The Boulder campus is also home to a complementary effort to turn STEM majors into math and science teachers. Faculty from the half-dozen science departments on campus have joined with the university’s school of education to employ undergraduates as peer tutors in large introductory courses. The program whets their appetite for teaching and, once they’re hooked, blends pedagogy with content knowledge. This fall six new graduates will enter the classroom. In the meantime, preliminary results show that both the tutors, called learning assistants, and the students learn more science than those in a regular class.
The University of Texas at Austin is a leader in this movement. Its UTeach program has nearly quadrupled the number of science and math majors headed into the classroom in the past decade (from 21 in a 1996 graduating class of 12,000 to last year’s total of 74), and there are nearly 500 undergraduates in its pipeline. Begun in 1997, UTeach is also making STEM faculty rethink their traditional view of precollege teaching as a second-rate career. “Other deans of science at major research universities would tell me: ‘Our students are better than that. Teaching is not a job for our graduates,’ ” recalls Mary Ann Rankin, the moving force behind UTeach. “We’ve exploded that myth.”
In middle schools, half of math teachers and 40 percent of science teachers lack a major or minor in the subject.
UTeach’s track record so impressed the Texas-based ExxonMobil Foundation that in March it launched a $125 million National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) to scale up the program at dozens of universities. (Part of the NMSI money will also be spent on expanding a model program begun in Texas in the 1990s that trains teachers for advanced placement courses and pays students who pass those rigorous tests.) Each grant-winning university will receive up to $2.4 million over five years if it adheres closely to the Texas model.
Despite the spread of such programs, the vast majority of the nation’s annual supply of new teachers graduate from more traditional programs that offer less rigorous instruction in science and math. For them, and for the more than 3 million teachers already in the K-12 workforce, learning more math and science means in-service professional development or a graduate degree.
Ken Gross, a University of Vermont mathematician, chose the latter approach in 1998 when state school officials asked him to help improve the mathematical literacy of their largely rural workforce. The three-year graduate degree program that Gross has developed for elementary school teachers begins with the concept of mathematics as a second language. “In the equation 2 + 3 = 5, the numerals are adjectives that modify nouns, and we’ve agreed that all the numbers modify the same noun,” he explains. “But the equation 1 + 1 = 15 could also be true if the first number modified ‘dime,’ the second modified ‘nickel,’ and the third modified ‘cents.’ We don’t teach that concept, but it’s the key to understanding the language of math.” Gross says he’s not watering down the math, just making it more user-friendly for teachers who may have deliberately avoided mathematics as undergraduates.
Many academic scientists are working with both populations—enhancing the skills of existing teachers and training those not yet in the classroom. At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, for example, mathematics educator Jim Lewis has developed The Mathematics Semester—a concentration of pedagogy and mathematics courses for undergraduates preparing to be elementary school teachers—as well as Math in the Middle, a graduate program for middle-school math teachers.
“Some argue that a master’s degree in math education should only be offered to those who majored in math,” Lewis says. “But I think that sets the bar too high. Our goal is to offer a professional master’s degree for teachers, some of whom needed only two math courses to become certified, through courses that are beneficial and challenging and appropriate for their jobs.”
Both Gross and Lewis believe they are making headway. Gross cites an unpublished study that found a cohort of fourth graders in schools with Vermont Mathematics Institute–trained teachers performed significantly better in math four and six years later than a matched group attending schools without such teachers. Lewis is proud of graduates who have demonstrated improved mathematical understanding.
But STEM professional development efforts are notoriously difficult to assess and perhaps even tougher to implement consistently. An official in the Department of Education, which has supported Gross’s project, says, “We’re not in a position to say that this works. But we think that the teachers understand the math better and are better able to teach it.” Last year, an evaluation of a decadelong $250 million program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the skills of some 70,000 science and math teachers in 31 states concluded that such efforts could make a difference—if they were done well, with high-quality materials, supported by policies, and sustained over many years.
That’s apparently asking a lot, however. None of the 88 projects in the NSF’s Local Systemic Change initiative met even the most basic goal of delivering the promised 130 hours of additional training. Iris Weiss of Horizon Research says her team couldn’t comprehensively measure the effects on student achievement because the NSF didn’t initially require school districts to address that question and because the projects served such a wide range of grade levels. A second evaluation found that those districts reporting student gains couldn’t separate the effect of the project from those of other factors.
