ARE YOU NUTS?

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

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"life and death of the human soul"

Boy if we could get that settled by 10th grade or so, that would be great.....

-- BenCalvin - 16 Mar 2006

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How the atom bomb functions.

You know, you need a lot of classical and Einsteinian physics and chemistry to understand how an atom bomb functions.

Cancer, what we know and how can we treat it. Biological and human aspects of abortion. How alcohol might affect the body. Biological and chemical weapons and what they do to the human body. Brutal, dangerous and threatening animals.

You need to know a lot of chemistry and biology to understand these topics.

What we know about HIV/Aids and how to control it.

Biology and intense maths necessary for that.

The "How ..." topics aren't science - which is about "Why ...".

The teacher with a mixed class should start on chemistry and biology. With an emphasis on poisons such as alcohol, chemical gasses, and snake venoms and how they interact with the human body.

Perhaps abortion and cancer in dangerous animals could also be covered.

-- TracyW - 16 Mar 2006

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So what they're basically saying is that boys are into science, and girls aren't.

Okay, maybe that's a little harsh. Let me try to restate that.

Boys like science, and girls like reading books and magazine articles about science-y topics.

Or, boys like math and girls like writing a paper about My Favorite Number.

[Or maybe that's just my late pregnancy snark talking.]

-- TerriWheeler - 16 Mar 2006

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I question the idea that kids even know what they will be interested in when it comes to science. A good teacher gets you interested (or at least motivated) and the labs draw you in.

Frankly the boys' list wasn't very much more related to science education than the girls'. I mean disasters caused by meteors? That's a thrill ride movie, not science.

-- EmmaAnne - 17 Mar 2006

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I question the idea that kids even know what they will be interested in when it comes to science. A good teacher gets you interested (or at least motivated) and the labs draw you in.

Exactly, that's my point. Why take these lists seriously at all? One goal of a science class should be to explain to the kids why things like what dreams mean do not count as science at all.

-- CarolynJohnston - 17 Mar 2006

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Questions like "what do dreams mean?" do count as science.

The answers may not be what the kids are expecting. And they may be much harder to come up with than answers to questions in physics. But there's nothing inherently unscientific about investigating why we dream, and why we dream the things we do. Just it's very difficult to do that in your average high school science lab.

-- TracyW - 18 Mar 2006

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But there's nothing inherently unscientific about investigating why we dream, and why we dream the things we do.

But we don't have the tools to answer that question.

We don't even know why we sleep!

-- CarolynJohnston - 19 Mar 2006

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Perhaps we don't have the tools now.

But we can make up hypothesis and investigate them.

The last time I read about this, they had worked out that REM sleep was dreaming sleep on the basis that if you woke someone during REM sleep they reported remembering dreams, but not vice-versa. They also think dreams have something to do with the brain processing what happened during the day, and apparently if you wake someone everytime they go into REM sleep they start to suffer from sleep deprivation symptoms, and also start trying to spend more and more asleep time in REM sleep. (This of course may be all very different now).

A class could investigate the hypothesis that dreams foretell the future, by students keeping dream diaries and checking back in a year's time to see what they dreamed has come true. A teacher could teach quite a bit about experimental design, for a start pointing out how backwards-looking can lead to dreams being reinterpreted so they appear to have predicted what happened.

The teacher could also cover the importance of predicting interesting results, and Bayesian statistics, and the difficulty of determing causality. E.g. while I was at high school I dreamed sometimes of going to school, and lo-and-behold, the next day I did go to school. But that is not evidence of impressive forecasting ability by my dreams.

-- TracyW - 19 Mar 2006

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But we can make up hypothesis and investigate them.

Sounds like Science Fair, which is a very popular activity in this neck of the woods. The point of Science Fair is to teach, by example, how to form and test hypotheses. Every year in grade school from first grade the kids spent weeks doing this. My problems with it:

• they could have done it only once and gotten the idea across -- it's not that hard and certainly doesn't need to be 'spiralled' year in and year out;

• time spent on science fair activities is time lost to teach material with content -- in particular, more appropriate things for very young children

Actually Ben went to a Core Knowledge elementary school and got an excellent grounding in many areas, particularly literature and social studies and history. Science was the weakest subject.

I am delighted with Ben's science curriculum now -- it's very very meaty and full of content.

-- CarolynJohnston - 19 Mar 2006

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"Every year in grade school from first grade the kids spent weeks doing this."

It starts in Kindergarten in my son's school. (In Junior Kindergarten, the Science Fair project is a class, rather than individual, project.) A search on "science fair" at Amazon US returns over 1000 books, among them, Science Fair Projects for Dummies.

"My problems with it:

"* they could have done it only once and gotten the idea across -- it's not that hard and certainly doesn't need to be 'spiralled' year in and year out;"

I think I disagree with this. The scientific method, and particularly the attitude that you have to have to make the scientific method work, is hard. To butcher a Clausewitz quote, "Everything is very simple in [science], but the simplest thing is difficult."

The basic concept of, "hypothesize, predict, test, refine, lather, rinse, repeat" is pretty easy to explain. It takes quite a bit more work to understand how important and powerful that is, and especially why. I think that a well-handled series of practical demonstrations is a reasonable way to communicate this.

"* time spent on science fair activities is time lost to teach material with content -- in particular, more appropriate things for very young children"

Notwithstanding my previous disagreement, I broadly agree with this. First, though, let me say that I don't have a problem with the occasional long-term "project" as homework. It more closely approximates the sort of thing you'll need to do later in life than most homework.

My problem with science fair projects is a problem with the method, not the goal. Science fairs are a really inefficient way to teach:

• Most parents don't understand the scientific method well enough to be good guides to the process. And students, pretty much by definition, don't understand well either.
• If you don't know what you are doing (see above), you're likely to choose a topic randomly.
• Most randomly chosen experiments are uninteresting. (Heck, a large portion of carefully chosen experiments have uninteresting results; ask most scientists.) The harder you try for novelty, the more likely the result is to be uninteresting or uninterpretable.
• Even if you choose an interesting experiment, confounding variables can be extraordinarily hard to control, especially when you're doing the experiments in you kitchen or garage. Even if there's a result to be found, it's quite likely that you won't actually see it.
• Boredom/frustration has not been shown to be a good teaching technique.

None of this is to say that I find the usual sort of laboratory class especially worthwhile either. In my experience, they run to the "reproduce the results of the pioneers in your notebook, even if not on the bench" sort of experiments. This isn't science and it isn't efficient either.

-- DougSundseth - 20 Mar 2006

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At the novice level your typical pre-scripted science lab is largely a waste of time. It is more a lesson in following instructions than science. The novices simply do not have the necessary domain knowledge and their knowledge too inflexible to bring anything useful to the table. And, these extra long science fairs are doubly a waste of time.

The DI people developed a videodisc high-school level science program and conducted many studies comparing students who learned from it and those that learned from more typical lab-heavy science programs. Invariably the DI kids came out on top. Usually the bottom half of the DI class outperformed the top half of the control class.

My favorite study was when the DI class which consisted of special ed kids who had previously failed science class were pitted against a control group consisting of honor students (AP, I believe). Naturally, the videodisc special ed kids outperformed the AP kids.

Perhaps, experts in science benefit more from hands-on lab classes. Clearly, novices have little to gain. The "experts" that develop these discovery classes make the same mistake that the math constructivists make. They design programs that they, experts, find interesting without determining whether novices feel the same way or are capable of learning from them like an expert would.

That is the failure of modern education in a nutshell.

-- KDeRosa - 20 Mar 2006

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I have to agree with Ken that lack of domain knowledge is just one aspect that is troublesome, not that I didn't learn much from my fetal pig, Marvin. Well, I learned that formaldyhide only goes so far.

Also, the lack of structure is just difficult for a lot of kids, just like in math.

-- SusanS - 20 Mar 2006

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I think the greatest value of traditional science labs may be as a test of whether students understand the science and human nature well enough to produce a convincing fake lab notebook. You need to know what the answer should be for that, after all.

-- DougSundseth - 20 Mar 2006

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In physics class we used Excel Spreadsheets to accomplish that: our spreadsheet had a column labeled "percent error." You would enter a value between 0% and 10%, and then Excel would calculate all your data.

-- RudbeckiaHirta - 20 Mar 2006

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I have a question, probably for Ken. How well would the DI kids transition into a college lab environment? In other words, I get that they (better) understand the lessons that the high school labs are intended to teach, but do you think there might be "lab doing skills", the absence of which might cause some difficulty in the lab heavy environment of college science courses? I'm guessing not, but then I had an awful lot of labs under my belt when I first took college lab courses.

I do believe that my community college labs (biology, chemistry, microbiology, clinical pathology, anatomy) were a heck of a lot more educational and practical than any of the labs I recall doing in junior high and high school. But then, college labs allowed more time (typically two hours) and there was a lot less screwing around by students. Maybe it's simply not possible to have effective labs at the high school level.

Is this high school videodisc program available to the general public?

-- LesleyStevens - 20 Mar 2006

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"In physics class we used Excel Spreadsheets to accomplish that: our spreadsheet had a column labeled "percent error." You would enter a value between 0% and 10%, and then Excel would calculate all your data."

I hope nobody smart enough to build that spreadsheet was dumb enough to actually use 0%. The trick is to always be wrong, but only by an amount within the error margin of a careful experimenter. I suspect the ideal might be some sort of gaussian distribution about a point near (but not exactly at) the known-correct answer.

I'm pretty sure this is a corollary of Clarke's third law. In this case, any sufficiently advanced student understanding is indistinguishable from a rigged experiment.

-- DougSundseth - 20 Mar 2006

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I would think that the skills you learn in labs don't translate too well into high school and undergrad level science courses. What you learn in those labs may be useful, just not for what you need to know for biology, chemistry, physics classes etc, especially since you usual take the labs as you are learning the material for the first time.

So, I'd say that high schools labs are good practice for undergrad labs, but probably not for gaining understanding of the underlying material.

Here's all the info I have on the video disc courses:

A Mathematics Series, on videodisc, for teaching geometry, equations, roots, exponents, graphs, and statistics. [St. Ann, MO: BFA Education Media, 1991.]

Understanding Chemistry and Energy. This videodisc program focuses on atomic and molecular structure, energy forms, organic compounds, energy activiation and catalysis. [St. Ann, MO: BFA Educational Media, 1991.]

Earth Science. This videodisc program explores phases of matter, density and mass, and geologicprocesses. [St. Ann, MO: BFA Education Associates, 1991.]

-- KDeRosa - 20 Mar 2006

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I also wonder if not taking labs at high school will create difficulties when it comes to taking labs at uni. Yes, uni students are generally more motivated, but I had been doing labs for five years by the time I got to uni, and I'm not sure how I would have gotten on if I'd had to learn every skill from scratch.

Plus there are all those students who will never take a science course at uni, but should know something about how experiments are done as they will be voting in the next few years.

Teaching by DI is much faster and more efficient, e.g. we covered the concept and layout of the Table of Elements in high school in about a week, when apparently it took several decades to develop. But I think there's a case for DI taking place in labs and in experiment design.

And of course, labs make for some great memories. Like the time we stunk out the entire top three floors of the school. Or the time we set fire to the desk.

-- TracyW - 20 Mar 2006

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My lab partners lit the gas jet directly, without benefit of, oh, say, a burner or anything else attached to it. The flame shot out about 8 inches and was about a foot high.

-- GoogleMaster - 21 Mar 2006

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And in biology class, another lab partner was picked to be the one to pith the frog. Dissection takes longer than one day, so each night the frog, pinned to its tray, was laid carefully into the fridge. On the second day, we took our tray out, and the partially-dissected frog promptly hopped off of the tray. Ick! The bio teacher came over and pithed it properly.

-- GoogleMaster - 21 Mar 2006