Monday, October 8, 2007 | Science : Teaching Science | print version

Call for major science campaign

by BBC

Reposted from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7030194.stm

science class

A major campaign to boost the teaching of science and technology is needed if the UK is to keep its place in the global economy, a key report warns.

Lord Sainsbury's Review of Science said there was a danger of a "race to the bottom", unless British firms moved into high value goods and services.

The UK had a good science record but needed to boost it quickly, he added.

Ministers responded by saying teachers who retrained as science specialists would be given an extra £5,000.

The government-commissioned report called for a major campaign to address the shortages of specialist science teachers.

It also wants to see more careers advice for those taking science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects in schools.

It said demand for graduates in these subjects was set to grow.

Although there was a reasonable stock of Stem graduates, potential problems lay ahead.

This was partly due to the 20-year decline in the number of pupils taking A-level physics, for example, it said.

Teachers should be given financial incentives and newly qualified teachers should be mentored.

Meanwhile the government should continue its drive to increase the number of young people studying biology, chemistry and physics separately.

Ministers should also consider giving all pupils the right to study a new further maths GCSE.

Cutting edge

The report also highlighted a fall in public funding of science in recent years, adding that investment as a percentage of GDP is now smaller than it was a decade ago.

And it warned that emerging research nations, such as China, India, South Korea and Singapore were now mounting a strong challenge to the UK's leading position in research productivity.

But it said the number of spin-off firms from university research had increased, with clusters of high technology businesses growing up around institutions.

England's schools secretary Ed Balls said £8m would be invested to increase the number of specialist science teachers.

"We will also introduce accredited physics, chemistry and maths courses to retrain teachers to become specialists in these disciplines, beginning this month.

"Every teacher who completes the course will receive a financial incentive of £5,000.

"In addition, new bursaries of £200 will be given to schools most in need to encourage them to release teachers for professional development at our science learning centres."

The money will also be used to double the number of school science clubs.

Spin-offs

There will be a £1bn campaign to boost business innovation, technological development and create a new science strategy, spearheaded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Shadow secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills, David Willetts, said: "Lord Sainsbury's report calls for more students to study the three sciences at GCSE.

"We believe every school student should have the right to study them."

Acting director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, Dr Hilary Leevers, said it was not surprising that Lord Sainsbury recognised the severity of the shortages of specialist secondary science teachers.

"He joins many calls upon the government to provide additional funding for current teachers to retrain into shortage subjects."

University and College Union general secretary Sally Hunt said it was important for colleges, as well as schools, to have the resources to implement the plans and for universities to be equipped to develop a new generation of Stem students.

The university leaders' umbrella body Universities UK welcomed the recognition of the importance cutting-edge research and skilled graduates played in the knowledge economy.

But it called for more government backing of links between universities and companies doing research and development.

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1. Comment #77077 by USA_Limey on October 8, 2007 at 11:47 am

I read something similar 10 years ago. Nothing changed then and nothing will change now.

Those students who have an aptitude for, and desire to pursue, math and science will do so.

Those who don't won't.

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2. Comment #77083 by konquererz on October 8, 2007 at 11:59 am

Unfortunately this is happening in the US as well. As parents continue to demonize science in the face of religion, its the expected outcome and why the United States continues to fall behind the world in math and science.

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3. Comment #77087 by Northern Bright on October 8, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Those students who have an aptitude for, and desire to pursue, math and science will do so.

Those who don't won't.

But good teachers are more likely to alert students to the fact that they have an aptitude for something, don't you think? And certainly more likely to make students want to pursue it. I certainly wish the science teachers I had at school many years ago had been a bit more inspiring. At the time I just thought it must be a boring subject or that my brain wasn't wired for it. Now I know otherwise!

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4. Comment #77088 by Ultraviolet G on October 8, 2007 at 12:11 pm

USA_Limey>>

I partly disagree: as the article says, it is worse now than 10 years ago. This is a cultural thing: anything that isn't easy and instantly gratifying is marginalised on TV and in pop culture. Science classes with good, funny, interesting teachers can help but I think it might be a losing battle against "big brother survival island part 27".

Maybe Channel 4 would be open to giving Prof. Dawkins and some of his associates a "state of the art" science series, introducing and exploring one subject per week for a couple of months, with production values like his previous mini-series?

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5. Comment #77097 by Nick Good on October 8, 2007 at 12:54 pm

This is laudable.

I'm not sure for the reason for the tail off in science graduates in Blighty. Could it simply be market forces pushing bright kids to study business studies, IT and accountancy, over science, maths and engineering?

I suspect that a goodly number of erstwhile science students, have been sucked into IT, I was.

What are your career prospects and how wide are your options with a business studies degree verses a physics degree? The answer to this may give us a clue.

It could also be a cultural thing - the Big Brother generation. Or even the global demand for good scientists being amply filled from India and South East Asia.

The burgeoning small business sector may be a factor too. Bright people are far more likely than a generation ago to be driven to setting up their own business rather than choose a career stalking the corridors in a white coat, of some dusty educational establishment, public sector organisation, parastatal or corporatation.

I suspect, it's a combination of these factors.

I'd also like to see critical thinking set into the core curriculum - and regarded as importantly as are numeracy and literacy.

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6. Comment #77106 by captain underpants on October 8, 2007 at 1:26 pm

Re declining interest in science, government sponsorship of religion-based schools is not helpful in this regard.

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7. Comment #77116 by Tyler Durden on October 8, 2007 at 1:41 pm

government sponsorship of religion-based schools is not helpful in this regard.

Very true. Also the fact that teachers can end up in court or out of a job/career for actually teaching science (e.g. evolution).

If only religion could be kept as a "personal belief" and not dragged into the classroom. People may think the Earth is only 6,000 years old, but science has shown otherwise - here are the facts!! Can't handle that due to your religion and obvious ignorance? Tough!! Go wait outside while others learn...

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8. Comment #77285 by hungarianelephant on October 9, 2007 at 12:43 am

"We will also introduce accredited physics, chemistry and maths courses to retrain teachers to become specialists in these disciplines, beginning this month.

"Every teacher who completes the course will receive a financial incentive of £5,000.

"In addition, new bursaries of £200 will be given to schools most in need to encourage them to release teachers for professional development at our science learning centres."

The money will also be used to double the number of school science clubs.

What planet do these people live on?

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9. Comment #77319 by dvespertilio on October 9, 2007 at 3:40 am

Again, why don't we have more students interested in physics,math and chemistry? Because these are hard-core sciences and they require a huge amount of discipline and hard study, even if one does have a special aptitude for them. A culture that panders to the banal and meaningless, and that is more interested in titillating than in thinking, isn't going to produce a whole lot of anything w/ any real significance. And yet we're still producing Nobel laureates. So maybe there's room for a little bit of everything in places like the UK and the USA. And if all the best scientists and teachers are overseas, we can do what we've always done, we can BUY them. My brother-in-law, about to finish his doctorate in structural engineering, is a Korean national. Ten to one, he stays in the US when he's offered a salary by a corporation that not only exceeds anything he'd make in Korea, but also buys him a lifestyle that wouldn't even be possible in South Korea. (Don't know how much longer that kind of lifestyle will be possible, what w/ global warming and general environmental and possible economic decline looming on the horizon, but for now....)

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10. Comment #77417 by somersetsimon on October 9, 2007 at 8:38 am

As someone who has always had an interest in science, maths and engineering, it's difficult for me to appreciate why people are drifting away from these subjects, while the overall number of students is steadily rising.

I'm not sure how you get well qualified, bright engineers and scientists to be teachers. I have a reasonably senior position in an engineering company and I doubt that a science teacher of similar standing would earn half my salary. I try to help out where I can. I go into my son's primary school occasionally to talk to the kids. One talk was 'How aeroplanes fly' and the last one was a 'What your dad does' week, so I talked to them about being an engineer. When I prepare this stuff and talk to the kids, it does come home to me that "wow - this stuff really is exciting and interesting!"

We seem to be stuck in a society where scientific and technical ignorance is almost seen as a badge of intellectual superiority. When some celeb claims "Of course, I know nothing about computers - I'm a complete technophobe, ha, ha, ha", people treat them like they are Oscar Wilde. My reaction is "No, you're just stupid". In the land of Big Brother style reality TV, demonstrating a level of ignorance that would ordinarily mark you down as mentally subnormal and completely useless to society, is now seen as cute personality trait, like having a nice smile.

Last year I heard something really sad. A 10 year old was being interviewed on the radio. He was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a footballer like David Beckham. When asked why, he said that he wanted to be rich and famous. When I was young we had dreams of being professional sportsman or astronauts and other daft ideas, but it was because we wanted to be recognized as being the best at something or achieving something that nobody else had achieved. TV programs like the X Factor let people think that there is a shortcut to fame and fortune and there is no need to spend years working your way up. It's pathetic when you see 18 year old X factor failures crying "singing is my life - it's all I ever wanted to do. It's not fair". Have they spent years practicing and working in clubs? No - they want it all now without any hard work.

It's now the same with university. Students look for the easiest course that will get them a well-paid job. It used to be that you got a good solid grounding in core subjects, then you chose the area that you moved into. You get good at something first, then the rewards come afterwards.

(Gets down off hobby horse)

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11. Comment #77657 by bitbutter on October 10, 2007 at 2:53 am

I wish Dawkins' books had been part of the biology curriculum while I was at school.

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12. Comment #77662 by epeeist on October 10, 2007 at 3:24 am

One might like to consider what the last prime minister of the UK who took a science degree actually did with it.

Did the policies of this prime minister promote science and the manufacturing base which to some extents support it. Or did the policies support the City and financial services instead?

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13. Comment #77984 by Teratornis on October 11, 2007 at 12:03 pm

Kids today play lots of computer games. If you want to teach science to kids, incorporate science lessons and puzzles into the plots of computer games. Or teach kids the math, physics, and computer science behind the games they love. And get all kids reading Wikipedia, and learning to edit collaboratively on their own school wikis, of course.

Traditional education has undergone continuous reform for more than a century. If educational reforms were actually helpful, then by now every student should be a veritable Einstein. We do have the Flynn Effect, but it's hard to claim educational technology today has improved much over what was available in the Middle Ages.

Only so much improvement is possible from rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. At some point, science must figure out the molecular basis for intelligence, so we can start engineering it. We cannot actually cultivate intelligence yet; we are still in the hunter-gatherer stage with respect to human abilities, wholly dependent on nature to produce the occasional talent in the wild. At best, educational institutions might recognize and promote intelligence where it occurs, and they do seem to be fairly good at this. Although they could always do better.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_reform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

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14. Comment #77991 by Teratornis on October 11, 2007 at 12:22 pm

In reply to comment #77657 by bitbutter:

I wish Dawkins' books had been part of the biology curriculum while I was at school.

Well, they can be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Up_In_The_Universe

Today we aren't limited to the traditional educational institutions. In the "old" days, most kids had probably five main sources of information:

1. Parents
2. Peers
3. School
4. Television
5. Church/Temple/Mosque/etc.

Each of these information sources suffers from having its own very narrow point of view. Television has of course expanded, but much of what is popular on television amounts to uninformative entertainment, so television rarely realizes its full capacity to inform.

Now we have the World Wide Web, which is sort of like television with a hundred million channels, allowing for geographically dispersed microcommunities to form. Today the Web enables any student, anywhere in the world that has Internet access, to interact directly or nearly so with well-trained minds in any field.

Of course the Web is as full of dreck as television, only moreso. The trick is to figure out how to tell the (probably small) percentage of students who have scientific curiosity and talent where to look for information which will appeal to their curiosity and develop their talent.

I'd have to think that any kid who is smart enough to become a scientist should be smart enough to find science online, but a number of factors can retard this process if we leave it all up to kids to guide themselves. Some form of active outreach might help.

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15. Comment #78007 by Teratornis on October 11, 2007 at 1:06 pm

In reply to comment #77087 by Northern Bright:

Those students who have an aptitude for, and desire to pursue, math and science will do so.

Those who don't won't.

But good teachers are more likely to alert students to the fact that they have an aptitude for something, don't you think?

Probably, but if so, what can we possibly do with that fact? Students may have little choice about who their teachers are, and maybe no way to know which teachers are "good" in the sense that you mean - so even if students were free to choose their teachers, they probably would not know which to choose. Presumably, "good" teachers cost more (like almost everything else which people consider to be "good"), so the percentage of "good" teachers would be largely fixed by the market (i.e., by teacher pay). How do we identify "good" teachers? What do we do with teachers who are not "good"?

"Good" teachers are probably much like "good" students: rare products of "the wild" rather than something we can engineer and cultivate.

Consider the difference between natural diamonds vs. artificial diamonds. To find natural diamonds requires years of painstaking exploration, then massive and destructive mining to separate each diamond from tons of surrounding ore. Human talent is analogous to natural diamonds (with the slight difference that we could selectively breed for human talent, if we wanted to, but that process is slow and imperfect and would require multi-generational commitment. Then again, the process of associative mating does this to some degree anyway - smart people tend to prefer other smart people as mates).

Artificial diamond technology allows people to manufacture gem-quality stones at much lower cost (both direct cost, and indirect cost to the environment and to native cultures). With further improvements, diamonds might ultimately become almost as cheap as graphite (if we look at the thermodynamics).

To cultivate "good" teachers, as opposed to merely "mining" or "hunting" them, we would need a scientific understanding of the basis of good teaching. Just now we are probably nowhere near to having that.

However, perhaps not long after computers can pass the Turing Test, we can use optimization techniques (e.g., genetic algorithms) to train computers to be effective teachers. That is, programmers will build conversational computers which do what teachers do, based on their study of the "best" human teachers, and then use learning algorithms to improve the teaching programs based on some objective measure of how well successive classes of students are learning.

The future of teaching might end up being a race between genetic engineering (which could improve human teachers) and Moore's Law (which could eliminate the need for human teachers).

The future of all employment could look something like that.

And certainly more likely to make students want to pursue it. I certainly wish the science teachers I had at school many years ago had been a bit more inspiring. At the time I just thought it must be a boring subject or that my brain wasn't wired for it. Now I know otherwise!

Well, that's asking a lot from teachers - they're only human after all, and how many inspiring humans do you know? Can schools outbid everyone else for them? People who have what it takes to be inspiring teachers might also have what it takes to, say, make a lot more money in business, or reach high political office, or to start new religions and really get rich.

Have you done any guest-lecturing at schools to share your belated interest in science?

I have not done that, so I have no standing to malign anyone else who hasn't, but there's nothing we can do to change our past. We might only try to give the next generation of students coming up some clues about what we wished someone had told us.

Materials are probably available to help the aspiring guest lecturer; I wouldn't think we'd have to start entirely from scratch.

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16. Comment #79270 by peteymunch on October 16, 2007 at 4:24 pm

I've just come to the end of my degree in physics, so, i've had my own personal experience of the british education system. I can only speak about my own findings, which in terms of schools is a bit outdated. In my school, i know that there was a certain lack of attention payed to those who had any talent in the sciences. They just left people who were going to pass because, as long as they got above a C grade they really didn't care. Revision support was not offered to anywhere near the level of those within the C grade area. As i say, this is just my school, others may be different.

My college physics class had 4 people in it, Maths A-level had a population of 3. The psychology class was roughly 30-40 people and the media class was so big that it is now it's own country (elections are in january).

My mum works at a school, in a science department, in her school the kids are now forced to do courses which are not recognised my colleges (non-gcse qualifications). The reason for this being that they are easier and the school looks better, because of all the A-C grades that they get. They even tell the parents that the qualifications are equivalent to 3 gcses. It's only when their child finishes their course and colleges won't go near their children that the parents realise the garbage they have been fed. So, at the end of the process, you have a child who should have gone to college to do the sciences, now unable to, because the school system let them down. I'm not blaming this on the teachers, because they're left unable to do experiments any more exciting than testing for reducing sugars and have to teach a course which is, at best, mentally unstimulating without their input.

In all, i agree with those who say that there should be more done to allure people towards the charms of science, some of the revelavtions that can be found within the subject can make you look at your whole world differently. More money should be spent, but i think we all know that if you throw money at, what looks to me like, a tumbling foundation, all it will do is buy a little time, rather than irradicating the situation all together.

Sorry if i rambled or if there are any literary faults, but this is my first post, and it's rather late

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