Adding Experience to Science Education

What makes science education effective? Over the years, more than one effort to improve science education produced a list—the things that should be taught and mastered at various grade levels. Sure, learning science, working in science and applying science to daily lives requires a basic foundation of knowledge, but the must-know lists can grow so long that there is little time for more than memorization. What fun is that? If science education turns into memorization and nothing more, then no one should be surprised when a student says, “Science is boring.”

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, though, provided a different approach in Stakeholders in Student Success. This publication searches for the:

… best possible ways to move the U.S. education system forward. Giving special attention to math and science subjects as essential for the development of critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, the program’s education project has high-lighted some of the most successful initiatives and best new ideas to give every American student a world-class education.

In short, the excellent programs discussed—the ones generating the best result—tend to include one or both of two elements:

hands-on experiences
interactions with working engineers, mathematicians or scientists.

Should that really surprise anyone? The fun part of science is the doing. If science education neglects the hands-on work and interactions with people working in the field, then the academic systems fails. List-based learning produces students with little or no interest in science. But getting your hands dirty, now that’s the excitement of science.

Once a high school student told me that he hated math, and when I asked him why, he said: “Because you can’t do anything with it.” You can’t do anything with math? Was he kidding? No, he wasn’t. He needed to get his hands dirty in equations—seeing how he could put those tools to use.

We lost that student to lists. Let’s not lose more.

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