What is a Smart Science Lesson?

Smart Science® lessons are "experiential online science lessons with real experiments and hands-on measurement."  What do these words really mean?  Break it down into three parts.  They are:

I. Experiential Online Science Lessons

II. Real Experiments

III. Hands-On Measurement

Understanding each of these leads you to understand the overall Smart Science concept and why it is poised for a new era in education.

I. Experiential Online Science Lessons

Taking this phrase from right to left, you can first analyze lessons.  A lesson is simply a learning experience.  For a lesson to be effective, it must have a beginning with introductory material, a middle where students engage in learning, and an ending with checks on learning and review.

Exactly how you set up a lesson is its pedagogy, how the learning takes place.  In Smart Science lessons, this pedagogy is based on 150-year old ideas and is also right up to date with the latest thinking.  The pedagogy challenges students to ask questions and seek answers through real-world data.  It fits perfectly with 5E pedagogy and with inquiry-based learning.

Science comes from the Latin meaning "to know."  In particular, this word has come to mean knowing about the physical world from the smallest subatomic particle to gigantic galaxy clusters, from viruses to giant sequoias, from how chemicals react to what the world was like billions of years ago.

The term online is rather well understood to mean using the Internet these days, although it could be a LAN.  The importance of this term is what is is not.  The word "virtual" often has been used to mean online, but it truly means in a virtual world, someplace unreal.  Virtual labs existed long before the Internet; they were even distributed on floppy disks at one time.  Online can include remote robotic labs today.

The connotation associated with virtual is that of a simulation, usually an animated one.  We say online to avoid the confusion of virtual.  You still have low cost, immediacy, data storage, and more.  You only lose that stigma attached to animated simulations.

Experiential really becomes the crucial word in the description.  I'm sure that you get that these are online science lessons now.  So are the lectures from Khan Academy, but they are not experiential.  The big difference comes from the lessons being highly interactive.  Students are very engaged in obtaining their own personal data.  They cannot copy from others but must do the work themselves.

In this way, students experience the lesson material.  They don't just passively absorb.  They don't merely do exercises or answer questions.  They are seeking answers to questions from real experiments.  But, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Real experiments form the next topic.

II. Real Experiments

This phrase, along with the next one, describe one of two cores of Smart Science lessons.  The second core is the pedagogy as described briefly above.  Why are real experiments preferred to simulated ones?

The most obvious reason is engagement.  Reality simply engages better than fakery.

Beyond engagement, students have the opportunity to come to grips with empirical data. Moreover, these are data that they take themselves!

Science is about understanding our universe from the tiniest to the grandest parts.  While it uses mathematics, it is not about understanding mathematics.  Scientists do not investigate equations; they use them.

III. Hands-On Measurement

Nearly every single online science system with experiments hands your data to you.  You do not have to take a single data point yourself.  Smart Science lessons are different.  Students must make their own measurements.  Measuring is an essential part of the process of science and should not be left out of student experiences, especially in grades K-12.

Smart Science lessons have much, much more.  They have assessments and constructive writing.  They provide experimental background information and vocabulary.  They are a complete learning system.

© 2015 by Smart Science Education Inc., U.S.A. www.smartscience.net
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Take a Closer Look at Science Education

With Jerry Brown taking over as governor of California and Mayor Bloomberg appointing Cathleen Black as chancellor of New York City schools, the time is right to review what's happening in science education in these two very large school markets. New York City has over 1,000,000 students in its schools, about 1/3 in high school, and the California high school population is estimated at a bit over 2,000,000.

In addition, Texas, no lightweight in education, has begun its RSSM (Request for Supplemental Science Materials), which seeks to certify 100% web-delivered materials for all of the high school science students in the state. Every Texas student must take four years of science, so all 1.3 million high school students are covered by this new requirement.

With so many articles bemoaning our nation's science education, what is to be done? New national science curriculum standards are being readied right now as is a national education technology plan. Neither of these will have substantial impact on the quality of science education. They may help a bit around the edges. Textbook manufacturers and others who create curricular materials will find their work a bit easier if they can begin with a single set of standards instead of 51. Technology does have great promise, but implementation has its problems.

I'm going to digress from my usual approach of leaving my business out entirely or leaving any commercial comment until the end because the situation is so dire. We've dropped from the first-place science education country in the world to somewhere in double digits depending on which data you use.

You cannot ignore the fact that all of the paths to success in science education that are being tried have been tried before. Why should they succeed now?

Some say that science education is being hamstrung by poor math and language arts skills and seek to improve science education by focusing on those areas. That idea appears logical but puts the cart before the horse. After all, science can be taught without complex language or advanced math skills. It's just not the way people usually teach it. Besides, science can be the trigger to engaging students in learning better math and language arts skills.

I created Smart Science® education just to deal with these issues. I looked at highly rated schools and found their science programs often lacking in basic science understanding. They did quite well in producing students who have memorized the materials: words, formulas, and procedures. But, their students did not understand the nature of science and often lacked decent scientific thinking skills.

My analysis indicated that these students simply did not have enough true science investigation (lab) time. Oh, they may have had plenty of science labs, but those labs were either verification labs (answer told to them ahead of time) or technique labs (focused on learning a particular technique). Students did not go into the lab wondering what they'd find.

Even in cases of investigation, the time and availability of materials and apparatus prevented a complete investigation. In addition, many great labs were being eliminated due to new safety requirements and increasingly tight budgets.

I chose to attack our science education failings right at the lab level. Anyone can provide memorization classes and create memorization software to aid in that course of action. However, creating great science labs is not so easy. You must have a number of factors such as:

1. Low cost, or the labs won't be used in most schools.
2. An unknown outcome of the experiments
3. Enough experiments to allow exploration and discovery
4. Data from the material world with systematic and random errors so students learn the nature of science.
5. Students collecting their own individual data point by point while exercising their own care and judgment to extend their understanding of the nature of science.
6. Data analysis made on students' own data to engage students by providing data ownership.
7. Certainty of experiment operation so that entire periods aren't wasted with totally failed experiments.

These criteria can only be fulfilled with the support of technology. Consider a couple of technologies that are being promoted to improve science education, simulations and probeware.

Science animated simulations use a formula to produce data for students to study. In general, they do not produce a data table of individual data points. These simulations violate criteria 4, 5, and 6 above. Using a simulation to mimic a true science lab tends to leave a very inaccurate impression of science in the minds of students: precise and easy. Science is just the opposite. Teachers should reserve simulations for understanding content and not attempt to use them to replace labs, where the nature of science is one of the major outcomes sought.

Probeware provides an efficient way to collect data from the material world. However, this approach violates criterion 5 above and may run into criterion 7 due to failure of the experiment or of the electronics. It also does not truly meet criterion 1, low cost. Probeware should only be used in advanced classes where students have already mastered the concepts of the nature of science to a reasonable degree. Unfortunately, even in advanced classes, the students often enter without having had the opportunity to master those concepts.

Only Smart Science® education, with its patented approach, meets all of the listed goals.

1. In large school districts, purchasing contracts allow students to do entire labs of many experiments for on the order of 25 cents per lab.
2. The labs do not disclose the outcome before the experiments are performed.
3. Each lab has a number of experiments, sometimes more than twenty, to allow a full investigation.
4. All labs use filmed real experiments as the source of data so students get a true feeling for real data with the same sorts of errors they'd get themselves.
5. Each student must collect individual data and cannot simply copy someone else's data; their own care and judgment affect the results.
6. Students analyze their own data; they even determine how much data to take.
7. Prerecorded experiments ensure success.

There's simply no other system for science investigation that matches Smart Science® education.

The above does not preclude traditional hands-on experiments. Rather, it embraces them. Many Smart Science® labs have a hands-on component so that students can have a kinesthetic experience and have the opportunity for experimental design beyond that available in prerecorded experiments.

Furthermore, Smart Science® labs are suitable for homework. Students can do a hands-on lab in school and then go home and expand that experience enormously with the platform-independent, 100% web-delivered Smart Science® system.

We must improve science education dramatically. All of the paths being trod today are old ones being revisited except for this one. The Smart Science® approach as been adopted from very successful programs in the past. These programs were successful in outcomes but were incapable of scaling to the entire population because of their high cost and difficult training requirements for teachers.

Those impediments can now be overcome with technology. The patented technology of Smart Science® education does exactly that.

Other measures must also be taken to succeed. For example, we must recruit the best possible science teachers and provide them with excellent tools for classroom use. Yet, these measures will take time. Implementing Smart Science® education can be done immediately so that its benefits can begin to be felt today.

The Smart Science® technology currently has implementations for grades 6-13. We have designs to add grades 1-5 so that this remarkable technology be used throughout every student's education beginning at first grade and continuing through the first year of college. We also can expand its capabilities to augment the lab experience beyond the freshman year of college.

Smart Science® education can revolutionize science education.

© 2010 by Paracomp, Inc., U.S.A. www.smartscience.net
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Finding Out

Science is really the activity of finding out about the world.

Other disciplines have finding out as their goals. For example, mathematics finds out about numbers and mathematical relationships. Psychology finds out about the way people think. Sociology finds out about human relationships.

Science seeks the find out about the world, and the world doesn't yield readily to inquiries. If it did, anyone might have made Galileo and Newton's discoveries. For that reason, science has developed methods of making these inquiries that involve provable hypotheses and reproducible results.

Scientists employ a different way of thinking than most other people do. Of course, it's not their sole thinking tool. Like others, they use hunches, instinct, and emotion. Unlike many others, they check their thoughts against reality in specific ways. Science requires both creativity and rational thought to explore the world and make new discoveries.

Carl Sagan used the phrase "baloney detection kit" to explain what makes the scientific approach different. Scientists must infer conclusions from uncertain data. They must avoid allowing their own personal bias to influence the results while allowing their imaginations to seek out different and unexpected conclusions.

I'd like to see all science students complete each science class with a step up in their "baloney detection kit" capabilities. This understanding of the nature of science, of scientific thinking, and of the complexity and ambiguity inherent in data from the real world is an important outcome of science courses. In too many courses, it gets lost as students struggle to memorize new vocabulary words, learn new laws with their equations, and manipulate formulas.

The science lab should be the time-out period from the words, laws, and formulas. It should be the time when students confront the complexity of extracting data from the real world and finding explanations for those data. Teachers should prepare students for this experience not by telling the answer that they're expected to find, but by explaining about concepts such as inference. Give them the foundation they require, not the edifice itself.

Online courses cannot lose this aspect of science courses. Of course, many science courses handle labs poorly. That's absolutely no excuse for online science courses to use those poor lab experiences as their standard -- easily exceeded. The standard must be the best science courses.

The best science courses, as indicated in America's Lab Report, routinely have students collect their own real data from the real world, analyze those data, and discuss their conclusions with the rest of their class. They don't collect data from simulations.

Online science courses can have real experiments with interactive, personal data collection. A number of means exist for that purpose among which is the Smart Science® system's integrated instructional lab units (www.smartscience.net). There's no excuse for settling for simulations instead of real labs in online courses. Combining real virtual labs with hands-on, at-home labs works very well to provide a full science learning opportunity to students. Do not substitute fake labs and fake science for the real thing.

© 2008 by Smart Science Education Inc., U.S.A. www.smartscience.netFollow this author on ETC Journal.

Science Teachers Have It Tough

I recently came across a blog about the problems that science teachers have. You'll find it at http://halljackson.blogspot.com/2008/09/interactive-labs.html.

"Science teachers have it tough. They have one of the most costly subjects in a school to teach, yet get a very small budget."

Ms. Jackson is totally correct in this statement. If we all can assume that textbooks are a similar cost in all courses, then which courses have as much capital equipment and expendables/consumables? All right, which of those are required courses? You just have to come up with science.

Of course, science teachers reach out to free (and low cost) simulations. And, that's great!

A serious problem arises, however, when they substitute those simulations for lab experience. Some of the key reasons for lab experiences in science classes are as follows.

1. Understanding the nature of science.
2. Developing scientific reasoning.
3. Understanding the complexity and ambiguity of empirical work.

That all may seem a bit abstract. However, these goals are critical for any student in a science class. Leaving a class without advancing these goals means that the time in the class was wasted.

Really! Who cares if you can list the first twenty elements in the periodic table or recite the level of taxonomic classification or name the eons, eras, and epochs of geologic time? You can look that stuff up. The real question surrounds the use of this information. And, not just use but wise use.

The three goals above are from America's Lab Report. In that same report, the National Research Council states that the typical American student's lab experience is poor. Their reasons include the lack of meeting these goals among others. They point out that in order to be a science laboratory experience, an activity must use data from the "material world." Simulations do not.

These days, science teachers can find more and more options other than simulations to provide quality lab experience to their students. One such option, the Smart Science(R) core learning system, although not free, is inexpensive and meets all of the goals of America's Lab Report as well as its definition of a science laboratory experience. Students work with real experiments at a cost of pennies per experiment. By blending inexpensive and safe hands-on experiments with these prerecorded real experiments, our overtaxed science teachers can produce great science classes and have their students leave the class understanding what science is really all about. At the same time, they can demonstrate a cost savings to their department head or principal.

© 2015 by Smart Science Education Inc., U.S.A. www.smartscience.net
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