Aug 25, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Keep Science Education in Context of Things That Matter
 
By Wm. David Burns
Special to Huntington News Network
 
Despite an increase in college enrollment over the past decade, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported that the proportion of undergraduate students obtaining degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics has fallen over the past decade. The number of graduate degrees awarded in the STEM fields has also declined.
 
It is ironic that the share of students in the sciences continues to shrink at a time when the United States offers more opportunities for more students to study science and mathematics in colleges and universities than ever before in our history. At the same time, perhaps never before in our history have so many of the biggest problems we face as a nation needed the benefits that those educated in the science, mathematics and technology fields can help provide as we search for ways to make things better.
 
Despite the opportunities and problems that can be helped by science, very few students actually choose to study any more science or math than required. Worse, far fewer American students complete degrees in these fields than we have the capacity to accommodate. We’re operating way under capacity and we are underperforming.
 
This has consequences. We can ill afford these casualty rates in a world now described as “flat,” where there will be increasing opportunities for gainful employment in the technical fields and fewer Americans trained to compete for them.
 
What’s wrong? Well, for starters, studying science is perceived as tough. It certainly can be. And though kids in grade school do well in science and math, somehow by the time they’ve finished high a school, far too many bright young minds have decided they’ve had enough. Something turns them off. Add to that the fact that many very good students abandon majoring in science in college. They drop out even though they are performing well and have demonstrated good aptitude.
 
What can be done? Let’s start with a pretty basic point. Science is about something other than just science. It’s about finding out how things work, why things work the way they do, why some things stop working the way they should, and what, if anything, can be done about it. It’s about predicting, with some confidence, how something will turn out given certain conditions and circumstances. It’s about origins, surely. But science is just as much, even more, about the here and now, and about what will most likely happen tomorrow.
 
Science and science education occur in a context. Often that context is a problem we face. When my mother called the County Agent about the wilt in our tomatoes, she wanted healthy tomatoes, but she was certainly glad that the agent knew something about the wilt. But all too often, science is taught as if it weren’t about anything but itself. It’s abstract, dry, and tough. It’s all wilt and no tomato, you could say.
 
At Harrisburg University, for example, we teach science, but we teach it in context of real people and real problems, in the context of things that matter. Maybe our students will study asthma and try to understand it as a way of learning complex biochemistry and physiology, among other things.
 
And as we do so, perhaps we can contribute to solving a serious problem we have in Harrisburg and around the nation: high absentee rates in school and loss of school time and academic performance due to this new epidemic. Or perhaps our students will study the Susquehanna River as a way of learning physics and statistics. While we’re doing so, we’ll learn something about what we can do to preserve and protect the very thing that got Harrisburg its start and makes Harrisburg the place it is today.
 
Putting the learning in a context--the context of the complex, unsolved problems we face--does two things:
 
First, it gives the student a real reason to study, a real reason to do the hard work--and it is hard work. People work hard on things that interest them. The evidence seems clear that when the learning is interesting, people get interested in learning.
 
The second reason is as important: we need the discoveries that students, faculty, parents and members of the community working on a problem--like asthma--will produce. This knowledge matters and thus it is worth the hard work that makes getting it possible.
 
In short, the learning matters because it is about things that matter. As a new university, with a focus on particular students and particular areas of study, we are building on what others have learned and are making the necessary adjustments to continually improve what we are doing. We also have the benefit of the experience of others, who, through our National Center on Science and Civic Engagement have been developing strategies to increase student interest and improve performance in science by connecting science education to important civic challenges.
 
When we succeed--as I expect we will--our students and graduates will make a difference for Harrisburg, for Pennsylvania, and for the nation and we will have made a contribution to improving science education, as well.
 
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Wm. David Burns is the Executive Director of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement--and professor of general studies at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, the first science and technology-focused comprehensive university chartered in Pennsylvania in over 100 years. The NCSCE maintains offices in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Somerset, New Jersey, and Washington, DC.