We need to change the way we teach science (part 2)

In response to my last post on science teaching, my father asked for some examples to clarify the type of science teaching I had in mind. Well, for those that asked, and those that did not, below are a few examples of the kind of science...let's call them...'experiences' I have in mind. The guiding principal for all these experiences is that, to make a science experience meaningful, you need to be answering a question the students actually care about.

 

You can start giving kids science experiences from the very beginning. Actually, as soon as their about six months old (probably earlier for some), kids are doing science. They make hypotheses, they test them and then they learn from the results. Don't believe me? How about learning to speak? Babies make noises. I assume initially by accident they find that some noises elicit a response from people around them. They hypothesise that these noises will elicit a response from Mum and/or Dad every time they make them. Some noises do. Some noises consistently elicit a very big and pleasurable response from Mum and/or Dad. Through science, babies learn that some noises are good for getting people to respond in certain ways, so they keep making these noises. I'm not saying that babies are conscious of this at all. I am just saying that kids are hardwired for science from the beginning, so most, if not all, will be enthusiastic for well-crafted science experiences.

 

What about with toddlers? What science experiences are appropriate for them? I stumbled across a fun one with my three-year-old a few years back. He had a 'magnet wand', which is basically a fairly strong magnet encased in a plastic handle. He enjoyed sticking it to the fridge and oven and the washing machine. He was wondering one day why the wand stuck to things. I jumped on this opportunity and suggested that there could be a few reasons, since the things he had been sticking it to all had common features. Together we came up with two hypotheses: H1 the magnet wand sticks to things that are white; H2 the magnet wand sticks to things that are metal. Then we went around the house finding metal things of different colours and concluded (obviously!) that the wand stuck to things that were metal. I think simple experiences like this can start kids thinking scientifically. They will start to see that the world is comprehensible and ordered and that, through science, we can understand and manipulate the world.

 

What about 6- to 12-year-olds? There are so many ways you can introduce science into a child's life to answer questions that really matter to a child, such as: what is the best type of sand for sandcastles? Or what is the best chocolate chip recipe? Or what is the best method to clean up the baking soda/vinegar volcano mess that just frothed all over the carpet? And how can I get it clean without Mum or Dad ever knowing it was there?

 

I hope you can see the point I'm making, but what about for high school kids and college students? How can we give older kids or teens meaningful science experiences? You might ask a very simple question, to which your students may know the answer, like why do plants get heavier? Your students might know a bit about photosynthesis, but few of them will have seen experimental evidence for it. So, you could ask, where does plants’ extra mass come from? Are plants taking up something from the soil or air or light or some combination of all three? You could then ask students to come up with methods of testing these four hypotheses. For example, you could grow some plants in the dark and some in the light and see which ones get heavier. You could grow plants in different gaseous environments. You could weigh the soil before you grow a plant in it and then again after the plant is grown to maturity (after removing the plant from the soil, of course!). Thinking about photosynthesis in this way is not only going to help students develop their scientific skills, but it will also teach photosynthesis in a way that sticks.

 

And what about at university? The approach that I have taken with my recent lab redesign is to give the students several tools they could use for conducting an experiment and then letting them decide which tool they want to use. The goal of the lab is to separate proteins in a mixture using chromatography. The students will be supplied with two types of resin and three buffers at different pH values, but it is up to them which resin to use and which order to add the buffers. This forces students to really grapple with the concept of separating proteins based upon differing pI values.

 

I could go on, but I think I'm just multiplying examples at this point.