The sad fact is that, the longer a student is enrolled in a school science program, the more science becomes less interesting. Why? Because many science teachers and programs discourage curiosity.

What happens in high school science classrooms in Iowa and in the nation disturbs UI professors who teach science and science education. High school students are not learning to think scientifically.

What they are "learning" is a hodgepodge of briefly retained vocabulary and vaguely understood theories. Only 25 percent of all high school graduates, for example, have a working understanding of what a molecule is, even though that term is typically introduced in the third grade. "That's rather shocking to some people," says Robert Yager, UI professor of science education.

Perhaps even worse is the fact that students are routinely and institutionally discouraged from being independently inquiring. Research has shown, says Yager, that if a high school chemistry class is told to mix two solutions in a beaker and that the mixture will be yellow when it will actually be black, 80 percent of students told to repeat the experiment will report that the mixture turned yellow.

Richard Bovbjerg, UI professor of biology, comments: "At the college level, we're finding students saying 'I went through that in high school.' We say, "Tell me what it means." And they haven't the foggiest. They remember some names, remember having gone through material. We give our nonscience majors who are taking an introductory biology course a pretest when they come in, and they typically score about 40. When we ask them what they had in high school, they had lots of cell biology but they just don’t know anything about it. Yes, oh yes, they had genetics, but they can’t work problems in genetics."

Yager, who began his career teaching high school science and is trained as a plant physiologist, says that the longer a student is enrolled in a school science program, the more science becomes less interesting. Although students start out enthusiastic about science — thinking divergently and connectively — school programs discourage the asking of questions, which is the basic dynamic of creative intelligence.

John Penick, UI professor in science education, says that research has recurrently shown that "at age nine students think science is neat, fun, and exciting. They think their teacher is neat and they say she doesn't like science. They also point out that she frequently says that she doesn't know the answer to some questions. At age 13, the kids don't think it's quite as neat and interesting. They think their science teacher likes science better than they did when they were nine. Their science teacher is less likely to admit to not knowing something. By age 17, kids in general don't like science, don't want to be there, and say there science teacher loves science and never makes any mistakes. So the more the science teacher knows, the less the kids like science."

This erosion is a source of no small torment to Yager. "We're trying to get people to be more curious about the environment and things around them, asking questions, wondering about things. And yet the school program discourages curiosity."

	When students refuse to believe their eyes because their teacher told them something else would happen, opportunities for learning are lost.

What occurs typically in a public school classroom is that 90 percent of all science teaching is spent going through the textbook page by page, Yager says. In many cases the fat, glossy textbook serves to protect teachers who don't know their material cold. He notes that there is an occasional bright high school science student who knows more than his or her teacher, but when this happens the textbook becomes the wall behind which the student's questions are answered or discarded as irrelevant. And in the lab, most exercises are undisguised verification activities that do little more than teach students to follow a recipe of directions. Labs become and exercise in conformity, to the degree that students are no longer interested in their own sensory perceptions of such things as solutions that turn black in spite of the authority that has said they will turn yellow.

Other problems stem from educational materials. The most commonly used biology textbook nationwide has thousands of words in bold type. Standardized tests are commonly one-third vocabulary questions, and in the composition of such tests, hard questions that test actual scientific ability are routinely omitted because they are too difficult, says Yager.

Teachers push for memorization, a technique that flies in the face of linguists who insists the only way to study a vocabulary is when first there is meaning, he says. Science ends up as a game of language, and not as an inquiry into the nature of the world.

"You find teachers in fourth grade lecturing about p-sub-orbitals of the atom," says Penick, "and they don't know what it means, the kids don't know what it means, and none of them care." He adds that fifth grade textbooks commonly discuss quantum mechanics and sixth grade textbooks discuss general relativity. "These are subjects that used to be considered graduate physics. They are all mentioned, and when I say mentioned, they are just little words. The teachers may think they are covering material because the words actually mean something to them. It makes them feel they're serious pseudo-scientists."

In such a context, says Yager, '[vocabulary] words have no real use." Terms and definitions are typically remembered temporarily. Yager says reassessment studies show that very little material is retained even by students who received A grades in science.

"One of the big problems with high school teachers," echoes Bovbjerg, who admits the concept of a molecule is something he occasionally has trouble with, is that they often had a smattering of science rather than a big slug of it, and what they've had impressed them as very with-it, very current, cutting edge science. When they get their first class of sixteen-year-olds, they can't wait for them to learn the structure of DNA, and what protein synthesis is, and what cosmology and the Big Bang is, and these are hot things. But most sixteen-year-old kids are not ready for this. It exacerbates their fear and dulls their interest and motivation."

What are the institutional causes of bad teaching? The finger pointing is measured, compassionate, and encompassing of numerous political and economic issues larger than any one teacher or school. And the list of causes is long. School administrators on limited budgets try to preserve jobs for veteran teachers by letting them teach subjects for which they are not trained. In large urban school districts undergoing shrinking student populations, the young teachers most recently trained in science education are the first to be let go because of seniority. Supervision of student teachers is sometimes done by teachers who don’t know the subject. ("I used to supervise student teachers of Italian," Penick admits, "and I spoke no Italian.") Industry, with the promise of further research and higher pay, soaks up many potential science teachers. Moreover, not only do teachers receive low salaries and prestige for their work, but unlike people in industry or other professions, they must pay for their own continuing education.

Sometimes teachers are forced into their careers as a result of not being accepted into medical schools or of not being able to pursue a Ph.D. "The pecking order being what it is, says Yager, "the best people are encouraged to study more and more and more, with the big prize at the end being the Ph.D. Yet most people don't get a Ph.D. in a science. And so then it turns out that those who end up looking at science teaching are those who have dropped out of the running. They have never stopped once to think about what science really is and why it might be important for all people."

Such teachers sometimes assume their role is to transmit what they have learned to high school minds. "If that's all you're there for, there's really a question of whether you can give anybody your knowledge," says Yager. You certainly can't give them your scientific experiences. Most of the time the kid says, "Why are you even doing this to me? Why so we need to know this?" And of course, there is no answer other than, "I learned it."

Teachers who want to transmit their own knowledge of science sometimes single out students who are bright and get their satisfaction from encouraging and seeing these very few students go on to scientific careers — at the expense of other less-talented students. He disagrees sharply with those who say that losing interest in science is just part of growing up. "Some of the hard-line science teachers say, "Well, science was never meant to be fun. We don't want it to be fun. I’m proud to say that my course gets the best from the best and the hell with the rest.'"

There are other causes of poor science teaching. Not only do some teachers have too little training as teachers, but they may have too little training as scientists. Penick notes that as of 1985, two-thirds of physics teachers in Iowa had less than six semester hours of college physics. "If you haven't taken any physics, then it is hard for you to deal with it conceptually," he says in droll understatement.

	Good teachers reach out to the child on her or his level of interest and ability.

Another problem is that teachers have studied science at the college level but are unprepared to consider what science is appropriate to a third grader. In the elementary schools, "science is what's known laughingly in the trade as an "afternoon subject," says Penick. "You get to it when you have time. And if you don't like science as a teacher, you don't find time for it very often."

A current buzzword among those who vocationally think about such issues is "scientific literacy." Yager says that although the term strictly means the ability to read scientific writing, the wider, general usage implies a knowledge of basic science. (By one definition of scientific literacy, 90 percent of the American public is scientifically illiterate.) Yet, he says, definitions as to what constitutes "basic science" begin to disintegrate into the sub-issue of what knowledge is, versus useless information. He is worried by states' attempts to legislate what discrete bits of science should be known by, say, a ninth grader, because such well-meaning and politically popular movements may discount and retard the process by which that information is rendered useful, meaningful, or interesting.

"Everybody likes excellence; everybody wants improvement. Yet it comes down to never really being thrashed out what improvement is," Yager says.

Amid the debate, one theme emerges. The goal of good science teaching, say the various professors, is this: keeping in mind that half of all high school students don't go to college, yet are entitled to useful instruction, teachers must be trained in and must search for a way to teach a dynamic of inquiry that can be extended past the material of any one course. This involves the very qualities that children are trained to lose, such as the skills of observation and curiosity, as well as the adult abilities to see the way science and technology affect society and nonscientific issues. Relevance ensures interest, and interest leads to study.

The desired product is a process, says Bovbjerg. "It's more important in how you learn than in what you learn.... You ask questions — you don't tell them what the answer is — you ask questions and force the student to deduce an answer that has validity from what can be seen. It can be seen under a microscope. It can be seen chemically in a color change, a temperature change, a pH change. It can be seen visually in a plant or an animal; it can be seen with measuring tools in physics. These raw data put together, plus a discussion of their significance, means the student can extract a powerful notion. This sticks to the ribs pedagogically."

Bovbjerg changes his voice to imply the exact moment of learning. "My god, the solution changed color! And it repeatedly did — everybody in the class saw the same thing! Or, we dissected a cow's eye and there it was, the damn lens! We took it out and put it on the book and it magnified the letter "E" ten times and it's an amazing thing. How infinitely better than to have somebody draw a big circle and say, 'This is the lens.' With the actual lens they felt it and they looked at it and they marveled at it and they'll never forget it. That's learning."