Improving Highschool Science Education

As I read this fascinating NYTimes piece on a Florida teacher covering evolution, I was reminded of an interesting email exchange I had recently with Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor in the Dept of Integrative Biology, and curator of the UC Museum of Paleontology. He was at Science Foo Camp, and afterward wrote in email:

My area is evolution, the most misunderstood concept in all of science. Two websites that help the public with this are at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology (evolution.berkeley.edu) and the National Center for Science Education (www.ncseweb.org) (our ExecDir Genie Scott was one of the other participants at camp). I'm in the process of constructing a website on major transitions in evolution to which scientists can contribute, and which will be available to all teachers, students, and textbook writers. We really want to get this stuff into textbooks so that the creationist assertions that we have no evidence for microevolution can be countered. I've outlined a strategy for this in an article (PDF).

Kevin was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper. His thesis is that highschools react to college demands, so providing great free resources for college textbook authors will raise the bar for highschool textbooks. He points to a new type of illustration, the evogram (caution: long, see also this PDF of the relevant slide), which clearly shows evolutionary continuity over both organisms and time. He suggests evograms as a useful addition to the educational toolbox.

My reaction was that I didn't think targeting colleges would work:

I enjoyed your paper. I disagree with your pivotal assumption, though, that if colleges up their game then the high-schools will have to follow. That's just not the case--you only have to look to computer science to see how CS has been gutted at the high-school level. It's as though math were taught in high-schools as "how to use a calculator". Despite our jests, math isn't that bad in high schools--there's still serious math education happening even if it could be done better, but there's precious little serious computing education at all.

Kevin stuck to his guns, though:

Interesting observation, but I think you're making a slightly different (and highly valid) point: that "simplification" for lower grade levels can mean "dumbing down" or even "subvert crucial skills" (like using calculators for everything because they're not making kids learn multiplication tables, estimates, and so on). As a result, the whole structure of CS -- what kids need to know to be literate about CS at the HS level -- is lost. That's exactly what happens when the whole science of macroevolution becomes reduced to making "molds and casts" of fossils instead of teaching concepts about biodiversity through time.

But I will stick to my thesis: K-12 curricula won't include this stuff unless it's taught at the college level. Everything is downward-driven. High schools structure their course offerings based on what will get their kids into colleges. Even at the university level we structure our major requirements for many science departments based on what medical and professional schools want as preparation. It doesn't necessarily mean that if something is in a college text it will be taught in high school, but I'm making a different point: if it's not an important part of the college curriculum, it definitely won't be taught in K-12.

PS: take a look at our UCMP website, evolution.berkeley.edu to see what can be done informally to circumvent the usual textbook-curriculum-standards bottleneck.

I now agree with Kevin—if something's critical at college level, high schools will want to teach it and teach it well. I also love the idea of providing free educational materials that make it easy for textbooks and teachers to cover a topic well. It reminds me of csunplugged.org (created by Kiwis!) that Google funded to be publicly available at no cost. I'd love to see more organized efforts to improve the high-school and college education of science (and computer science) through small reusable teaching resources. Anyone know of some?

Radar Theme: Collective Intelligence

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

"None of us is as dumb as all of us," but the opposite of this profound truth is also true. Systems that channel individual behaviours to create new and valuable data are showing up everywhere. We point to Amazon Recommendations as the canonical example, but it's hard to find an area that isn't using individual actions to produce collective wisdom.

Watchlist: Luis von Ahn, Intrade, Robin Hanson, David Pennock, Slashdot Karma.

Radar Theme: Art and Technology

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking.

Watchlist: Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU ITP, We Make Money Not Art.

Radar Theme: Open Beyond Source

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

The lessons and techniques of open source are applicable beyond source code. Open standards, open hardware, open data, open government are all borrowing from the legal, cultural, and technical toolbox of open source.

Watchlist: Sunlight Foundation, Limor Fried, Change Congress, Wesabe Data Bill of Rights, Creative Commons.

Radar Theme: Materials Science

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve. The trick is to identify the alpha-hardware-geeks prototyping great things from the new materials.

Watchlist: Inventables.

Radar Theme: Overload

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We have access to more information than ever before, so now rather than attempting to acquire more information sources we're challenged to filter the ones we have. We want technology to make us more productive, more effective, and smarter. Life hacking was the start, and intelligent software tools are the next step.

Watchlist: Linda Stone. (Pointers to other interesting people in this area gratefully accepted)

Radar Theme: Digital Democracy

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We can no longer smugly claim that the Internet exists separate from the law. Copyright, patent, and taxation are all pressing issues. From the other side, we can use our web techniques to fix a broken and corrupt political system.

Watchlist: Larry Lessig, Sunlight Foundation, Greg Elin, MySociety.

Radar Theme: Clean Energy Tech

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

All civilization depends on energy, and always has done so. Oil is rising rapidly in price and alternative energy and energy consumption management have become viable businesses. We're interested in the IT use of energy technology (green data centers) and the energy industry's use of IT (smart monitors, intelligent grids, data center placement).

Watchlist: IBM/Sun/Google, Amazon/Microsoft, Wattzon, Vinod Khosla.

Radar Theme: ARGs

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

As the players of The Lost Ring watch the Beijing Olympics, they'll see more than the rest of us. They've been playing an Alternate Reality Game, creating new significance for events and locations in the real world. Companies are interested in ARGs because they see players able to interact with brands at multiple levels, as well as creating mystery and excitement around the brand. These games are player-constructed, unpredictable, and may not even survive under the moniker "Alternate Reality Games". Whatever they grow into, they're showing us new ways of collaborating, recreating, and engaging the world around us.

Watchlist: Jane McGonigal, Jordan Weisman, Elan Lee.

Radar Theme: Neo-Geo

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Google Maps and Google Earth changed our ideas of what a map on a computer could do for us. We now have tremendously detailed data about the real world and software to manipulate it. Some of the data and code are open, some closed. More and more companies want to connect their products and services to the real world with these data and services.

Watchlist: Google Maps, Google Earth, the open source geospatial community, Where 2.0.

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