What can we do to help improve science education in the US?

I believe his experience would be typical.

I didn't mean to pass myself off as supporting allowing students who don't know course material to go on to the next level. But there are poeple who do -- it's a dnagerous idea.

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At risk of over-simplifying: for whom should we be improving science education?

That is...

(1) Does each and every high school graduate in the United States need a firmer grasp of basic scientific concepts?

(2) Are the potential scientists we produce failing to compete with the potential scientists from other countries?

(3) Is our recruiting class of future scientists -- that is, the group of individuals coming out of high school who are desirous of and capable of pursuing science or science-related fields as a career -- too small?

The answer to (1) is a highly subjective matter. Personally, I think that the vast majority of people will never need a more complete understanding of, say, physics than the qualitative understanding they gain from their interactions with the daily world. Most people will -- and should -- go on to specialize in fields of endeavor where no real scientific education is necessary. However, a sharpened ability to reason through a problem will undoubtedly benefit everyone.

(2) and (3) strike me more as the real problems. I worked in the chemistry department of a major state university (in Washington, a state where primary and secondary education are not exactly the best in the nation by any standard you can apply), and it was very obvious that graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from other countries were, as it were, overrepresented. Part of this has to do with the economic status of the United States: a scientist is far more likely to want to come from an institution in India to an institution in the United States than vice versa simply because of the level of funding available here. Another reason for this, it seemed to me, was that the quality of undergraduate education in certain other nations -- notably India and China -- appeared to be considerably higher. Of course, competition for slots at undergraduate institutions in these nations is much, much greater, which impacts education there in at least a couple of ways: first, the quality of the average university student is much higher, so courses can proceed faster and toward a higher degree of understanding; second, each space in a university is more highly sought after, and so more valuable, and so more of the students who get them are more inclined to work very hard to keep them. (Which brings up another question: does the United States have more institutions of higher learning than it could ever need, and is the education one receives at these universities of an inferior quality as a result? In the sciences, the second part of this question is almost definitely yes; I've been around enough places to be pretty sure of this. The first part of the question is a basic economic one, asking for the answerer to balance the values of equity and efficiency, and so is highly subjective.) So that's question (2).

As to question (3)... I'd say the answer to this question is yes, as well. Does this contradict what I think about the dilution of higher education in the U.S.? Yes and no: my science courses, from community colleges to the University of Wisconsin, are filled with people taking them because they are required to, not because they really want to learn the material, and so they are filled with dispassionate and disinterested people (who are nonetheless passed through the system just as they are in high school; the result is grade inflation). (Quite the rambler today, I am.) And I don't think thhat standardized testing does anything to remediate this problem.* Making students do better in a subject in high school doesn't necessarily make them more interested in pursuing it in college or as a career. My friend Brian and I were at the top of all of our science classes in high school. He went on the become a literature major at Berkeley and I went on to become a theater major at Santa Cruz. However well we had done in our high school science courses, something about them had made us want to pursue something else -- and that something was not a surfeit of equations grained into our head. Rather, it was a lack of a sense of science as something interesting, as something mysterious (at least in terms of what we don't know) and powerful, as something that could ultimately be a rewarding endeavor. I'm glad I've found this out a decade later, but many of the people I grew up with who would be fine scientists pursued other things, because they were more interesting. Teaching toward a standardized test is not going to do anything to change this.

* Let me say something about standardized testing: it has become a cliche that what they really test is the test-taker's ability to take a standardized test because this is, to a considerable extent, true. I happen to be very, very good at standardized test. Last fall I took the GRE for the first time. It had been a decade since my last math course, my memory of mathematics was hazy, and I scored an 800 on the math portion, largely because I happen to be very good at reading between the lines of the test question, figuring out where they are trying to lead -- i.e., to one of two wrong answers among the four available choices -- and to deduce the correct answer from among the two remaining possibilities. I'd say a quarter to a third of the questions I faced I couldn't have answered on a non-multiple choice test; my score (and a full 8% of folks who took the test last year got the same score) was a reflection of my test-taking ability, not my aptitude with shapes and numbers.

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patio,

Very interesting post, you indentify the main points with great clarity. I have an interesting take on these issues. I taught secondary physics for a few years. I am now doing programming for a educational reasearch organization.

How many people need a firm graph in science *is* a very interesting question. Most people don't need to be able to solve a comples projectile problem etc. What I think is important is that people understand enough about science to make political decisions. The way people dismiss rational scientific thought in favor of wild claims, or political spin bothers me, and I wish that our educational system could address this for the majority of average citizens we produce.

My impression is that the US does a very good job producing the top level scientists and engineers it needs. When I was teaching in a public school there was a group of kids who were very bright, intelligent and motivated. They were put in small classes with senior teachers and an interesting curriculum. They graduated with a firm knowledge of calculus, physics and chemistry as well as the scientific process in general.

Sure, this was an affluent community and there are obvious issues of fairness. But my belief is that as a whole we are producing the top scientists and engineers we need with this system.

I think the failure of the US system is what we called the "mid-kid". These are the middle 60% who aren' exceptional in any way and are looking for a normal carreer. These kids come out with a very poor understanding of science or the scientific process.

I understand your point about foreign students in prestigious programs in the US. I am near MIT and there are a large number of Americans who are very bright, and soon to be very well educated engineers and scientists and mathemiticians.

I would be interested to continue this discussion with some kind of numbers on the number of top achieving American scientists. But my quick impression is that we continue to produce as many hyper-educated American scientists as we need. The problems are at the achievement levels beneath this top level.

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Wow! What a very thorough post!

(By the way, though I don't plan to be a science major, I will pursue a career deeply delved into science; I don't think I could be satisfied with my education without it -- besides, i really like science)

You said a lot I was getting at, and a lot more I never saw. About the asterisk on standardized testing, you said it more clearly that I had attempted to in a previous post. I found there are three ways to get an correct answer, and a standardized test (referring to multiple choice -- guess, sorry) only levels the playing field for these methods. The first 2 (knowing and "figuring it out") are the best way to answer any test question, as long as the answer is honestly obtained and figuring out the answer doesn't mean from among the given choices. But then comes the nasty "GUESS" option . . . .

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About standardized testing, I still believe that we have to take the attitude that no one will ever be allowed to pass a course who does not know the material, and there will be no incentive promotions. I cannot see any way to do this except to have very cut and dried tests that cannot be tampered with at the local level. If some standardized tests are imperfect, I would rather make them better than not give them.

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Wow, quick responses! (And more excuses not to start in on catching up on my biochem....)

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They were put in small classes with senior teachers and an interesting curriculum. They graduated with a firm knowledge of calculus, physics and chemistry as well as the scientific process in general.

This is something that was not really available to me at my California high school: our "honors" courses consisted of upawards of 30 or 35 students who were generally more reflective of how involved their parents were in their education than any real aptitude or interest on their own part.

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But my belief is that as a whole we are producing the top scientists and engineers we need with this system.

Hmmm. I think we could use more, especially in terms of integrating various fields. There's about to be an explosion in genomics and proteomics, and a lot of people will be needed to sort through the information and interpret it in and for various fields.

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The way people dismiss rational scientific thought in favor of wild claims, or political spin bothers me, and I wish that our educational system could address this for the majority of average citizens we produce.

Me too. The rub is that the only way to rectify this is on any large scale is through public education (that is, through politics), and there are lots of people who people with the opposing viewpoint active in the political arena.

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I think the failure of the US system is what we called the "mid-kid". These are the middle 60% who aren't exceptional in any way and are looking for a normal carreer.

Is this a problem engendered by our transition to a largely service economy, where a strong back and a good work ethic aren't necessarily enough to secure a good job? (not a useful response, I'm afraid, so...)

Is a stronger grasp of the sciences really going to help these folks -- and, if so, what about the sciences is most likely to benefit them? I still contend it's more useful for them to practice the scientific method (that is, to apply it repeatedly) than to learn theorems and equations.

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I am near MIT and there are a large number of Americans who are very bright, and soon to be very well educated engineers and scientists and mathemiticians.

I'm not near MIT, and I don't see as many of them. Wink

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The problems are at the achievement levels beneath this top level.

Very nicely put; I'm not sure if I agree or not, in lieu of the many other areas where our students seem to be in need of improvement (writing foremost among them, in my mind).

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The first 2 (knowing and "figuring it out") are the best way to answer any test question, as long as the answer is honestly obtained and figuring out the answer doesn't mean from among the given choices. But then comes the nasty "GUESS" option . . . .

I did glance through one GRE review book before I took the test, and it seemed very emphatic about teaching this third method. (And why shouldn't they be? For all the money people pay to take the courses, they should be entitled to a short-cut...)

Another tangential question: which sciences would benefit HS kids most? I'm inclined to think the biological sciences would be most useful to them as living creatures and as citizens, but, as a student of the biological sciences, I'm more than a little biased.

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If some standardized tests are imperfect, I would rather make them better than not give them.

Fair enough. But I still think tests of content rather than quality of thought fail to gauge the most important factor to a person's future success: their parents! No, that's a joke (sort of): they fail to measure whether a person can think through a problem.

Really, this whole thread is a little difficult for me because I would like to see reading and writing emphasized more, even at the expense of the sciences. (Well, mathematics, too, which is also very useful for learning how, rather than what, to think; and, for all my criticism of the folks who write the GRE and the SAT, math is the field best suited to standardized testing, I think.)

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patiodog wrote:

Fair enough. But...they fail to measure whether a person can think through a problem.

If I were designing the test, although I would include some questions that required understanding and thinking through a problem in addition to the questions that only tested memorization of facts, ultimately my criterion would have to be whether the student could give me the correct answer. I do not want to give students a passing grade who can think through a problem, but can't give me the correct answer, which requires, among other things, having learned the course materials.

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I did glance through one GRE review book before I took the test, and it seemed very emphatic about teaching this third method. (And why shouldn't they be? For all the money people pay to take the courses, they should be entitled to a short-cut...)

I think I would have been a bit more accurate to say that the tests should be structured more in a way that either knowing or being abled to figure out the answer would be better than a mass of guesses. In every test, regardless of the type, there is room for guessing with every question. Perhaps I should have stated that many standardized multiple choice tests give such obvious 2-wrongs in many questions, and the two possible answers are still quite different. This makes it very easy to skip right to the guess in stead of even trying. Yes. We all deserve the luxury to guess. But not as much as I have seen it (though credit is given where credit is deserved: I have never seen the GRE, and since the ACT is the standard in my local home area I never bothered with the SAT so I cannot account for either).

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Another tangential question: which sciences would benefit HS kids most? I'm inclined to think the biological sciences would be most useful to them as living creatures and as citizens, but, as a student of the biological sciences, I'm more than a little biased.

Though I love science, I do not excel in any part of biology. The only biology classes I have ever taken were one in 7th grade and one in 10th. I only took these classes because I had to. During these classes, I realized that the whole classroom experience was about memorization and the labs were all about dissecting specimens and trying to line up parts according to a chart. There was no scientific method in these classes, and I do not wish to pursue any part of my future with a large standing in anything biology. So you might say that makes me a bit biased int he other direction. But I do not completely disagree. Biology is important -- it's very important. But just because a person is a living being (duh), does it make biology more important? I never learned anything about self-diagnosis of a cold or food poisoning in biology, and I'm definitely never going to even want to check up on how my vacuoles are doing (That is if the technology ever comes along for cellular-level checkups). And I could really care less what an animal's or plant's scientific name is. Why would biology be more important to me than chemistry and physics, which will be the main focus of my career and already play a significant role in my life?

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I would like to see reading and writing emphasized more, even at the expense of the sciences. (Well, mathematics, too, which is also very useful for learning how, rather than what, to think; and, for all my criticism of the folks who write the GRE and the SAT, math is the field best suited to standardized testing, I think.)

This makes a good point to me -- I really don't think any subject should suffer for improvement of another. Improved education doesn't necessarily mean longer classes, but better materials being taught. I think especially today that everything educational should be improved.

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I do not want to give students a passing grade who can think through a problem, but can't give me the correct answer, which requires, among other things, having learned the course materials.

No one said anything about not learning the material. If the questions regarding the material are directed correctly, the students will have to think it through to come to the correct answer, except in the instances where memorization is necessary. In this case, the issue at hand would be rather the student was learning or simply regurgitating answers.

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(hee hee. My interests biological are directed more toward physiology and biochemistry -- which give me a greater understanding of my own health/health and tools for deciphering what various commercially marketed pharmacetuicals are doing -- than toward gross anatomy or taxonomy, which bore me to tears, but point taken. I freely admit I am biased towards these things and never have more than a passing interest in, say, physics, except where a passing understanding of it is necessary in my pet subjects....)

Brandon wrote:

If I were designing the test, although I would include some questions that required understanding and thinking through a problem in addition to the questions that only tested memorization of facts, ultimately my criterion would have to be whether the student could give me the correct answer.

What it comes down to is that I object less to the content of tests themselves as to how their application affects curriculum. The natural response for a school (or an individual student) faced with having to pass a particular test is to study only what is on that test without regard for process. Where it might ultimately be more useful for a student to work through a single experiment for a week to really understand what's going on (and, more to the point, to really understand how they came to understand what's going on), a higher score on a comprehensive exam is more likely to be be obtained by just skipping to the expected results of the experiment (it's in the book, after all) and move on to the next piece of information on the test. I've seen this in action: "We don't have time to go into any detail on this because we have this much to cover." While I don't object to standardized testing per se, I hesitate to advocate its broad application in primary and secondary education because I see the main point of primary and secondary education as learning how to learn, not as the transfer of information. Students who have not learned how to do the former benefit little from the latter.

Another personal example: I had two terms of organic chemistry laboratory. The first term was simply a series of disjointed and pretty uninteresting sessions designed to give us a feel for various techniques and principles. These were important. They were also stultifyingly dull and unengaging, and I honestly don't remember as much of them as I should. A lot of the students didn't even understand the purpose of the procedures as they were doing them.

The second term incorporated the identification of an unkown organic substance over the course of 10 weeks in addition to further work on techniques. I -- and the class as a whole, I think -- gained a much deeper understanding of the analytical processes we were applying in identifying the unknown than when we knew what the results were supposed to be before hand. We had to, or we never would have made the identification.

Also, I'm realizing that I have an innate objection to a central authority issuing decrees on when something is working and when it is not. If we can't trust the administrators and teachers in primary and secondary institutions to judge when students are learning, how can we trust them to educate children at all? I'm hardly a big states-rightist, but it seems to me that some determinations have to be made on a local level, by people who are closer to the students, for better or for worse. Let Big Brother keep an eye on my tax returns instead...

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patiodog wrote:

The natural response for a school (or an individual student) faced with having to pass a particular test is to study only what is on that test without regard for process....

The solution is to not tell them what is going to be on the test.

patiodog wrote:

I see the main point of primary and secondary education as learning how to learn, not as the transfer of information. Students who have not learned how to do the former benefit little from the latter.

Here we disagree. I don't want a bunch of graduates who know how to learn, but haven't learned anything. Sure, teach them how to learn, but if the course is in basic Physics, when the course is over, make sure that the students have learned a sufficient amount of the course contents. Give the student every opportunity to do well in the course, and give the teacher and school the resources they need, but when the course is over, either the student has learned the material or he has not, and if he has not, don't give him a passing grade. I believe that policies of this type, involving accountability, will tend to promote better education. If a teacher knows that his students will be examined at the end of the course to see whether they have learned the material, and that he won't be able to fudge thir grades, he will be motivated to make sure the students do learn.

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The solution is to not tell them what is going to be on the test.

How? There are two ways to do this: 1) don't give schools any guidelines as to curriculum, and then test them on whatever you like, which places enormous pressure on them to guess what you're going to test; or 2) require such a curriculum so broad that the material couldn't possibly all be covered during the course of the test. Anyway, even if the testers managed to keep such a secret, the cat would be out of the bag after a couple of years.

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Here we disagree. I don't want a bunch of graduates who know how to learn, but haven't learned anything.

Everything covered in an entire year of high school physics is covered over the course of about three weeks of college physics. In fact, every single piece of hard information I was taught (and occasionally mistaught, I'm afraid) in high school I've either encountered again in college or have not needed. Honestly, every single bit. So we disagree very strongly on this point. If I'm hiring someone who needs to know physics, I'm not hiring directly out of high school. On the other hand, if I'm hiring for, say, an entry level position in a well-drilling business, I want someone can think on their feet, who can learn independently, and who will grow in the industry and learn enough to advance to a position just below mine (but never level with or above, of course!). Does the process of learning how to calculate the velocity of a ball rolling down an incline help with this? Sure. But they damn well better know the process and be able to apply those reasoning methods to other problems, as well, or all the rote memorization in the world is of no use to me as the owner of a company that drills wells.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not against testing -- it's an essential part of the process of education. I just think the path that standardized bubble tests takes us down isn't one toward a broad, generally useful secondary education.

But, then, I just come back 'round to my questioning of the value of teaching any of the natural sciences in high school, which sort of removes me from the arena of this discussion...

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patiodog wrote:

How? There are two ways to do this: 1) don't give schools any guidelines as to curriculum, and then test them on whatever you like, which places enormous pressure on them to guess what you're going to test; or 2) require such a curriculum so broad that the material couldn't possibly all be covered during the course of the test. Anyway, even if the testers managed to keep such a secret, the cat would be out of the bag after a couple of years.

I think it's possible to specify what must be covered in a class, without telegraphing exactly what you're going to put in your test, which forces the teacher to cover the entire subject. If you say, for example, that the course must cover mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and thermodynamics, and give a couple of paragraphs about what must be learned in each area, I have to believe that you can do it without simultaneously specifying which fraction of it you're really going to test on. Most likely the person who writes the curriculum specification actually won't know what's going to be on the test.

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yes, you're absolutely right. I strayed to far afield and clung to tightly to a tenuous position, and never adequately expressed my real point about standardized testing, which is this: standardized testing, by its very nature, is most easily and accurately applied to disciplines and to aspects of disciplines that are quantifiable -- and not everything is. If schools and individual students are going to be evaluated on the basis of quantifiable tests administered from outside the institution -- test designed not just to monitor progress but with real adverse consequences for that institution -- an economic pressure is introduced in which progress in quantifiable subjects is more valuable than progress in subjects that are less easily quantifiable, and in areas of achievement where progress is less easily quantified.

Now, schools that are already doing well might have the luxury to continue on the same track they've been on, but schools that are doing poorly -- which are presumably the schools we most want to help, having outgrown social darwinism -- have little choice but to shunt already meager resources away from subjects that cannot reasonably tested and toward subjects that can, and will be. That's simple economics: the physical sciences or more easily tested and those tests more easily prepared for, and so greater apparent gains can be realized by allocating resources to those areas.

The problem is, the relative values that an array of tests -- at least, a test that must be administered and evaluated cheaply and quickly over an enormous segment of the population by what will inevitably be a small staff working with limited resources -- to restate, the relative values that such an array of tests assigns to various skills does not, in my estimation, adequately reflect the values of those skills to students entering the real work-a-day world. Most people work in words, not numbers. Most people depend on rhetoric and logic more than they do on trigonometry and physics. And the skills that most people need are the ones that are most sorely lacking in public secondary schools, if my experience as a teaching assistant and in the workforce are any indication. I've worked, mostly in a temporary capacity, in about 15 different businesses in five years, and I've seen which employees are valued and which ones or not. With the exception of a few college-educated specialists, the people who had the most responsibilities (and these have varied from construction contractors to newspapers to hospitals) have been those who can persuade people to do what's good for the company, who can put customers at ease and work to understand what their needs are -- and these are people who can speak well and, if necessary, write proficiently.

I'm interested in the thread because I think that primary and secondary education in the sciences could stand to improve, but I think that education in the liberal arts (writing, oratory, logic) needs to improve even more, at least from a standpoint of making public education equitable in terms of the opportunities it gives all students -- not just those bound for college or born under fortunate circumstances.

Anywho, that's where I'm coming from. Sorry about the lack of clarity -- i was underslept, hypercaffeinated, and overstimulated yesterday.

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patiodog Wrote

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I -- and the class as a whole, I think -- gained a much deeper understanding of the analytical processes we were applying in identifying the unknown than when we knew what the results were supposed to be before hand. We had to, or we never would have made the identification.

This is a great example of how schools can teach students the process of learning and thinking for themselves. The answer may have been given and it may have steered the students in a certain direction or other from time to time but it also gave valuable experience about what to do and how to do it right. Giving the answer in this case was a study guide. Kool!

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If we can't trust the administrators and teachers in primary and secondary institutions to judge when students are learning, how can we trust them to educate children at all?

Good question. For the most part, it seems that today people see the traditional role of educators as the authority on their children's educations (in fact, the trend has sadly moved to some parents' wondering why primary discipline does not come from school -- but that's another topic and a controversial issue all together). Parents have grown a bit too trusting of traditional school roles, thus allowing the same trends of gradually slacking education standards in all subjects.

Brandon9000 wrote:

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Give the student every opportunity to do well in the course, and give the teacher and school the resources they need, but when the course is over, either the student has learned the material or he has not, and if he has not, don't give him a passing grade. I believe that policies of this type, involving accountability, will tend to promote better education. If a teacher knows that his students will be examined at the end of the course to see whether they have learned the material, and that he won't be able to fudge thir grades, he will be motivated to make sure the students do learn.

This is another good point. As this may apply to some subjects, or specific topics within the subject, and not to others, there is another way. My high school physics teacher did an outstanding job of making sure the students understood the material. On the tests, the questions are related to the material. But they are nothing directly from lecture or the text book. He asked questions that made the students think, in stead of just recite recently-given material. The tests he gave were on not only the new material, but there were questions on the rest of the previous material. There was a lot he did that many, if not most, other teachers do not do often.

My point? These types of things can be done with most subjects (though there are times when memorizing is the only method to learning something). There dos not have to be a test at the end of the year, necessarily, as long as the progress and knowledge retention are both monitored through tests.

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The solution is to not tell them what is going to be on the test.

The students should know exactly what will be on the test. There should be a curriculum. But the tests should not be simply regurgitative answers. If students have to memorize lists, the questions can be directed in a way for the student to have to understand the list in order to answer in stead of just re-stating pieces of the list. Answers should be more subjective in some cases, such as the liberal arts. there should no longer be gradable things like "What is your interpretation of . . ." The questions should be direct, as in "What did the author (or character) mean by ...?" I just mean that, though this post is about science education there is also much to say about the other subjects in today's education system. (thanks, patiodog) There are just many ways that things can be improved similarly across the board.

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I think it's possible to specify what must be covered in a class, without telegraphing exactly what you're going to put in your test, which forces the teacher to cover the entire subject. If you say, for example, that the course must cover mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and thermodynamics, and give a couple of paragraphs about what must be learned in each area, I have to believe that you can do it without simultaneously specifying which fraction of it you're really going to test on. Most likely the person who writes the curriculum specification actually won't know what's going to be on the test.

Once again, I reference my spill about my physics teacher. He didn't just cover the material for the test. This is a dangerous thing many teachers do today. When someone asked what would be on the test, he simply answered that it would be what he taught. And he did cover everything, or at least the majority and the most difficult of the material, on the test.

patiodog wrote:

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The problem is, the relative values that an array of tests ... does not, in my estimation, adequately reflect the values of those skills to students entering the real work-a-day world. Most people work in words, not numbers. Most people depend on rhetoric and logic more than they do on trigonometry and physics.

You're right. With this, I can also say however that a strong curriculum in science not only makes more rounded students, but it does strengthen the skills in logic -- thanks, of course, to a (hopefully) strong basis in the scientific method. It's basic problem solving skills. But science will not be the backbone for many jobs. Abut the "more rounded students" comment, I think that the students can benefit from a good scientific foundation at least to help out on some levels in life, only because of the increasing amount of misinformation attempting to take advantage of weak science knowledge.

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I think that education in the liberal arts (writing, oratory, logic) needs to improve even more, at least from a standpoint of making public education equitable in terms of the opportunities it gives all students -- not just those bound for college or born under fortunate circumstances.

I think this needs to improve as well. i'm no scholar of literature. But at least I can say there was someone in a school somewhere who cared enough about teaching that they (sorry -- he or she for the grammar critics out there) were determined to make an impact. Actually, I remember at least two of my teachers doing more than just teaching grammar out of a book, but showing how very poor grammar can affect professional situations. and even things as simple as a high school report.

I guess my point, though this is supposed to be about science education, is similar to patiodog's. All subjects are lacking. But overall, I guess I'm still biased towards science (as a favorite, not as a priority over others -- except maybe history).

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patiodog wrote:

Anywho, that's where I'm coming from. Sorry about the lack of clarity -- i was underslept, hypercaffeinated, and overstimulated yesterday.

A state I'm usually in.

The question isn't whether physics is valuable or whether a student ought to be taking physics, but whether those students who do take physics should be passed if they don't learn the material. Personally, I am against any system that purports to teach a subject, but has such poor quality control that it often does not. The only was to introduce quality control that I think would really work is to make a determination at the end of the course as to whether the student knows the material. And, ideally, it would not be an easier test for some than for others, nor permit local authorities to pass more students to cover up the fact that they're doing a poor job of teaching.

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I know I talk about physics a lot -- I just like it. It's not to try to push the issue of whether or not it should be taught. I just over-use it as an example. As you said,

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I am against any system that purports to teach a subject, but has such poor quality control that it often does not. The only was to introduce quality control that I think would really work is to make a determination at the end of the course as to whether the student knows the material. And, ideally, it would not be an easier test for some than for others, nor permit local authorities to pass more students to cover up the fact that they're doing a poor job of teaching.

I just meant that an end -of-course test is a good idea but it's not the only way. Of course some students will do better than others in every subject. Aptitudes vary greatly. For example, no matter how much I study history, I can barely do better than mediocre. I would do very poorly at any history class' end of year exam. But the test would force me to be sure I know at least enough of the material to pass. I think history (as well as other mostly name/date-type classes) would benefit profoundly from such a test.

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I have been a mentor for two years now in Elementary school. My observations with input from the councilor and several teachers is that the parents are by far the major problem with our educational system. The children that I mentor are, as the councilor told me, lethargicly lethargic and I found this to be somewhat true.

Parents do not take an active roll and usually blame the teacher or school system. Yet, they do not go to PTA meetings or school board meetings. The two kids that I mentor have no personality and show no emotions. One kid I have been teaching to play Chess and after the 5th or 6th lesson, he began to get excited when I took out of class because he knew that I would tutor him for 30 minutes and that we would play Chess for 30 minutes. I can't tell you guys what a change began in his little mind.

When I arrived to take him out of class, the teacher would tell me what he need tutoring in that day and that is what I did. Before I got him, he was failing math and reading. After 4 months, he was making strong As in both subjects and has continued to do so into this school year. He is still lethargic with no personality, but that is my goal this year.

Parents allow too much TV, do not read to them or have them read. They mostly do not go to teacher requested meetings to discuss their children's progress and problems. The school is a babysitter for a lot of these parents.

I do not care for some of the teaching methods, especially in math, which makes it more complicated than is necessary at this age.

This forum seems to have a lot of caring and mature people. Think about giving one hour per week to a child. If you want more information on being a mentor, please PM me. You will really enjoy the experience.

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Texan wrote:

Parents do not take an active roll and usually blame the teacher or school system. Yet, they do not go to PTA meetings or school board meetings.

Parents allow too much TV, do not read to them or have them read. They mostly do not go to teacher requested meetings to discuss their children's progress and problems. The school is a babysitter for a lot of these parents.

You're right there. I have seen too many parents complaining about the schools' lack of discipline, and the same parents let their kids do almost anything. The word "no" is becoming less frequent in the home. As far as parental involvement, you made another great point. My parents were both very busy with work, and never had time to go to PTA meetings. But I never really minded, and I still don't. They did take the time to help me with my homework and they encouraged me academically. They did the things parents don't often do any more.

As far as the kid with a lacking personality, don't worry. He will come around. I was there for a while myself.

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1st of all i think standarized testing should be used for all subjects. kids these days don't need to learn anything to graduate. all that a high school diploma shows in this country, is that you attended the minimum required classes. in other countries they actually emphasize learning something.

as for science in particular, i don't think there's enough emphasis on engineering. the new york educational system has taught me hold to mix chemicals but never taught me what an ohm was.

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What can we do to help improve science education in the US?

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