On the heels of my post wondering where the science is in elementary school, I’m interested in your sense of how things stand now and what, if anything, you think we should do about the situation. Draw on your experience as a former (or current) student, a parent, an educator (including educating future teachers), a working scientist, or whatever.
The possibilities that have been raised so far seem to be:
- There is not now, and will not be any time soon, anything like a coherent and inspiring elementary school science curriculum because people who go into elementary education lack the necessary science background and/or enthusiasm. Whether it’s because people who have the science chops can make more money (or get more respect) doing something else, or because the people training future teachers have communicated to these future teachers that it’s OK not to know a whit about science if you’re teaching K-6, or whether elementary school teachers are hobbled by the crappy science instruction they received as students, it does seem like a lot of K-6 teachers back away from the science. If they’re the ones delivering instruction to the kids, this could be the main problem.
- There is not now, and will not be any time soon, anything like a coherent and inspiring elementary school science curriculum because No Child Left Behind has marginalized science in favor of reading and math (i.e., the schools are too busy teaching to the high-stakes tests to teach science). If there are regulations applied to the schools that make our kids less educated, rather than more, maybe those regulations are a bad thing and ought to be changed. I’ll leave it to those more familiar with the details of NCLB and its implementation to provide more detail here.
- There is not now, and will not be any time soon, anything like a coherent and inspiring elementary school science curriculum because the nature of science doesn’t lend itself to small chunks of time in the school day or precise answers that match those in the teacher’s manual. To the extent that something science-like creeps into the grade schooler’s consciousness, it’s about facts and definitions rather than inquiry or problem-solving. It’s memorization rather than digging for explanations. It’s boring. But, if we’re working within the time-and-space framework of the school day (where every 30-45 minutes you have to move onto the next activity), how do you get around this?
- There’s something like a coherent and inspiring elementary school science curriculum somewhere … but word hasn’t gotten out about how to make it happen other places, or it depends on very special conditions that don’t prevail in most school districts, or it depends on this one amazing teacher who we can’t easily replicate.
I’m open to the possibility that more than one of these factors could be at work.
As well, it strikes me that there may not be consensus amongst the commenters (let alone society at large) about how big a problem it is if the K-6 science is lacking. Possibly a lack of coherent and inspiring science instruction is setting the stage for a major loss of potential scientific talent, not to mention a general population that has decided science isn’t worth understanding or caring about (because is it’s something worth caring about, wouldn’t they take some care to teach it to us?). On the other hand, it’s possible that well-intentioned attempt to teach science at the elementary level could be worse than no science instruction at all (by making science seem boring or scary). Maybe leaving science as something the interested kids pursue as a hobby keeps it interesting, but maybe this only works for kids who have a certain kind of out-of-school support system (libraries, internet, adults who help nurture their interests).
Because I think science is cool — and because I spend lots of time teaching college students who have been put off science by the educational experiences they get before they come to me — I’m inclined to think that elementary school science education needs to be fixed. Then again, I survived a pretty lame K-6 science curriculum and went on to wallow in science. Is there a problem here? And if so, what do we do to fix it?