I just returned from a chemistry conference at SUNY Potsdam to serve as a panelist for a symposium on chemical education past, present and future. For those who have never taken long car rides to a remote location, let me tell you how Potsdam, New York seemed so far away from the New York City region it might as well have been the same Potsdam in Europe where Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and DeGaulle met during World War II. 788 total miles (round trip), approximately 450 on local roads (i.e., non-interstate highways), approximately 250 via single lanes with 35-45 mile per hour speed limits. Phew! To say it was a tad of a schlep is an understatement, so if you’re ever interested in taking such a road trip, budget plenty of time for yourself.
Why did I make such a trip, especially given my declining health? Well, as I will explain further in a future column someday, I essentially have a bucket list. Unlike the voluminous bucket lists some folks make when they know they’ll be soon departed, mine is somewhat shorter and more global. One of my major bucket list items, or perhaps themes, is to do as much as I can before I die to defeat ignorance and enlighten people about what chemistry and physics education can and should be. In other words, like Don Quixote de La Mancha, I’m still on a quest, the same journey since I first started teaching in 1984, to stimulate a paradigm shift in the way we teach and learn science. The only difference now is that because I likely won’t be among us a year from now, I’m taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to keep pushing my effort to whomever’s willing to listen, think and learn.
So, off I traveled to Potsdam to be a panelist for this symposium. What does a panelist exactly do? Well, the way the symposium was set up, there was a symposium organizer, four presenters (speakers) to share their work in chemical education, and then a panelist (me) to present a summary of my work in the field and then discuss/summarize each or the four presenters’ work. All of this was to take place in slightly less than three hours.
Because it’s somewhat standard practice not to publicly divulge identities of people when writing something about their academic backgrounds or work, I will refer to them as Professors A, B, and so on.
Professor A was an Emeritus member of the chemistry faculty at a very well-regarded university in the northeast, having retired five years ago. He apparently had a lofty reputation from his lengthy career, as the room was packed with an impressive number of cronies, colleagues, and perhaps protégés. In fact, after Professor A finished his presentation, more than half the room emptied out, his loyal audience leaving for other sessions.
What was interesting about Professor A’s presentation was that he incorporated a “novel” teaching approach during the first half of this past decade at a university known for very selective admissions, where the “cream of the crop” of high school graduates get the best education one can get for $50,000 a year, a price he mentioned more than a couple of times during his 20 minutes. This “novel” approach actually had its roots during the 1990s at a large public university with open admissions and a poor student retention rate in many courses, particularly in chemistry. Why Professor A even chose this “novel” approach was never really explained, nor did he ever explain the theory behind how it works. But Professor A apparently was interested in this approach and wanted to use it with students who had much stronger academic foundations and experienced much greater success while working on their undergraduate degrees.
Professor A presented three possible groups of students he could have used this approach with – a small class (approximately 20) of environmental science majors taking their required introductory chemistry course, a large lecture class (approximately 200) of traditional science (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics) majors taking their required introductory chemistry course, or a moderate-sized (approximately 50) class of honors students taking their required introductory chemistry course. Professor A chose the third group as his target population for what he considered logical and practical reasons – the environmental science group may be too small and needed resources might be limited, and the large lecture class was one within a multiple lecture section-course taught by other professors not inclined to share Professor A’s pedagogical interest.
The honors class enrollment was the right size, it was a one-section course taught and controlled by him, and as everyone supposedly knows, honors students are intelligent and motivated enough that they’re open to any teaching approach and will succeed no matter what kind of teaching you do. In other words, the “cream of the crop” is smart enough and “teacher-proof”.
What was the “novel” approach used by Professor A? Peer-Led Team Learning. What is it? Basically, instead of 50 students (split into half-groups of 25) having their weekly discussion (recitation) classes run by the professor or graduate students, the groups get smaller (6-8) and are run by a “peer”, a fellow undergraduate student who successfully took the course one year earlier. In other words, instead of getting someone with at least a bachelors degree reviewing material for college freshmen, you get a more personalized touch with a sophomore possessing a sterling grade point average. Just think, mom and dad, this is what $50,000 per year at an exclusive university gets you. Not only does the professor get to delegate his teaching load, he manages to pass on teaching opportunities to kids at $1,000 per semester and research credit instead of training doctoral students making $15,000 per year in fellowship stipends who may someday replace him.
Funny, I thought kids “teaching” other kids meant what we saw in the tutorial center…
Not all was bad with Professor A’s innovation. He was a strong proponent of testing students without calculators, which I agree can be beneficial. I strongly believe calculators have become students’ surrogate brains and made students (and their K-12) teachers lazy when it comes to working with the basic skills and language of mathematics, which woefully shows up when they flail away trying to solve chemistry and physics problems with so sense of how to conceptualize problems or the algorithmic tools needed to solve them. I was among the last kids to graduate high school without the benefit of a calculator that did everything short of making lunch for you. I learned how to use a slide rule, trig tables, logarithm tables, and even how to approximate in my head. I also remember the “brutality” of being drilled in my times tables up to 12 when I was in the third grade and word problems in the fifth grade. I’m highly skeptical even college freshmen truly know their times tables, much less how to consistently solve word problems.
It was also good that Professor A inspired several peer leaders to pursue careers as high school chemistry teachers, although I don’t know how many parents were thrilled to learn that $200,000 in college education expenditures paid the way towards a career where the average starting salary could be as little as $32,000 per year and their darling offspring would need to work at least 30 years with the same employer until seeing a six-figure salary.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against people getting an education at expensive exclusive universities, but from my perspective as a veteran educator, folks commonly send their kids to such places as “investments”, as in you invest money to make money, or more specifically, to earn a profit or dividend. Folks send their kids to such schools to become part of society’s powerful, to be leaders in business or politics, or to become doctors or lawyers, futures with better than average potential to be among the highest income earners and live a good life.
Professor B also taught chemistry at such a university, a university best known for its preparation of future lawyers, business barons and political leaders. Keep in mind Professor B’s chemistry department is also among the better ones in the northeast, and his university also has a highly-regarded medical school, as did Professor A’s university. But Professor B’s main educational innovation revolved around the scientific literacy of his university’s biggest population, students NOT majoring in science or aspiring careers in medicine.
How does scientific literacy translate at Professor B’s university? Develop courses that peak their interest in academic subjects they find personally irrelevant. Want to intrigue a future lawyer or politician about science? Develop a course that revolves around global warming, or environmental disasters, or nuclear weapons, or AIDS, or cancer, or nutrition. Get them talking, reading, and writing about today’s science-related issues so they can carry on intelligent conversations when out in the real world, and sprinkle in a little science content along the way to legitimize it with the traditionalists. Sure, and forget about offering these topics to future chemists, biologists, or physicists while they stuff themselves with pizza, milk shakes and tortilla chips while memorizing and mastering the drab facts and repetitious end-of-chapter problems from 1300-page textbooks costing on average $100. In theory, I love what Professor B has been doing at his university, but it does make me wonder why application is only reserved for the future members of non-scientific fields. I certainly would’ve welcomed more exposure to how science was being used in the world while learning all that “important stuff” in all my chemistry, biology and physics courses. I don’t think it would’ve detracted from my formal science education, and in some respects I wonder if we taught beyond the textbook in such courses, maybe we’d see fewer kids running away from science as an academic major or career goal. Call me naïve, but as a product of Post-Sputnik education, I think you can give future generations of science professionals the best of both worlds by blending the “important stuff” with the applications, so all students can appreciate that science is indeed difficult in knowledge and skills, but still very exciting. It seems we’re still stumbling around the dichotomy of how to excite kids about science and not scare them off by all the complexities of the subject matter. But like me, Professor B deals with colleagues who believe you can’t have your curricular cake and eat it too.
Equally interesting about Professor B’s work is that he used some form of objective testing in order to determine the effectiveness of his curricular innovation. Now I happen to be a real cynic when it comes to educational research, especially if one wishes to determine if a cause-effect relationship exists between innovation X and academic outcome Y. Years ago when I was completing my doctorate, I took an education research course with a professor who got his start during the 1960s with the Florida Department of Education. True story – back then some politician got the brilliant idea that first-graders’ reading scores would improve if they had better hand-eye coordination. His suggestion? Have first graders throughout the state divided into two groups – one who had regular recess breaks and one who had 10 minutes of trampoline jumping during recess while holding an open book in both hands. All first graders took a reading pre-test at the start of the school year and a post-test at the end of the school year.
What did the data show? Absolutely nothing. The kids who did best on the pre-test tended to do equally as well on average on the post-test, and the kids who did poorly on the pre-test didn’t do as well as the better performers, but showed more improvement. Was this some kind of educational miracle? No. Besides the fact that the “experiment” was poorly designed with no true control (as if one really exists when doing educational research on human beings), the study failed to recognize a statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean, which basically says there’s no way down when you’re starting at the bottom and no way up when you’re already starting at the top. In NFL terms, this is the theory behind parity. In corporate or governmental terms, this is the theory behind how everyone rises or falls to one’s own level of mediocrity and/or incompetence.
Professor B used a cognitive assessment test designed by another chemistry professor at another private, exclusive university in the Midwest. What were the results? Very similar to that reading study done in Florida during the 1960s… the top performers on the pre-test pretty much did the same on average on the post-test, and the poorer pre-test performers improved by the post-test, but still scored not as well as the top performers. Perhaps this validated professor A’s contention that top students will succeed in spite of instruction.
Professor B collaborated with a consortium of other colleges in the United States as well as other countries. What did these colleges, some being public, less exclusive and not working with English as the primary language demonstrate? The same data patterns except overall scores were lower at the “lesser quality” colleges than at Professor B’s university or universities similar to his. What did this tell Professor B? The curricular approach works at all kinds of colleges regardless of its quality, student population, or primary language of communication.
No it doesn’t. All it showed is regression to the mean is universal regardless of educational context. That’s why it’s a statistical phenomenon, and statistics are notoriously devoid of context. This is why I’ve preached for years, to colleagues, graduate students, and anyone who cares about educational research that it doesn’t prove anything and all the data one collects and analyzes ultimately means diddly pooh, to quote Jim Mora. The story behind the data is what counts in educational research, where we learn about the place, the faculty, the students, the curricula, the infrastructure and resources that support teaching and learning. Numbers are just part of the story, just like pitchers’ ERA or hitters’ batting average. And if you don’t believe me, give a pop quiz on something to a college graduate who boasts a straight A average. I’ll bet you any amount that college graduates barely remember half of what they supposedly learned or could correctly answer half of your quiz questions.
Trust me; I do this all the time. In fact, the first words out of my mouth at this symposium after I thanked the organizer for introducing me were Pop Quiz – Titanium is a magnetic metal, true or false? The answer is false, and everyone in the room, people holding PhDs in chemistry or working towards a PhD, answered true. My response? If it was true, then every person having any form of orthopedic surgery would set off metal detectors.
My point? Test grades, course grades, grade point averages, and even academic degrees don’t guarantee you truly know enough, much less everything in your field, especially chemistry. Titanium is a light transition metal in the upper middle of the periodic table and its electron arrangement causes it to be non-magnetic, hence it won’t be sensitive to metal detectors or MRI machines, or be picked up by aviation radar, which is why the space shuttle and similar aircraft were built with this metal. Does the term stealth bomber mean anything to you?
But this is a basic fact of chemistry, something we typically learn during a first-year college course, and here I was in a room full of “experts” in chemistry who didn’t know this fact. What does this tell you about the state of chemical education in the United States? But what do I know? I’m a product of a public K-12 school system and state universities. Furthermore, I am proud of a 25-year career that has never involved teaching at any exclusive institutions. The thought of $50,000 per year tuition bills would’ve sounded like science fiction, or highway robbery, to my mom and dad 30-odd years ago. I’m a chip off the old shoulder, as the concept rubs me wrong too.
As much as Professors A and B truly believed what they were doing at their hoity toity universities worked for the betterment of students, they clearly were out of touch when it came to the state of chemical education in this country. On the other hand, Professor C, the fourth presenter at this symposium, REALLY GETS IT. Professor C teaches at a branch campus of a public university in the Midwest. I knew he gets it from his very first PowerPoint slide, which offered three quotes. The first quote was from a now-deceased SUNY Potsdam chemistry professor. His words back in 2000 were “We teach the students we have, not the ones we wish we had.”
The second quote was also from a decade ago by a long-time prominent leader in the chemical education community – “Students come to college with good SAT/ACT scores, but poorer backgrounds in chemistry, mathematics, reading, and writing versus 5-10 years ago”.
The third quote, also from a decade ago by another long-time member of the chemical education community, said “General Chemistry is too mathematical and spends too much time and energy on algorithmic manipulations”.
What was Professor C trying to teach everyone? We’re essentially at the same point in terms of improving chemical education compared to 2000 and compared to 1990. In 20 years, the span of my science educational research career, we’ve essentially made not one iota of progress in our reform efforts. We sacrifice chemical literacy for the sake of bludgeoning students with lots and lots of mathematical problems – no, make that exercises, because science is basically applied math with a weekly laboratory experience to provide more opportunities for doing lots of calculations. Students calculate to their hearts’ content and have little clue what their numerical answers really mean, what the implications or applications of their answers are, or how their answers illustrate anything about the fundamentals of chemistry. But somehow students manage to get enough correct answers on tests and exams in spite of themselves, their professors, the curriculum, and any pedagogical approaches. This results in satisfactory or excellent grades in chemistry, but do those grades really translate to competence or expertise? Do successful chemistry students retain enough knowledge after completion of a course, or series of courses, or do they format their brains like old floppy disks and purge all useless data when no longer needed? Do professors do enough to encourage or inspire long-term comprehension or are they simply going through the motions of tradition, dispensing the contents of a textbook stuffed with far too much content and not enough connectivity, viewing the ultimate outcomes for the vast majority of students with a cé la vi perspective?
Professor C implored the younger members of the audience, as did I, to break the mold and try being a truly new generation of chemistry professors, try new ways to look at knowledge and how it can be taught and learned. He recommended NOT to rely exclusively on the textbooks we’re forced to assign and teach from, to think of new ways to work with the content so all students can strengthen their fundamental math, reading, writing, and reasoning skills while building content knowledge each step along the way. He recommended holding students accountable for all that they are taught, as did I, so students can appreciate that all aspects of a chemistry course have meaning and relevance, not just the answers to calculation-oriented problems. More importantly, students need to understand and appreciate WHY we teach what we teach and what the ultimate goal will be with regards to all that we teach. In other words, students need to learn about the big picture for a chemistry course, so they understand what the end product should be for them as learners, and us as professors… putting all the knowledge together for a comprehensive and integrated knowledge base.
Most importantly, Professor C reminded everyone that chemistry education is important for everyone, especially students of all levels, academic backgrounds, educational institution, and future post-academic goals. Chemical education reform is not for the privileged or academically talented, nor is it just for helping those repulsed by science complete mandatory course requirements. Chemical education reform is for everyone; chemical reform needs to be comprehensive for all students taking chemistry courses. Until we stop our subconscious or semi-intentional class warfare, cherry picking which students or chemistry courses are worthy of re-examination and re-configuration, we’ll never have true or complete chemical education reform.
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