Through the years, I have become increasingly aware that science is the poor step-child of early elementary education. It is mostly ignored in many curriculums until the fourth grade. Not only is it ignored early on in education, once it finally begins to be taught, it is mostly taught as a body of facts. This is not science.
Through my student’s unknowing prompting, I have come to understand that science needs to be taught as a process and not as a body of facts. For years, my students came to me upset after having taken their ACT science section because the things that I had been teaching them were not on the test. As a teacher trying to help my students succeed, I was frustrated.
For years I was upset that the people at the College Board were not making the ACT test fit into the mold that most of the schools in the country were using to teach their students. Most schools were teaching facts in four core science areas, Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Why were my students not finding any of these facts on the test? Slowly I began to realize that the facts that I had learned as science in high school were changing so much that I was teaching many new facts that I had never learned. I finally realized that the field of science “fact” was growing at such an alarming rate that it would never be possible to teach the students all they needed to know to succeed on a fact test.
The method that the ACT used to test students in science suddenly made sense. If the volume of science fact would continually grow and was already so immense that students would never be able to master all of the information, then students should learn how science facts are collected and why science facts might change through the years. Students should learn how to collect and interpret and display data for other scientists to use. I finally realized that I needed to be teaching my students how to think like a scientist and I needed to stop emphasizing the learning of scientific facts. I finally saw that scientific facts did not constitute science; they were merely the results of scientific thinking. I realized that for my students to be successful in the real world of science, they would need tools that I was not giving them. They would need an understanding of the scientific method, better critical thinking and graph interpretation skills and the opportunity to put these things into practice.
I also realized that it wasn’t just me. When I scoured textbooks, I found the same deficit in all of them. Our education system was largely missing the point of science. While certain schools and teachers were beginning to approach science as a problem-solving process instead of a body of facts, many classes were like mine and many teachers were like I had been. Many teachers did not understand the situation into which they were putting their students.
My student’s complaints had inspired me to try to create a new curriculum for K-12 science that would be vertically aligned with hands-on problem-solving processes as the focus. As I started to do research to see if anyone else was doing something similar, I began to realize that there were many science curriculum ideas out there and a lot of research had been done on various approaches to teaching science. I found that there were a few groups, including Project 2061, that had come to the same conclusion as I had, and had created some great resources for teachers to use. Not only that, but the National standards were being written with the idea of a K-12 vertically aligned science-as-a-process approach in place.
As I did further research, I realized two things still needed to be done. First, a cohesive K-12 curricula needed to be written based on these new standards, and second, teachers needed to be shown the need for a different approach to teaching science, and trained to teach according to this approach. While the need for a new curriculum is very important, I realized that each teacher could restructure their own curriculum to meet these standards if they understood why the standards were rewritten and were trained to implement them.
Therefore, my mission (to change the way science is taught in America) gained a new focus. I realized that my first goal was to start spreading the message that science needed to be taught in this new way. In order to do that, I needed to develop a course that I could use to teach other teachers at seminars and science conferences. With this approach I could help other teachers see how to change the way science is taught in their communities. They could also then teach others how to do the same.
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