Professors from Northwestern and two other Big Ten schools will receive a $9.9 million grant to develop better K-12 science curricula, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced today.
The money will help School of Education and Social Policy professors, working with colleagues at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, to create programs that connect scientific concepts to real-life problems.
“Science is generally taught as the memorization of facts and procedures,” said Daniel Edelson, an NU professor of learning sciences and computer science. “Where real science is dynamic and exciting and relevant, school science is unexciting, irrelevant and disconnected from the lives of students.”
The National Science Foundation grant is part of a $100 million initiative to develop national centers for learning and teaching. The $9.9 million, distributed over five years, will allow for the creation of the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Project 2061, a branch of the association dedicated to the reform of science education, will administer the new center.
In addition to the universities, the center will involve students and teachers from Chicago, Detroit and Lansing, Mich., school districts, where researchers can study the effectiveness of various teaching methods.
Brian Reiser, an NU professor of learning sciences, cited female and minority students’ relatively poor performance in science classes as evidence that education should change.
“Science has not traditionally worked well for all sorts of learners, and that’s something we need to address,” he said.
George DeBoer, deputy director of Project 2061, said the project’s name — a reference to the expected return of Haley’s Comet in 2061 — is a metaphor for the long-term outlook of education reform.
“What we’re saying is this isn’t going to get done overnight,” said DeBoer, who received his doctorate from NU in 1972. “We look at this as ongoing.”
DeBoer said the new center can contribute to a national dialogue about how to improve science education by training teachers, creating opportunities for graduate students in curriculum research and development, and producing better textbooks and other teaching materials.
James Gallagher, a Michigan State science education professor, said the center’s primary goal is encouraging a change from a “culture of memorization to a culture of understanding.”
“One of the questions that kids continually ask is, ‘Why should I learn this?'” he said. “And we often don’t have the best answers for that.”
Textbooks and classroom materials should connect concepts to situations and problems in the real world to engage students, DeBoer said.
Although many science education professionals recognize the need for changes, the new center will allow for concrete research to determine what works and what doesn’t.
“There is a lot of concern in the field in general that textbooks, although they have a lot of potential to enhance student learning, are not doing as much as they can to do that,” DeBoer said.
NU professors already work with teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools through the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools. The Michigan colleges have developed similar programs with area schools.
Reiser said the new center will allow the universities to study curricula in practice and the training of teachers.
“This new center really helps continue the involvement we’ve already done under (the existing program),” he said. “It will allow us to do professional development work and training of (post-doctoral students) and graduate students in connection to the work we’ve been doing.”
