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In 2001, Carl Wieman won the Nobel Prize for creating a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, using lasers to manipulate individual atoms. Now the 56-year-old physicist is trying to manipulate the pieces of a much larger, far more rigid system: higher education in the United States. His goal is to improve the teaching of undergraduate science and math, and he knows he’ll need every watt of his renowned laserlike concentration to get the job done.
“Yes, I think that you can teach old dogs new tricks,” says Wieman, who began working with other science educators several years ago at the University of Colorado at Boulder, before moving this year to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver after being promised $12 million in support of his education endeavors. “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Taking on this challenge has required Wieman to set aside his first love—research, a passion that he says was nurtured by his seventh-grade science teacher in rural Oregon. Instead, he is staking out a position in the middle of a growing but often uncoordinated movement to improve the current system of American science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education (often abbreviated as STEM).
Signs of deficiencies abound. U.S. students may be holding their own in math and science at the elementary level, but international comparisons indicate they are falling behind most of their global peers as they progress through the system. And what they do know is often inadequate. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the nation’s report card, reveals that nearly one-third of eighth graders don’t possess even the most basic math skills, a fraction that rises to nearly two-fifths for high school seniors. The staggering number of teachers with STEM class assignments outside their field of expertise certainly doesn’t help: In middle schools, 51.5 percent of math teachers and 40 percent of science teachers lack a major or minor in the subject.
But knowing what’s wrong isn’t the same as agreeing on what to do about it. Current reform efforts range from individual labors of love to huge multistate collaborations. Although most reformers say that they want to raise student achievement, many projects focus on interim targets, like attracting more students into STEM fields, training more and better math and science teachers or improving the skills of those already in the classroom, and strengthening curricula. A recent litany of reports laud all those approaches, but most put better teachers at the top of the list.
Reformers must also contend with the reality that education in the United States, unlike that in most countries, is primarily a state and local responsibility. Federal programs provide less than 10 percent of the $500 billion spent each year to educate the nation’s 50 million elementary and secondary school students. Even the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which requires school districts to show that their students are making progress toward acceptable achievement levels in math and reading by 2014, preserves the authority of each state to set those levels and to decide how to achieve them. Teacher certification, too, is largely a state function.
One downside to local control is that it’s harder to scale up programs on a national basis. As a result, districts can find themselves reinventing the wheel, or worse. As one educator puts it, “sometimes we end up reinventing the flat tire.”
That slow progress angers Susan Traiman of the Business Roundtable, a group of top CEOs that has pushed hard for improving STEM education. “None of this is rocket science, nor is it new,” she says. “So the question is, Why aren’t we doing these things already? The answer, I guess, is that it’s easier not to.”
A cadre of educators like Wieman are determined to develop strategies to get science education where it needs to go.
As a lifelong academic, Wieman is concentrating on the culture he knows best. Unfortunately, it’s one in which many professors still take pride in weeding out those students deemed unworthy and where the job of teaching science to nonmajors is often assigned to those on the bottom of the totem pole. “These people [faculty members] have succeeded under a system that has existed for hundreds of years,” he says, “and they assume that everybody else thinks like they do and learns in the same way.” Studies have shown that many liberal-arts majors finish their science courses less interested in the subject matter than when they began the semester, a consequence of teaching practices that fail to engage the students.
To change that outcome, Wieman and others employ a variety of educational tools. One popular device is a portable interactive teaching technique pioneered two decades ago by Harvard University physicist Eric Mazur. Instead of waiting until the final exam to find out what students know, professors repeatedly interrupt each lecture to pose a question about the topic being discussed. Students answer via handheld electronic “clickers,” and the professor then uses the answers to home in immediately on any problems.
“I’ve looked at how to improve the quality of K-12 teachers,” says Wieman, who also chairs the Board on Science Education for the U.S. National Academies, “and I think that we have to fix the universities first. Our goal is to get to the point where people start asking universities: How come you’re not doing it this way?”
