SCSGC Text Version - Coastal Heritage, Winter 1997-98

VOLUME 12, NUMBER 3, WINTER 1997-98

Coastal Heritage is a quarterly publication of the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium is a university-based network supporting research, education, and outreach to conserve coastal resources and enhance economic opportunity for the people of South Carolina.

Many young Americans leave school with poor science and math skills, unprepared for today’s competitive job market. In fact, most American schools are not preparing students for lifetime learning, for constantly acquiring new skills in a rapidly changing economy. So in recent years, educators and business leaders have initiated the first stages of ambitious reforms to change how all young Americans learn science and math. Reformers want to provide better training for teachers, more rigorous and focused curriculum for students, and tests that measure problem-solving skills.

Today many u.s. schools are training young people to work in the assembly-line era of Henry Ford’s Model-T, while Japanese and Korean schools are teaching students how to succeed in the information age.

The problem is that most American eighth graders must plow through routine, repetitive tasks in math and science classes. Japanese and Korean eighth graders, meanwhile, are spending class time solving challenging science and math problems, according to a recent international survey of school performance in dozens of nations.

The U.S. must change “what we teach students and how we teach” them, says William Schmidt, Michigan State University professor of applied statistics and research director of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

“Years ago, our schools were designed to prepare people to work on assembly lines,” says Paula Keener-Chavis, director of the Charleston Math & Science Hub, one of South Carolina’s 13 regional centers that support school districts implementing education reform. “But now we need workers who can think critically, solve problems, function in teams, and be flexible. There are many changes in the modern workplace, and we’ve got to prepare our students to work in this new environment.”

In November 1996, TIMSS published a survey of 500,000 randomly selected seventh- and eighth-grade students in 41 countries. American 13-year-olds ranked below the international average—28th—in math, and slightly above average—17th—in science. “It was disappointing but not catastrophic,” says Schmidt. A surprise, though, emerged in June 1997 when TIMSS published fourth-grade math and science surveys results in 27 nations. This time, U.S. students performed quite well, with only Korean students scoring higher than American fourth-graders in both math and science.

Researchers were puzzled. What happens between American fourth and eighth grades? Why do our children succeed early in science and math, but later fall behind?

In fourth grade, most American youngsters are taught the same math-and-science basics as students in high-scoring nations, including Hungary, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Japan and Korea. But by eighth grade, the American science and math curriculum fades dramatically, lacking in focus and rigor, say TIMSS researchers.

In eighth grade, the vast majority of students in high-scoring nations are studying algebra and geometry. But only 20 percent of American eighth graders study these subjects; the rest are tracked into general math classes, where they are drilled primarily in lower-level skills such as arithmetic, fractions and decimals.

“This kind of tracking is so pernicious,” says Schmidt, “because many of these students never take the real math (of algebra and geometry).” Americans initiated this tracking system because we believed “that some children could learn things and some couldn’t.” In high-scoring nations, “all children—not just the elite—learn algebra, geometry, chemistry and physics” by eighth grade, before they are sent into vocational or college-bound tracks, he says. So all students learn early the principles of scientific exploration and problem-solving.

Even our best and brightest are falling behind—the top-scoring 20 percent of U.S. eighth-graders are taught what seventh graders are taught in high-scoring nations.

A generation ago, an illiterate could make a decent living working as a unskilled laborer. But today’s jobs demand more from workers. Employees must have at least basic reading, science and math skills. And as the economy continues to create and destroy jobs, workers will have to adapt to new environments, learn new skills and solve problems. Yet nearly one-third of all South Carolinians have not graduated high school, and even many graduates are poorly trained for the new economy.

Communities will rise or fall economically based largely on the skills of local workers. “The quality of the workforce is the greatest determinant of economic development success,” says William Youngblood, attorney and chair of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce’s Education Foundation.

Since South Carolina regularly scores near or at the bottom on nationwide tests and college boards, the state’s educators, parents, and students have work to do.

In the 1960s, American educators sought to create a revolution in how science and math are taught to children. Science and education agencies designed high-quality classroom exercises and curricula, but reform lost political momentum in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, though, educators and their partners in American industry became determined once again to improve the quality of math and science instruction.

There are four interconnected parts of education reform, says Chris Marsh, director of the Waccamaw Math & Science Hub, based in Conway. School districts need standards that define what all students should learn at each grade. Teachers must use the best instructional methods to help students reach those standards. Classroom materials offered to students must be appropriate for their ages and intellectual development. And finally students “need to know why they’re learning—they need real-life educational models to see possible careers for themselves,” says Marsh.

At the heart of education reform is the principle of “hands-on, inquiry-based” learning, says Leslie Sautter, who leads the S.C. Sea Grant-sponsored COASTeam program, which trains teachers in marine science. In first and second grades, children should learn the building blocks of investigation, such as observing, classifying and measuring. With these skills, fourth graders can develop hypotheses, perform experiments and write about their conclusions.

“In the old days, you sat in neat rows, and you were told to open your textbook and do all the odd-numbered problems,” says Keener-Chavis. “You learned formulas; as long as you knew the formulas, you did fine. But you didn’t have to know how the formulas worked or why they were important.” Instead, classrooms should have “a lot of noise, excitement, with children asking questions, and teachers drawing information out of students, giving children an opportunity to think.”

Reading and writing must be a crucial component of science education as well. “Just knowing facts isn’t enough,” says Elizabeth Stage, director of science for New Standards, the research arm of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit in Washington D.C. that has written national performance standards, which states and localities can adopt. “You must be able to analyze facts you’ve gathered. You cannot do science without reading and writing.”

Despite recent reforms, U.S. math and science instruction in middle schools is still “fragmented and fractured,” says Schmidt. Superficially exposed to so many varied science topics, American eighth-graders do not have time to learn anything in depth. Teachers in Japan cover an average of 13 science topics in eighth grade, while American teachers cover an average of 24. In U.S. schools, the science curriculum is a “mile-wide and an inch deep,” researchers say.

“We have a pattern of covering all of science, but the layer is very, very thin,” says Audrey Champagne, education and chemistry professor, State University of New York-Albany.

Many U.S. eighth grade science classes still focus on memorization of science words, so students are being introduced to the language of science but not its excitement, logic and methods. Jeff Lee, director of the Pee Dee Math & Science Hub, based in Florence, describes a traditional American science lesson: “This week we memorize words on insects, label the parts, and next week we’re on to something else.”

For one nation, the u.s. has a bewildering array of national education standards. Describing what students should know at various grade levels, these standards have proliferated like weeds in recent years.

In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards of what students should learn about math at various grade levels. In 1993, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a set of “benchmarks” for science and math students. In 1995, the National Research Council issued standards for science students. Recently, the National Center on Education and the Economy introduced standards for math, science and English that states and localities can adopt.

Although each set of standards is unique, each aims for the same goals—to link classroom activities to real-world problems and to improve teaching by encouraging investigating and analyzing skills rather than rote learning and memorization.

In turn, several states, including South Carolina, have written their own education “frameworks,” or standards based on these national goals. The S.C. Science Framework, in particular, has received high marks from national experts.

Now the S.C. Department of Education is revising achievement tests for third-, sixth- and eighth-graders to correspond to state curriculum frameworks, says Susan Agruso, director of the office of assessment. These new tests will be given in Spring 1999. Soon the state education department will probably propose testing science knowledge for the first time on high-school exit exams in 2001, she says.

Many students also take “national” exams, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. But these tests do not provide scores for individual students, instead providing a sample of student performance state by state.

While high-scoring countries have national education standards, curricula and testing, the U.S. educational establishment is decentralized. What is taught to an eighth-grader can be different from state to state, community to community, and school to school. Some communities and states have high standards; others very low ones. Even within the same school, two science teachers for the same grade can provide strikingly different instruction, with one teacher providing a challenging curriculum, the other offering a watered-down version.

Local control of schools is highly prized in America, with about 16,000 school districts and elected school boards. There are also 50 state education agencies, various federal offices, committees, boards and administrators. Important messages can be lost among the cacophony of voices and agendas, experts say. Many teachers, students, and parents still are not getting the message about education reforms and changes in standards and tests.

“The top 20 percent of teachers are sophisticated and well-informed” about higher expectations for students, says Phil Astwood, University of South Carolina’s Center for Science Education associate director. But many teachers, in South Carolina and elsewhere, are not keeping up with reform methods, experts say.

That’s why in 2000, the Clinton Administration wants to offer national tests for students in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math. Proponents say that voluntary national tests, to be designed and administered by an independent board, would create uniform standards that could be used to gauge how students are doing compared with others nationwide. Each state would decide whether its students would participate. These exams could help communities see their schools’ strengths and weaknesses, some say.

Such tests, costing $27 million a year, would be an unnecessary intrusion by the federal government, opponents say. A national test would create a national curriculum, diminishing local and state authority, because teachers will “teach to the test.” Some argue that poor and minority students could be stigmatized by the tests. Only eight states and 15 urban school districts have agreed to use the proposed test.

Some educators, though, see the value of the voluntary national test. “There can be no harm in offering a test that shows what children should learn at various ages,” says Astwood. With this test, “no one would force a school district to teach in any particular way.” A national test could provide a forum for education issues, he says, an opportunity for the best, most experienced teachers to explain the qualities of good education to the nation.

______________________________
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST:
Teachers Spark Reform

The youngsters are glum at first, 24 fourth-graders filing into Linda Carter’s science laboratory at C.C. Blaney Elementary School on Younges Island. At square lab tables, the children sit in groups of four, staring glassy-eyed as Carter gives instructions about today’s experiment on the weight of water.

Each group is told to write an hypothesis about the assigned science puzzle, to perform a series of measurements using lab tools, and to chart their results on paper. The youngsters sigh and frown and fidget in their seats.

But only minutes after starting the experiments, the children are transformed. Suddenly they have the absorbed, excited look of kids at play. The children bicker cheerfully over the precision of measurements on plastic red-and-yellow balance weights. One child in each group charts results, some proudly showing their work to their home-room teacher, who moves from table to table. An exuberant boy lifts his chart and kisses it.

After experiments are completed, Carter asks the students a series of questions, and hands shoot up. It’s apparent that each child has followed this lesson’s clear logic. And when Carter instructs the youngsters to return to their home-room and write in their lab journals about what they’ve learned today, there’s not a single groan or peep of protest.

“They love being here,” says Carter, a science extension teacher. “It’s hard to prepare them to leave.”

In its second year of existence, this laboratory is a remarkable teaching tool for an elementary school in a poor, rural section of Charleston County. Outside, the school’s wooden sign needs fresh paint, yet the school laboratory, which students from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade visit twice a week, is well-stocked, with all the equipment needed to design experiments: a refrigerator, an oven, a water sink, collections of plants, animals and shells, a freshwater aquarium and a saltwater touch tank. Now other schools are studying the lab as a model.

“At first, the children just wanted to play with the equipment,” says Carter. “But after a couple of months they got that out of their systems, and they began learning how to handle the materials.”

The lab was expensive to set up, costing $5,000 to $6,000. Carter wrote grant proposals for these funds, though the school made a long-term investment by hiring her as a full-time science teacher. While relatively few elementary schools in South Carolina have well-equipped labs and full-time science instructors, investing in such personnel and equipment is worth the cost, experts say.

Still, hiring a science specialist for an elementary school has limitations. “If you’re not careful, the other teachers take no responsibility for science,” says Jeff Lee, director of the Pee Dee Math & Science Hub, based in Florence. “Science is seen as a specialized knowledge. It only works when the (home-room) teacher comes in with the kids and reinforces what happens in the science lab.”

Most elementary education majors in South Carolina universities are exposed to new “hands-on” instructional methods, experts say. But new teachers face numerous obstacles to using these techniques.

Once on the job, teachers quickly become overwhelmed, juggling dozens of duties. Grade-school teachers must teach reading, math, music and art, as well as science. And increasingly, they face the consequences of youngsters’ personal and social problems such as disinterested parents, learning disorders, family drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence.

New teachers are thrust alone in front of a classroom after 12 weeks of student apprenticeship, while doctors and other professionals are closely mentored for much longer. “Legally, you can’t allow a first-year lawyer to argue a case in court alone,” says William Youngblood, attorney and chair of the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce’s Education Foundation. “Teachers need more professional socialization” to be successful.

Many teachers don’t have the time, materials or administrative support to teach with new techniques. “It takes a great deal of effort for teachers to organize the classroom to perform lab-based science,” says Audrey Champagne, an education and chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Albany.

Funds for science materials are always hard to come by. “The schools don’t always support inquiry-based science instruction because it takes time and money,” says Leslie Sautter, who leads the S.C. Grant-sponsored COASTeam program, which trains teachers in marine science.

These are nationwide problems. In fact, American teachers receive less training and professional guidance than their peers in nations with higher math and science scores, according to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, a comprehensive survey of school performance in dozens of countries.

To help local school districts address education reform, the 13 Science & Math Hubs around the state have established curriculum leadership institutes for teachers’ professional development. The goal is not to teach math and science courses to teachers, but to instruct teachers in how to be mentors and problem-solvers for schools in their area.

“This program teaches leaders who can become reform agents within the schools,” says Chris Marsh, director of the Waccamaw Hub.

The institute also provides excellent science teachers with professional acknowledgement and fresh perspectives. “The leadership institute has given teachers like me confidence that we’re doing a good job,” says Carter. “We take ideas from each other. Teachers get together and teach each other.”

Similarly, the COASTeam program seeks to create teamwork among elementary-school teachers through a year-long, graduate-level course in marine science education. The program, led by Sautter, instructs teachers in the process of hands-on learning and experimentation. Teachers can learn scientific methods and concepts while experiencing the excitement of learning about nature. “It opens their eyes to science,” she says.

Each school must have a team of two teachers who attend the course. In turn, these teachers design an in-service program for six or more other teachers in the school to learn about many science concepts using innovative techniques. The COASTeam program thus establishes a core of teachers who can integrate hands-on activities and concepts in to a school’s curriculum, says Sautter.

Each participating school provides $100 to establish a marine science resources library, including books, maps and activity guides. Teachers must make the library available to all students and instructors in the school. “The library resources are a seed” that grows as teachers and students add materials, says Sautter. In 1998, S.C. Sea Grant will expand the COASTeam program to include middle-school teachers.

Children who learn connections between science and their daily experiences often become lifelong learners, experts say. Carmelina Livingston, kindergarten teacher at Jennie Moore Elementary in Mt. Pleasant, is applying this principle in her classroom.

“Children need to learn about the science of the everyday world,” she says as excited students gather and watch her spray a fine mist into a tank, where juvenile green tree frogs emerging from hiding stick out tongues to catch the moisture. “Look,” she laughs, “frogs are taking their bath.”

Two weeks ago, the frogs were tadpoles swimming in a nearby freshwater tank. The children observe their transformation from swimming creatures with gills to hopping ones with lungs. “You need to put some sort of life in your room,” says Livingston, a recent participant in the COASTeam program, sponsored by the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, to train teachers in marine science. “You can’t look at books alone. I want to show them to respect animals, not just say, ‘There’s a worm!’ and squash it.”

For students to flourish in middle-school science classes, they should learn the basics of scientific investigation in grammar school, experts say.

“During the middle-school years, students can make great progress in developing their problem-solving skills,” says Leslie Sautter, who leads the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium’s COASTeam program. “But many students are not learning the basics early enough. In elementary school, students are learning words out of a textbook, but the knowledge doesn’t stick with them. Instead they should be taught through hands-on activity and exploration.”

Since 1994, the COASTeam program has trained 129 teachers as facilitators in marine science activities and concepts in 65 elementary schools in Charleston, Horry, Lexington, Georgetown and Richland counties. These facilitators in turn have provided training to 770 teachers, reaching more than 15,000 students. Now the program is training 59 more facilitators in Beaufort, Hampton, Lexington, Dorchester, Berkeley and Richland counties with more courses planned for summer 1998. Contact the COASTeam program manager (843) 953-7745 or e-mail COASTeam@cofc.edu.

A true or false quiz: Many American students perform poorly in math and science, because they watch too much TV and spend too few hours in school and on homework.

“False” is the correct answer. For too long, Americans have relied on old excuses for mediocre performances by our students in math and science. In fact, American eighth-graders watch less TV and spend more hours in class and on schoolwork than do youngsters in nations that score consistently high on worldwide math and science surveys, say researchers in the Third International Math and Science Study.

Improving schools will require a team approach among parents, administrators, students and teachers, with a greater focus on the quality of instruction in the classroom, says Paula Keener-Chavis, director of the Charleston Math & Science Hub.

Most of all, we need teachers trained in “hands-on, minds-on” learning, she says. Schools that require students to think critically and solve problems, that have rigorous standards and a focused curriculum, that receive support from parents and administrators—these schools are the answer to improving American education.

One reason for the mediocre performances of U.S. eighth graders in math and science is that test scores by Southern states such as South Carolina are dragging down the nation’s average.

In 1991, the International Assessment of Educational Progress compared the eighth grade mathematics students’ scores among various nations, and among states in the U.S. In that comparison, the math scores of Iowa, North Dakota, and Minnesota were similar to high-scoring nations Taiwan and Korea. But South Carolina and other Southern states scored about the same as low-scoring Jordan.

In schools nationwide many poor, minority students are being guided away from challenging science and math courses. “Too often we are leaving children out of opportunities,” says William Schmidt, Michigan State University professor and research director of a recent international study of student performance in math and science.

But this problem is especially evident in states, such as South Carolina, with large populations of poor, minority students. “We must have high expectations for all children,” says Chris Marsh, director of the Waccamaw Math & Science Hub, “and we must clarify what those expectations are.”

Drew, David E. Aptitude Revisited. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Schmidt, William H. et al. A Splintered Vision: An Investigation of U.S. Science and Mathematics Education. Dodrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.

U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Pursuing Excellence by Lois Peak. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996.

U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Pursuing Excellence: A Study of U.S. Fourth-Grade Mathematics and Science Achievement in International Context. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997.