Bruce Alberts — Editor in Chief of Science — Made an Excellent Suggestion for Improving American Science Education — but Policy Makers Will Probably Ignore It — because So Many Do Not Understand How Science and Critical Thinking Work

14 January 2014

Citation — to Bruce Alberts’ statement

Bruce Alberts, Failure of Skin-Deep Learning, Science 338(6112): 1263, doi: 10.1126/science.1233422 (07 December 2013)

Theme — when you don’t understand the mechanics of what you’re actually trying to do, you’re not going to go anywhere useful

American educators have imposed a “Test ‘Em out the Wazoo” paradigm on American pre-college education.

Bruce Alberts, Science’s editor in chief, thinks that is a wrong-headed approach because it does not teach students how to think:

Research shows that the most meaningful learning takes place when students are challenged to address an issue in depth, which can only be done for a relatively small number of topics in any school year.

But the traditional process of setting standards tends to promote a superficial “comprehensive coverage” of a field, whether it be biology or history, leaving little room for in-depth learning.

The factoid-filled textbooks that most young U.S. students are assigned for biology class make science seem like gibberish—an unending list of dry, meaningless names and relationships to be memorized.

At all levels of schooling, we need to replace the current “comprehensive” overviews of subjects with a series of in-depth explorations.

To do so, we will need to abandon the one-size-fits-all textbooks used in schools in favor of a large set of much shorter curriculum units, each designed to facilitate the active exploration of one important topic in depth for a month or so.

Importantly, the teachers in each school district should be empowered to cover only a fraction of the topics available for their grade level.

Rather than attempt to cover an entire subject such as biology, an impossible task, the goal of each unit should be to challenge students to explore one narrow topic deeply.

Does Dr. Alberts’ suggestion make sense?

Yes. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples from my own school years.

My pre-med chemistry lab instructors were all motivated PhD candidates. They generally tried to challenge us with extra credit questions, the answers to which were not among the material that we had already learned or could build on.

One esoteric reaction product question, in particular, had me in the library (for many hours) reading advanced materials regarding metals chemistry. Although I recognized that my classmates would fudge an answer based on a bogus foundation — meaning their “dots” wouldn’t really connect — I wanted to discover at least the outlines of an analytically defensible answer.

That ordeal:

(i) introduced me to an aspect of chemistry that I didn’t know existed,

(ii) impressed me with the investigational complexity of this new field,

and

(iii) reinforced my awareness of probabilistic basis of all knowledge.

Similarly, my organic chemistry professor — being a 3-dimensional theoretical and experimental chemist — taught us to think about organic interactions spatially (the way they really occur).

He required us to estimate the proportions of the variety of products that would come out of reactions involving molecules, whose complexity went beyond those customarily found in textbooks.

Building three dimensional mental models from these was not easy, especially under the pressure of test-taking. And predicting the orientation and inter-reactivity of the pertinent multi-molecular groups was challenging.

His in depth teaching gave us insights that went much beyond pre-med organic chemistry’s customary memorization format.

Not just science — English and History, too

I once took a graduate level English Literature course to fill an empty space in my summer graduate schedule. Our professor challenged us with analytical papers on a variety of poems and plays. Brilliant himself, he challenged us to be the same. When the course was over, I recognized that I had gained significant insight into the authorial brain and into the clay that is language.

History, my undergraduate major, was the same way. I took a seminar in Historiography (the writing of history). Our professor supervised my (allegedly masters equivalent) honors thesis on the unconditional surrender policy during World War II. The endeavor required me to “do” (rather than memorize and think about) history. I spent a lot of time rummaging around in musty boxes of quasi-original papers, trying to find materials to substantiate competing hypotheses.

Without that experience, I would not have had the confidence to think that I understand historical research.

Solid education is more than just saying — “Hey kid, figure this conundrum out”

Good teaching requires the addition of, “Give me your answer and a detailed analysis that supports it.”

Memorization and a too widely scattered approach cannot do this.

The moral? — We’ve gone off an empty memorization tangent — which is probably going to take us farther from our goal of producing capable scientists and analysts

The sciences differ enormously in their phenomenological “jargons.” But they are roughly similar in the underlying processes that run everything. And they are also similar in the workings of the analytical mindsets required to find answers.

This broad foundational substrate is, paradoxically, something that only a narrowed and in depth exposure will uncover.

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Bruce Alberts — Editor in Chief of Science — Made an Excellent Suggestion for Improving American Science Education — but Policy Makers Will Probably Ignore It — because So Many Do Not Understand How Science and Critical Thinking Work