Minds-on science: open-ended experiments cultivate childhood inquiry - National Research Council recommends new science standards to support new approach to science education

Science News, Feb 3, 1996 by Janet Raloff

Last year, Sherry Drilling asked each of her second-grade students to guess a mealworm's favorite color. To test those forecasts, each youngster placed a larva at the center of a color wheel and recorded which hue it wiggled toward. After repeating the experiment nine times, the children graphed the insects' responses and attempted to interpret the findings.

The project was part of a 3-week science segment at Takoma Park (Md.) Elementary School that focused an hour and a half each day on insects-what they are, how they communicate, the stages they pass through during their life cycle, and their diverse strategies for coping with a sometimes hostile environment.

After a few days of coached studies, Drilling encouraged the children to frame their own questions-Could a meal-worm find its way out of a maze? Would it react to smelly substances? How would it respond to gentle prodding of its antennae? The children then devised and ran experiments to find answers. This deeply involving, experiential investigation of insects embodies an approach to learning that has been dubbed minds-on science. It goes beyond mere hands- on activities-performing specific experiments under the guidance of a teacher or book. Instead, it engages the student in formulating original questions, brainstorming to find answers, and critically evaluating subsequent test results.

"I teach them that everybody is a scientist," Drilling says. Because science is driven by curiosity, she encourages questions-loads of them. By allowing students to chart the direction of their inquiries, she says, they not only become "discoverers" but also have fun.

Ann O'Meara of the Winsor School in Boston takes a similar tack with older students. "Without question," she says, "the best course I've ever taught is introductory physical science. Generally geared for eighth graders, it is totally self-discovery- and activity-based." Conducting an experiment daily, "these students really do come away knowing how to do and understand science." While such programs can be found in some classrooms around the nation, they do not yet represent the norm, according to a blue-ribbon panel of educators and scientists assembled by the National Research Council in Washington, D.C. But in a new, 262-page report, "National Science Education Standards," the NRC panel argues that this type of science teaching should be available to all. The report offers a rough blueprint to help schools toward achieving it.

There have never been true national standards for science education, argues Richard D. Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and chair of the NRC committee that proposed such standards in December 1995.

There has always been a set of de facto standards for the older, university-bound students, he acknowledges-generally the specific knowledge or skills needed to perform well on college placement exams, especially the Advanced Placement (AP) tests and Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs). Textbooks, he notes, can serve as a second tier of de facto standards by creating a series of arbitrary bounds on the depth and breadth of a studied subject. The existence of these informal standards prompted the NRC panel to recommend changes in curricula, tests, and other gauges of knowledge and skills to support the newer approach to science education, explains Karen Worth of Education Development Corp. in Newton, Mass.

A former first-grade teacher and now a curriculum developer and educator of elementary teachers, Worth served on Klausner's standards-writing panel. She argues that "there is nothing in the new standards that a really good teacher in the right environment is not doing already."

The message that the NRC panel took home from observing such teachers, Klausner says, is that classroom science should not focus on lectures, textbook study, and paper-and-pencil tests but should instead involve procedures "that actually look like the process of doing science-which we call inquiry."

The panel's new model for science education stresses collaboration and communication among students, problem solving, and individual evaluation. It downplays a drilling on vocabulary and formulation of hypotheses, he says, in favor of promoting questions and exploration, both "central to science." Unfortunately, Worth points out, budgetary and other pressures, such as the need to succeed at "high-stakes tests like the SATs and APs," encourage the majority of teachers to continue using the older, less effective techniques.

"I watch my own kids in the Washington area who are just being asked to memorize parts of a cell or names of minerals," Klausner says. "And this is not how we do science." He would prefer to see students taught the functions that characterize a cell and then encouraged to investigate what structures the cell has developed to carry out such tasks.

Critical analysis of how and why things function-with the goal of being able to apply such knowledge to novel situations or questions-should be integrated throughout the curriculum, he argues, rather than "ghettoized" in courses labeled as science. Moreover, the new standards recommend that inquiry-based science remain an integral part of precollege education for every student, every year.