Educational Technology and Change Journal

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Last February, Conrad Farnsworth achieved nuclear fusion in his father’s shed in Wyoming*. This would be a big deal were it not for fourteen other high school students who had done this previously. You can find a YouTube video of his accomplishment and will note that the poverty-stricken need not apply. The equipment I see there would cost a few thousand dollars new and over a thousand even if you scrounged quite a bit. You even have to have a cylinder of deuterium, the stable heavier isotope of hydrogen. It has an atomic mass of two instead of hydrogen’s one due to an added neutron in its nucleus.

“First Neutrons,” uploaded to YouTube by Conrad Farnsworth on 2 Dec. 2011.

He achieved fusion by confining the deuterium in an extremely hot plasma, hundreds of millions of degrees hot. That’s hot!

Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas. A plasma is like a glowing hot gas. Its molecules have disintegrated into atoms, and those have lost electrons to become ionized. Ionized gases can conduct electricity just like your fluorescent lights (today’s energy-saving CFLs for example) do. The ionized gas in those lights causes the fluorescent material lining the inside of the glass to glow.

Gases like to expand when they’re heated up. This expansion cools them down. To achieve enormous temperatures and fusion, you must confine the gas to prevent expansion. The problem you’ll face is that no known substance can survive those high temperatures. You cannot make a bottle to hold your super-hot plasma out of any material in the universe.  Continue reading →

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Dr. Yager is a Professor of Science Education at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Academy of Education. He has a long career in this area, and we should pay attention when he writes.

He has just written a short article for Science Education Review (11.3 [2012], pp. 54-55), “Does ‘Hands-On’ Indicate Real Reforms of Science Teaching?”* It begins with the following sentence. “Too often the reform of science for K-12 students is described as being ‘hands-on.’“ Everyone seems to be calling for reform these days. So, this is a valid discussion. Many of the reformers are “hands-on” advocates and even extremists who insist that no science education should be anything but “hands-on.” The short piece, just 1.5 pages, is well worth reading for anyone involved in science education.

Robert E Yager

Dr. Yager makes the point that involving muscles does not necessarily involve the mind. Indeed, as I also have seen, just the opposite is often the case. Science is about exploring. According to Dr. Yager, “One uniqueness of humans is their interest in exploring the natural world.” This uniqueness can drive the excitement and engagement of students with science. Losing it tends to do exactly the reverse.

Further on, he says, “Hands-on may be needed to develop tools to investigate student ideas.” Then, he counters with, “Often collecting evidence involves technology, not science!” He’s saying that you might use hands-on to collect evidence for your scientific investigation, or you might use technology. The hunt for dark matter is all technology. The Mars rovers are distant technology. Neither is truly hands-on. However, I take the view that science and science education are not the same thing. Just because scientists are trending away from hands-on, does that mean that students should too?

Continue reading →

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

[Note to the reader: I am CEO of an online science lab provider and, while this article does not address online learning, it does have opinions related to the use of science labs. While I have made every effort to avoid bias based on my current position and believe that my opinion would be the same were I, for example, still a university professor, readers should be aware of my personal connection in this regard. -HK]

The long-awaited Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) second draft has been published for public review*. This is the final public review version. After diving into them, I found them lacking in some important respects.

I’ve taken the time to look at both versions (DCI­ and Topic arrangements). They’re both the same material arranged differently. I haven’t bothered with elementary school standards because I’m happy with doing any science at all in grades K-5.

I spent some time in the middle school area and was disappointed with the lack of academic rigor, the insufficient range of topics for three years of learning, and the paucity of quantitative investigations indicated. So, I went on to the high school topics hoping for something better.

As a chemist, the first thing I looked for was chemistry. There’s so no such topic. The NGSS document is arranged under three heading: PS, LS, and ESS. These stand for physical science, life science, and earth and space science. Earth and space science is certainly physical in nature but has its own separate section, while chemistry must lie hidden in physical science somewhere. The word chemistry does not appear.

Instead, most of what I’d term chemistry appears under two headings: Structure and Properties of Matter and Chemical Reactions. All right, a derivative word for chemistry does appear there but only in the topic-oriented version.

In order to see what’s afoot here, it’s necessary to list the topics under these headings. The good news and the bad news is that there are only ten topics (eleven if you count the bonus topic). It’s good because the list is short and easy to write here. The bad news is that this is all that there is for an entire year of high school chemistry. To give the NGSS their due, the introductory material does indicate that these are “core” ideas and that teachers are free to add on more material. You have to wonder how many teachers will bother to expand on the requirements that they’re given.   Continue reading →

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By Dan Branan, Ph.D.
NANSLO Lab Director
Colorado Community College System

John Adsit wrote a recent article (“No Satisfaction in Finding on Online vs. Traditional Science Classes,” 22 Oct. 2012) commenting on a study by the Colorado Department of Higher Education’s study showing, among other things, no significant difference in long-term college grades and GPA when comparing community college students who had taken their introductory science courses online with those who had taken them in the traditional community college classroom (Epper, 18 Oct. 2012). I had initially posted a response to John’s article, and was asked by the editor of ETCJ to expand it into an article, which I greatly appreciate. In short, it seems to me that John has largely missed the mark with regard to the Colorado study and its implications.

For many years, as an online educator in the community college system in Colorado, I have listened to traditional colleagues claim as a fact that students taking online science courses are not as well-prepared and, in fact, are at a disadvantage, compared to traditional students. The traditional model was held up as the standard, without proof, even though, as John points out in his post, there have been studies indicating that the traditional educational model does not work as well as it should in the first two years of college.

John’s initial response to the Colorado study is to merely sneer at the demonstrated equivalence of online vs. traditional science classes at the community college level by stating that “students in general learned very little in the first two years of college,” relying on the excellent analysis in Academically Adrift. While I cannot dispute the findings in that report, I do have an important question about its true meaning: Do we have proof that college education has ever been different? While it may indeed be a cause for alarm, could it be that the first two years of college are a time when students undergo a wide range of mental and personal transformations in readiness for the culminating two or three years before they earn their degree? Isn’t it true that the first two years of college are often filled with fairly bland courses in preparation for study in one’s chosen field of interest?

After all, the U.S. still possesses an undergraduate educational system that many students from around the world envy. According to a report last year from the Institute of International Education, the number of international students enrolled at U.S. colleges is 32 percent higher than it was a decade ago, and this is largely due to undergraduate enrollment of Chinese students.  Continue reading →

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By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

John Adsit has written very well (“No Satisfaction in Finding on Online vs. Traditional Science Classes,” 10.22.12) about some of the issues raised by the Colorado Department of Higher Education study (Epper) and has expressed some excellent insights into this field. In some ways, I wouldn’t go quite as far, and, in others, I’ll dig more deeply.

While it’s mostly true that a university cannot meet these standards in large classes, it does not have to be so. It’s because most professors are dedicated to research and not to teaching that such situations abound. I was such a professor with 350 students in a freshman chemistry course with labs. I met with my 22 teaching assistants weekly and visited lab sessions constantly during the course. It left me little research time but helped to build a good quality course. (Today, I’d make a much better one, but I was new to teaching then.)

In community colleges, there’s no excuse for not meeting the goals of America’s Lab Report (ALR). It’s not a publish-or-perish environment, and the class size is smaller.

John has listed the ALR goals in his remarks, and I’ll comment on them specifically. I see no excuse for not meeting the second set of four goals that addresses integration of science labs with the overall course. These are overarching goals for any lab course and would be easy to meet for anyone who cares to make the effort.

The first set of goals focuses more closely on the labs themselves. These are nice goals, but are not all equal when it comes to designing great lab experiences. I’ll take them out of order to put them into the proper context.

3. Understanding the complexity and ambiguity of empirical work.

This is so important that ALR singles it out as the one goal that can be achieved in no other way than through a science lab. In this context, it’s important to note the part of the report that John left out, the definition of a science lab:

Laboratory experiences provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world (or with data drawn from the material world), using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science.

Note well that the data must always come from the “material world.” That statement completely rules out simulations that use equations and algorithms to create the data.

Continue reading →

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A recent study by the Colorado Department of Higher Education (Epper)* finds no significant difference in the performance of community college students who took science classes online and in traditional classrooms. This is consistent with many studies that show online learning to be as effective as classroom learning, but the importance of this study in the area of science is, sadly, less significant than it appears.

The study had two parts. One compared the grades of students within the system. This has little value as an indicator since grading was left to the instructors and thus provide no standard basis for comparison. The other part of the study is more valuable, showing no significant difference in the performance of the students after they transferred to four year colleges and universities. The students who completed their first two years of science education online did just well as those who completed it in regular classrooms. The significance in terms of science is the challenge to the common perception that students need to spend time in a true laboratory to get a proper science education. This online program used specially designed kits to replace the formal lab experience, and other programs used other online approaches.

Unfortunately, the 2010 study Academically Adrift shows there is little reason for celebration. That study found that students in general learned very little in the first two years of college. The conclusion of this study, then, implies that the online science program didn’t do any better (or worse) than a traditional program that we know isn’t working. One would hope that the online program is an improvement, and, in fact, it should be able to achieve improvement without breathing hard.

In 2005, the National Research Council published America’s Lab Report, a devastating look at science education in America. It was particularly concerned with the very poor way in which laboratory work was incorporated into the instructional process. Although that report focused on high school courses, the nature of the identified problems is almost certainly just as likely to be found in college classrooms, if not more so. This study not only shows why lab courses are ineffective, it also points the way to how they can be improved, whether in the physical classroom or in the online environment.

This was a meta-analysis that looked at a huge number of studies in science education.  Some of the studies actually indicated that students would perform better if labs were eliminated entirely. The reason is simply a matter of instructional alignment. Achievement in science is usually measured by the ability of students to memorize and repeat facts related to science. They are rarely assessed on their ability to think and perform as scientists, by investigating, forming hypotheses, and following the scientific method to solve a problem or reach a valid conclusion. Thus, instructional time spent on anything other than learning and memorizing facts is time wasted.  Continue reading →

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