A physics major teaching children in kindergarten won't succeed by lecturing. Instead, that teacher must consider what a five-year-old can understand. Maybe the kids are fascinated by squirrels.

In universities across the country, in science education curricula that go back long before the Sputnik scare of 1957, traditional science teacher preparation consists of a methods course and a final semester of student teaching added to a major in one of the sciences.

"You wait until your science learning is over and then you tack on a little education," says John Penick, UI professor of science education. 'That's analogous, I think, to preparing surgeons by teaching them a lot of basic science, giving them a 12-week residency in surgery, and then turning them loose. Those aren't the brain surgeons I want to go to."

At the University of Iowa, science education students get more than do their counterparts at most other schools. Since the late 60s, when the faculty began to expand the curriculum to support their proposal for a long-running National Science Foundation grant, the aim has been to produce about 30 new science teachers each year. From a program that typically enrolls about 60 sophomores, 40 juniors, and 50 seniors, that goal has been met.

In addition, an active outreach program to teachers in and around Iowa now reaches approximately 300 veteran science teachers a year. According to Robert Yager, UI professor of science education, "There are too many would-be excellent teachers out there who are asking 'Why does it have to be the way it's always been?' An in-service teacher can sometimes see more quickly than the traditional approach of just learning science because there is not something that everyone is motivated to do."

At the UI Science Education Center, undergraduate students seeking teacher certification in science take a minimum of three sequential fieldwork courses. In order to graduate, they must earn 60 hours of credit in their science major and 30 hours in science education. They are carefully challenged from the outset, Penick says. A physics major teaching a kindergarten science class cannot resort to a standard lecture format and is forced to consider what a four-year-old can understand.

"A couple things happen," says Penick. "If the students don't know much about science, they still know so much more than a kindergartener that it doesn't make any difference. If you put them in a class and they are nineteen, some of them are in trouble age-wise. In a high school class a bright student can run circles around you and make teaching a very miserable experience. In a high school class you give the kids an electron microscope and some of them are going to yawn. In kindergarten you give them an eyedropper and a test tube and they're excited. So, there's a chance to work with excitement."

UI science education students next move up to the fifth grade level, where they see developmental differences. Later they tutor and team-teach high school students. In addition, they take seminars on teaching skills and self-assessment. They are videotaped and critiqued for their classroom manner. They remember, in the event that they have forgotten, that high school students are in the midst of biological and psychological change. They see that the study of science can be hampered by math anxiety. They learn to avoid setting up guessing games with students and to avoid defensiveness in the classroom. With faculty help, they build patterns of classroom behavior that induce learning. A final closely monitored 16-week student teaching experience finishes the training.

The UI program stresses the development of a rationale for individual methods. "If someone asks them why they are doing something," Penick says, "we want them to be able to say why, based on what research has shown is effective technique."

"It's very intensive, careful, and expensive," states Penick. It's also quite effective, apparently. At the UI, 96 percent of students completing student teaching through the Science Education Center program go on to teaching careers, versus a national average of less than 50 percent. A study of UI program graduates showed they did not succumb to the typical high school science-teaching syndrome, but instead were able to maintain student interest in science.

Science education students must study not only the hard science and methodology of teaching, but the philosophy and history of science as well, pressing toward a synthesis of ethical issues. This last component is important, says Yager, because of the pluralistic function of public education.

"In the public schools," Yager notes, "we are dealing with all people. It's extremely important in today's society with so many problems rooted in science and technology that all citizens in a democracy be able to act wisely in trying to resolve those very problems. And that's the heart of what science teaching is all about in the schools."