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Universities Try to Pique Kids' Interest in Science for Texas' Economic Future

Posted on: Sunday, 3 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 3--Some of the most important people in Kendall Miller's 10th-grade geometry class are not in the classroom or even in school.

"Our biggest problem in education is not so much the resources or the curriculum but more of a way to get students motivated and to see long-term goals," said Miller, who teaches at Arlington's Sam Houston High School. "It needs to come not just from us but from parents and society as a whole."

The economic future of the state depends on the abilities of math and science teachers and their students' interest in the subjects, according to leaders of math and science advocacy programs.

For example, about 80 percent of the jobs at Texas Instruments, an $8.4 billion Fortune 500 company based in Dallas, require technical degrees.

"You ask any industrial corporation what they need in the marketplace, and they'll tell you they need a better-trained scientific person who knows how to use analytical tools and knows how to solve problems," said Jim Roberts, a University of North Texas physics professor who runs training programs for science teachers at the UNT campus in Denton.

Test scores show that Texas still has room for improvement in math and science. In 1996, Texas eighth-graders performed slightly below the national average on a national science test, scoring 145 out of 300, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The average score of Texas eighth-graders who took the test in 2000 was 144. The 1996 math average was 270 out of 500, which was about the national average. In 2000 the average score rose to 275.

Texas universities say they are trying to do their part by reaching out to schools long before students reach college age. Here's some of what they're doing:

-- UNT runs training programs that help teachers sharpen their science, math and teaching skills with sessions on subjects including lab work and using the Internet as a teaching tool.

-- The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin provides teacher training and has developed substantive Web sites with lesson plans, curricula and even safety manuals for math and science teachers.

-- The Rice University School Mathematics Projects worked with 16 Houston area school districts and 10 private schools to overhaul the teaching of mathematics, organizing instruction by concept instead of by test-driven objectives.

-- The University of Texas at Arlington's College of Science hosts the state's annual science and engineering fair, which displays science projects by students from grades six through 12 and hands out $250,000 in scholarships.

"In part, the failure of science [education] is the failure for scientists to be very involved" in the schools, said UT-Arlington science Dean Neal Smatresk. "Ten years ago, no one was talking about any of this, and there was almost an active disengagement policy.

Things have changed radically. What made it change was when we started really assessing on a nationwide level the science and math abilities of American students."

Smatresk said test scores that showed U.S. students lagging behind their peers in other countries served as an abrupt wake-up call.

Leaders in these math and science advocacy programs said they saw some of their funding evaporate in the recent regular legislative session, which grappled with a budget shortfall. And there's no effort to coordinate the many science and math advocacy programs Texas universities have.

But the lack of coordination might not matter too much, said Gloria White, deputy assistant commissioner in the division of participation and success at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

"I'm not sure they needed to be coordinated because I'm not sure that one size fits all," she said. "The variety of support structures that you see is probably appropriate."

Math and science skills are not just marketable, as many argue and salary figures show; they are also part of the foundation of a good education, said Florence Fasanelli, associate program director for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based in Washington, D.C.

"If they want to understand the world that we live in, it's a necessity to understand very simple things such as measurement and what measurement means," Fasanelli said. "If kids don't understand this, then they do not have a sense of personal empowerment about understanding the world."

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(c) 2003, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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