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Inquiry Method Recommended to Improve Science Education; Education Experts Convene at New York Academy of Sciences

Posted on: Wednesday, 17 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

NEW YORK, Aug. 26 (AScribe Newswire) -- The United States may be the world's only superpower, but on the science and mathematics literacy front, the country is losing the war. Reports issued by the Office of Science Education of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and the National Research Council indicate a large gap between the state of science education in the U.S. and the demand for an educated citizenry in a technology-driven marketplace. At the same time, the percentage of science majors at U.S. colleges and universities continues to drop.

What can be done to reverse this trend? According to a panel of education experts at the New York Academy of Sciences, one solution might be the "inquiry" based approach to learning. This process, which plays upon natural human curiosity - the desire to understand the "why" behind the "what" - encourages students to stop parroting what they learned in textbooks in favor of experiencing natural or man-made phenomena firsthand and then coming up with their own explanations for what they observed.

The "Why" Behind the "What"

To illustrate the process, Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr., physics professor at Boise State University and one of the speakers at an Academy workshop, "Why Inquiry? New Models of Teaching College Science", asked a group of physics teachers to observe a gooseneck lamp containing a 40-watt bulb. After placing a lens between the lamp and the wall, he switched on the bulb, which housed a five-sided filament with one side open. The teachers were then asked to explain why the resulting projected image was inverted.

"Science education is not about imparting knowledge and supplying the 'right' answers, but inducing students to examine and reconstruct new, more effective understandings of their world," he said. If these teachers had been students, they would have had time to explore the limits of the ray theory and find their way to the wave, versus particle, theory of light and to the laws of refraction, diffraction, interference and reflection postulated by scientists such as Huygens, Newton and Einstein.

Science is Everywhere

Another way to break down students' common misconceptions about science (that it's too hard or has little relevance to their lives) is to stress the interdisciplinary nature of science and how scientific thinking is related to other disciplines. Frank Cerreto, a mathematician from Stockton College, asserted that quantitative reasoning infuses virtually every discipline. "Students take a calculus class, then a business class where they study compound interest, and then a biology class where they study bacterial growth, but they don't realize that the latter two are about the same thing as calculus," he said.

At the second Academy workshop for inquiry-based learning, Nancy Baxter Hastings, professor of mathematics at Dickinson College, argued that technology could be used to make science less intimidating. Using a laptop, she projected a graph onto a large screen and employed a motion detector to illustrate the relationship between time and distance (as represented by two axes). In addition, audience members could press a button that made the line representing the inverse relationship between time and distance go up and down. "Technology can make the study of mathematics engaging, relevant and fun," she said.

Making Science Come Alive

Other teachers used highly imaginative methods to make science come, literally, alive. Merle S. Bruno, professor of biology at Hampshire College, explained how she used real medical cases to guide students through human anatomy and physiology. "We give the students a little information about a case and let them go from there," she said. After students develop three categories of questions, they narrow down their "differential diagnosis" a little bit at a time, comparing their research with their observations until a diagnosis is reached.

In the same vein, Jeannie Drew, who heads the Science Department at Riverdale Country School in Riverdale, New York, asked her 7th-graders to create a mock crime-scene lab where they tested "urine" samples for excess sugar - a sure-fire way of identifying a criminal known to have diabetes.

Content vs. Inquiry

While the inquiry approach isn't a panacea, many scientists agree it represents an advance over orthodox methods in its ability to stimulate critical thinking. "Content always gets sacrificed," Drew says. "Because thought and discovery come first, we spend a longer time on projects, which means we often can't cover enough material to compete well on national tests." Still, researchers believe that a method that simulates the real-life working conditions of scientists will create long-term understanding and critical thinking.

By offering these workshops, the Academy hopes to encourage teachers to see science education beyond the classroom. "Science Education at the Crossroads," an article on the Academy workshops, is featured in the September/October issue of Update, the Academy's member magazine. To learn more, visit www.nyas.org.

Founded in 1817, the New York Academy of Sciences is an independent, not-for-profit organization of more than 23,000 members worldwide dedicated to advancing support and understanding of science and technology and their role in society.

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