Clear Learning Outcomes

[Author's note:  These subjects have been taken from the goals in America's Lab Report, a groundbreaking report from the National Research Council.  The text and images explain how authentic online science lab experiences meet those goals.]

Design of lab includes clearly stated learning outcomes.
Every one of these virtual labs has a full activity plan to support teacher and curriculum writers. The first image above is the header for the plan and includes the purpose and goals of the lab for use by the teacher. The second image is taken from an introduction to one of the lab units and will be seen by both students and teachers.

Are There Stars Out Tonight

Are There Stars Out Tonight?

[Author's note: This is chapter two to "Why American Can't Think," a book in progress. This chapter discusses the attitudes of American society toward scientists and how that affects our schools.  Should it be longer? What's missing? Comments are welcome.]

Have you seen the magazine and newspaper articles? They cite PISA and TIMSS scores, and how low those of the U.S. are. These international science tests may be a harbinger of future woe. We may draw two conclusions from these low scores. The science literacy of our citizenry is declining, and we won't have enough scientists to compete in the future world economy effectively. Both conclusions have severe consequences that should be recognized and acted upon soon.

Science literacy affects us all because we must make important decisions individually and as a people that depend on understanding basic science. Just look at the climate and energy debates for examples of group decision making. Our individual buying patterns affect everyone. Should you buy an SUV or a compact car? Buying tobacco products supports the tobacco industry and provides money for them to market to our youth. Informed individual decision making helps us all to enjoy better lives.

Studies suggest that science literacy in the United States is low and is declining. Why? Some say that the quality of science classes is lower than before. Others point to the increasing complexity of science. I'd like to discuss another potential cause, not to say that these others don't contribute.

When I was young, Albert Einstein was all the rage. He was still alive then and was lionized by society. For roughly a hundred years, a series of scientists and inventors had been held up as role models. James Watt, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Simon Newcomb, and a host of others became celebrities of their era. In later times, Jonas Salk, Linus Pauling, James Watson, Francis Crick, Edwin Hubble, and Richard Feynman became their modern equivalents. These people populated the sky of science. They were our science stars.

Think carefully. Can you name an acclaimed living scientist, one with awards such as the Nobel prize?

Probably not. Our science stars have gradually faded from the sky until it's now virtually empty, black, and barren. You can still find plenty of scientists with these prestigious awards. They're just not known to non-scientists. Science stars used to provide some balance against movie stars, sports stars, television stars, music stars, and even political stars.

Having met Richard Feynman and having taken a course from Linus Pauling, I can attest to the remarkable character of these brilliant people. They enjoyed doing science immensely. Their enthusiasm was infectious. They're just a couple of the famous ones. I have met many others, not as well known, whose zeal for science is so great that just spending time with them gives you an interest in finding out more about science. What is it that attracted these very smart people to science? Why do they enjoy it so much? If your science classes were much like mine, the answers aren't obvious.

I find it disheartening that we don't see scientists' images on the cover of Time magazine. (Actually, James Thompson was on the Aug. 20, 2001 cover. In 1961, Time featured sixteen scientists on its cover as “men of the year!”) We don't hear them on widely-viewed television shows. Where is the role model for future scientists today? Is it any wonder that our youth focuses on entertainment, sports, Wall Street, and, to a lesser extent, politics?

Without prominent role models to interest young people in a career in science, what's left? The science classes that every student takes must step up and provide engaging, interesting, and accurate images of doing science. To their credit, many science teachers take this challenge on successfully. However, the challenge is a big one in the face of declining budgets and growing class sizes.

One part of the problem is the nature of science. In the pressure of meeting standards, passing high-stakes tests, and improving all sorts of test scores, the focus has shifted even more than ever toward the output of science: the laws, equations, vocabulary, and procedures that can be memorized and repeated on tests. A simple, basic fact known to most elementary school students gets lost: science is fun!

Most of today's science teachers don't really understand science, especially the nature of science. I'll return to this topic in a later chapter. For now, understand that new generations of science teachers are learning their science from teachers who don't understand it. And the cycle repeats. As a result, students, especially in middle and high school, lose any interest that may have been germinating in their minds and turn to other, more exciting fields.

The twin problems of no prominent scientist role models and rather lackluster science classes have reduced the quantity of high school graduates who go on to major in science in college. This issue is particularly significant in our graduate schools where an increasingly higher percentage of graduate students come from other countries. According to the National Science Foundation, “Among first-time, full-time graduate students, enrollment of temporary visa holders increased at a greater annual rate in 2007 (8.3%) than did that of U.S. citizens and permanent residents (1.7%)” [NSF Report NSF 09-314, June 2009] The same report shows that in 2007, the number of U.S. citizens in graduate studies enrolled for the first time in physical sciences was 4,089, while temporary visa holders numbered 2,622, about one-third of the total. In engineering, the numbers are 12,267 (U.S.) and 15,998 (visa), which is well over one-half of the total.

Scientists get their real training in graduate schools with that training being extended for the more challenging fields in postdoctoral fellowships. Again, far more than half of all science and engineering postdoctoral appointments, 58%, are held by temporary visa holders. Simply stated, we are not able to fill up our graduate and postdoctoral positions with our own graduates. Graduate schools around the country must find the necessary people to fill these ranks in other countries. While we should have our graduate schools accepting foreign students, it should not be out of necessity.

The nature of science eludes people because it's not a simple formula or set of rules. After all, the word science comes from the Greek and means “to know.” Science, however is not about knowing, it's about how you find out what you know. If you read about what scientists do, you'll find out that they don't simply apply a straightforward procedure to their work, although they have evolved plenty of those for use in their studies. They're constantly on the lookout for something that doesn't fit the known patterns. Scientists are tinkerers. They're saying, “Hey this idea worked here; will it work there?” You find this same curiosity in artists.

The big difference with scientists, is that they must test their ideas out on the real world. They make measurements. Newton, Pasteur, and Pauling made measurement after measurement. They also used the measurements of others. I don't think that Picasso or Beethoven made measurements and compared their data with that of others.

These practitioners of such disparate professions as art and science all had one thing more in common: they all require great discipline. You can't just throw paint at a canvas or mark notes at random on a sheet and create great art. Years of practice lead to a discipline that allows you to do your work well. So It is with science. Scientists learn to make meticulous notes on their work, how to do literature research, and of course learn the procedures associated with their particular discipline.

Young people see great success in sports or entertainment and think that they too can do that. It looks easy – and fun. They look at what scientists do and think that it looks hard and not so much fun. They're wrong on both counts, but their community of peers, teachers, parents, and role models aren't disabusing them of these incorrect viewpoints.

I knew two brothers in high school who were quite talented in baseball. One was a pitcher; the other was a catcher. Their father had arranged things that way. In high school baseball, they were the best in the league. The high school girls were impressed, and their future in sports seemed certain. The world of professional sports demands a great deal, however. One of the brothers, the pitcher, was able to get a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers and played for a few years in its farm system. The other couldn't even get that far.

The life of these professional athletes and entertainers includes many hours of practice, far more than most people realize. It may be easier to win a Nobel prize than to become a hall-of-fame athlete. The following table illustrates this point. Only Laureates in chemistry, physics, and medicine are counted. The special election of 2006 is not included in the baseball list, neither are executives.

Year	Number of Nobel Laureates in Science and Medicine	Names	Number of Baseball Hall of Fame Inductees	Names
2001	9	William S. Knowles Ryoji Noyori K. Barry Sharpless Leland H. Hartwell Tim Hunt Sir Paul Nurse Eric A. Cornell Wolfgang Ketterle Carl E. Wieman	4	Bill Mazeroski Kirby Puckett Hilton Smith Dave Winfield
2002	9	John B. Fenn Koichi Tanaka Kurt Wüthrich Sydney Brenner H. Robert Horvitz John E. Sulston Raymond Davis Jr. Riccardo Giacconi Masatoshi Koshiba	1	Ozzie Smith
2003	7	Peter Agre Roderick MacKinnon Paul C. Lauterbur Sir Peter Mansfield Alexei A. Abrikosov Vitaly L. Ginzburg Anthony J. Leggett	2	Gary Carter Eddie Murray
2004	8	Aaron Ciechanover Avram Hershko Irwin Rose Richard Axel Linda B. Buck David J. Gross H. David Politzer Frank Wilczek	2	Dennis Eckersley Paul Molitor
2005	8	Yves Chauvin Robert H. Grubbs Richard R. Schrock Barry J. Marshall J. Robin Warren Roy J. Glauber John L. Hall Theodor W. Hänsch	2	Wade Boggs Ryne Sandberg
2006	5	Roger D. Kornberg Andrew Z. Fire Craig C. Mello John C. Mather George F. Smoot	1	Bruce Sutter
2007	6	Gerhard Ertl Mario R. Capecchi Sir Martin J. Evans Oliver Smithies Albert Fert Peter Grünberg	2	Tony Gwynn Cal Ripken, Jr.
2008	9	Martin Chalfie Osamu Shimomura Roger Y. Tsien Françoise Barré-Sinoussi Luc Montagnier Harald zur Hausen Makoto Kobayashi Toshihide Maskawa Yoichiro Nambu	1	Rich "Goose" Gossage

How does the joy of discovering something hitherto unknown or seeing something no one else has ever seen compare with hitting a home run at a major league baseball stadium? I'm not sure, but the likelihood of doing the former is greater than the latter.

Recently, a 14-year old girl discovered a new type of supernova (an exploding star). As reported by the Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/19/741195/-Teenage-girl-discovers-new-type-of-supernova), Caroline Moore of Warwick has been scanning images of the sky as member of the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team. They have four automated telescopes scanning the skies and photographing galaxies. Caroline discovered SN2008ha, which is a Type I supernova based on its spectrum but is much too dim to be a Type I supernova. It's also too bright to be an ordinary nova. I'm sure that she was very happy to have found a supernova at all. Just try to imagine her delight when she heard that she was the first one to find his entirely new type of supernova.

There's not much to be done in schools to create the next science icon except to encourage more students to try a career in science. However, we can make a greater effort to make school science past sixth grade more like it was in earlier grades in terms of engagement and more like real science in terms of the nature of science.

Our science classes must spend more time on science and less on learning seemingly endless lists of words, laws, equations, and procedures. If the science is real and is interesting, the rest will follow naturally. A later chapter addresses the role of the science lab in making this outcome happen. The following from John Dewey seems appropriate to close out this chapter.

[John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 221, Macmillan (1916) (reprinted by The Free Press, 1966).]

Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get some insight into what scientific method means than that they should copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have reached. Students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered," but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. And it is safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of purely technical and symbolically stated information.

© 2011 by Harry E. Keller, Manhattan Beach, CA U.S.A.
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Mastery of Subject Matter

[Author's note:  These subjects have been taken from the goals in America's Lab Report, a groundbreaking report from the National Research Council.  The text and images explain how authentic online science lab experiences meet those goals.]

Enhance student understanding of specific scientific facts and concepts and the way in which these facts and concepts are organized in the scientific disciplines.

In order to use science lab experiences to aid subject matter mastery, labs must have supporting material that helps students. At the upper left, you can see a reduced image of a warm up page. This page includes a brief description, goals and objectives, and a series of questions designed so that students begin to think about the topic and, possibly, to challenge their preconceptions. At the upper right is the beginning of a post-lab quiz that helps students to consider the science investigated with the experiments. Students can review their experimental work and support materials during this quiz.
The lower image shows the vocabulary and scientist mini-biography taken from the same Cell Respiration lab. The vocabulary list links to a hyperlinked list of all words related to this lab.
Not shown above is the Procedure page, which has additional background material on this lab, a procedure discussion when warranted, and information on errors, graphs, apparatus, units, and more. Also not shown are the fully worked out solutions for all quiz questions and the Solution Strategy page that explains principles in more detail and provides some sample worked-out problems.
All of this material creates a greater mastery of the science illustrated by the experiments being performed by the students.

Definition of "Laboratory Experience"

Definition of a Laboratory Experience

"Laboratory experiences provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world (or with data drawn from the material world), using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science."

This definition forms the critical basis for all of the goals specified in America's Lab Report according to Prof. Susan Singer, the lead author of the report. All data from science labs must originate in the material world. That definition does not provide for data that originates from a programmer's pencil: simulations.

Simulations can have pedagogical value, but this value does not include substituting for true laboratory experience no matter how well designed or well integrated the simiulation is.

I will be providing examples of online activities meeting the goals of America's Lab Report that all use data that originates in the material world. In some instances, the online activities have been augmented by hands-on experiments that provide another dimension of experience to students.