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

As long as school systems evaluate teachers on their ability to cover a certain number of chapters in specified texts or on how well their students perform on multiple-choice achievement tests, teachers will neither pace their teaching to the speed at which their students are learning nor risk omitting a topic that will be on the test so students can pursue other concepts in greater depth.

O'Meara concurs, noting that minds-on learning emphasizes experiences over the facts that achievement tests tend to measure. In that eighth-grade class she taught, she reports that "although the students didn't learn a great deal of facts, it was the most successful course I ever taught." She argues, "kids forget most of the facts we give them. So what we really hope they will retain is an ability to think critically, work through problems logically, and make connections with the real world." That, she maintains, is what her course taught.

Such experiences may prove especially hard to engineer in poor, inner-city schools, Akiri argues. "I've taught in them, and what I'm teaching now [in an independent, girls' school] would be impossible there," she maintains. "That's not because teachers wouldn't like to do what I'm doing, but because you can't maintain discipline for more than half the class period."

Compounding the problem, she says, are overcrowded classrooms-which don't lend themselves to in-depth discussions-and the frequent truancies in many poor schools. Akiri structures her lessons and experiments to build cumulatively from one week to the next. "So if you come in halfway through the year or have many absences, you're lost."

Worth argues that too little time, overcrowding, and lack of resources or adequate teacher training "are political problems" that can be remedied when the United States musters the will to demand adequate resources for educating the next generation. She suspects that the NRC standards, because they have been issued "by the premier science organization in the country," may finally offer education reformers like herself the clout to begin mustering that will.