Study Rips Quality of High School Labs

[Max]

By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer
2 hours, 45 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - While sleek crime-scene TV shows have turned students on to forensic science, an investigation of today's high school laboratories shows that reality isn't so flattering.

Most of the labs are of such poor quality that they don't follow basic principles of effective science teaching, said a report released Monday by the private National Research Council, a prominent adviser to government leaders on matters of science and engineering.

The typical lab is an isolated add-on that lacks clear goals, does not engage students in discussion and fails to illustrate how science methods lead to knowledge, the report said.

Also contributing to the problem: teachers who aren't prepared to run labs, state exams that don't measure lab skills, wide disparities in the quality of equipment and a simple lack of consensus over what "laboratory" means in the school environment.

Even the way class time and space are organized in high schools may be limiting progress, the study found.

"It's on target," said Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association and a former high school physics teacher. "There's a lack of clarity about why we're doing things. And we can't measure how useful labs are unless we have that clarity."

Successful lab time is critical because it bolsters students' science literacy and, more broadly, can help inspire the next wave of scientists, the report said.

The review amounts to the latest warning over the state of science in the United States. Business groups whose members have tens of millions of workers recently announced a campaign to prod the nation into improving math and science education, wary of slipping U.S. competitiveness in the world.

Criticisms of science labs are not new, but teachers say the report, coming with the imprimatur of the National Research Council, could give the matter a boost of urgency.

"For literally 150 years, laboratories have been the sacred cows of science education," said Susan Singer, chairwoman of the committee that wrote the report and professor of biology at Carleton College.

"Nobody has stopped to question what the value added is, or how we should go about using labs to improve learning. We haven't asked the right questions."

Most students take science classes during three of the four high school years, participating in labs about once a week in biology, chemistry or physics courses.

During lab time, students are supposed to be mastering subject matter, developing scientific reasoning and understanding the complexity of work involving observation, the report said. Students also should be developing teamwork abilities and cultivating an interest in science, it said.

In his high school lab in Rogers, Ark., chemistry teacher Steve Long said every activity has a clear purpose. Sometimes experiments on chemical reactions are done at the start of a lesson to hook students; sometimes they are done at the end to test a theory.

But Long said many science teachers are limited by old lab equipment, limited money, large class sizes and infrequent training on how to be better lab instructors.

"This is a problem that nobody's been willing to address. Now there's a flag out there that we can't ignore," Long said of the report.

Overall, research on high school labs is inadequate, making it difficult to draw conclusions on how to fix the problems, the report said. It recommended no specific policies, calling instead for more research and posing questions for leaders to consider.

Teachers, school boards and test writers all have responsibility to make changes, said Wheeler, the teachers association official.

___

Conclusions of a National Research Council report on U.S. high school science labs:

_Researchers and educators do not agree on how to define high school science laboratories or on what their purpose is, hampering the accumulation of research on how to improve labs.

_Labs should be designed with clear outcomes in mind and sequenced into the flow of class instruction. They should cover science content and process, and foster student discussion.

_The quality of lab experiences is poor for most students.

_Improving high school teachers' capacity to lead labs is essential. This would require major changes in undergraduate science education and more comprehensive support for teachers.

_The organization of most high schools impedes them from improving lab experiences.

_State science standards are often interpreted as requiring teachers to cover an extensive list of topics, which discourages them from devoting time on effective lab lessons.

_State science tests are often not designed to measures skills learned during labs.

[Max]

Sorry..here's the link

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050808/ap_ ... ience_labs

[PrinceofLowLight]

Labs? What labs?

I go to a fairly good magnet school in NYC, and the labs are either worksheets or study periods. Sometimes a teacher will use the limited resources and a bit of creativity to make a real lab, but usually that's not the case. My bio teacher used a tool chest of tweezers with different heads to simulate the evolution of the beaks Darwin's finches, but teachers like that are the exception.

And then they get screwed when the Regents (state-wide standardized tests) come around at the end of the year. Of my entire grade, only me and one other person passed the test, and this is in one of the better schools.

This is then used as an excuse to not fund advanced classes...I wouldn't even have taken chemistry if it wasn't a requirement for AP Biology, and then they cancle the class.

Science education in the US is a joke.

[Son of the Suns]

Schools need to spend more money highering decent science teachers with science degrees (not coaches) before they worry about the status of the laboratories. Students not learning how to apply the mathematical functions that describe how the world works to problems is the main failing of high schools.

[Quadlok]

I can remember taking about a dozen labs in highschool, although only two of them required that we actually make a lab writeup, and a most of them were along the lines of: dissect this mushroom, or look at this big collection of old slides we have on one of the 70(!) microscopes we have for a science department that never has more than 30 students. When I took a lab science course in college last spring, it was disorienting to say the least, doing one or two big labs a week that all required writeups.

[Duckie]

I go to one of the better High Schools in the Panhandle (that is to say, they hire a few Teachers after getting their Coaches, instead of spending it on improving the massively expensive and utterly useless stadium), and I can say that we did do labs.

Biology had mostly stuff like dissect the Sponge/Grasshopper/Frog/Worm, Poke About, Pretend You're Samurai Chef With A Ginsu Knife And Create Chunked Bits Of Unidentifiable Remnants, Then Answer Worksheet.

And I assume since we got all the "Don't throw a testtube, liquid will come out in midflight" and "Pyrex hurts like hell" talk, Chemistry has even more.

[darthdavid]

My bio teacher last year did her damndest to teach us the important things and I tend to think she did a good job. Beyond that, all her labs were much better organized and more informative than any of the labs the state of NY foisted on us .

[dworkin]

Arrghhh! The stupid, it burns! It burns!

Has my cerebral cortex broken down or are these people actually questioning the need to have laboratory style classrooms for science and practical work?

You want students doing science? Then they have to be able to do science which will involve designing and carrying out experiments and doing practical work so that they have the skills to do that. The 'hands-on' aspect of practicals and experiments is also a major motivator among students.

[Uraniun235]

I never cared for most physics labs, but chemistry labs were fun. Especially when the chem teacher is such a pyro that every so often he'll do something involving fire just for the hell of it.

"Today we're going to burn some gummi bears!"

Labs? What labs?

I go to a fairly good magnet school in NYC, and the labs are either worksheets or study periods. Sometimes a teacher will use the limited resources and a bit of creativity to make a real lab, but usually that's not the case. My bio teacher used a tool chest of tweezers with different heads to simulate the evolution of the beaks Darwin's finches, but teachers like that are the exception.

And then they get screwed when the Regents (state-wide standardized tests) come around at the end of the year. Of my entire grade, only me and one other person passed the test, and this is in one of the better schools.

This is then used as an excuse to not fund advanced classes...I wouldn't even have taken chemistry if it wasn't a requirement for AP Biology, and then they cancle the class.

Science education in the US is a joke.

Maybe it is, but I think it's pretty hilarious that my half-redneck high school with a herd of sheep out back and an auto shop was somehow able to have no less than six comparatively well-stocked science lab classrooms while a New York City magnet school can't do shit.

[FSTargetDrone]

Pah, science. What we need is more school prayer!

"Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. There are some things we don't want to know. Important things." --Stupid Flanders

The review amounts to the latest warning over the state of science in the United States. Business groups whose members have tens of millions of workers recently announced a campaign to prod the nation into improving math and science education, wary of slipping U.S. competitiveness in the world.

Really though, with this and the bizarre discussion of intelligent design actually being incorportated in science classes, the U.S. will be left behind.

In my case, more than 11 years ago now at a college prep high school, the science lab was fairly well-equipped, but we rarely got to do any real lab work. I was much more interested in the actual lab stuff than the classroom work, but I was fortunate to have it at all.

[Son of the Suns]

Arrghhh! The stupid, it burns! It burns!

Has my cerebral cortex broken down or are these people actually questioning the need to have laboratory style classrooms for science and practical work?

You want students doing science? Then they have to be able to do science which will involve designing and carrying out experiments and doing practical work so that they have the skills to do that. The 'hands-on' aspect of practicals and experiments is also a major motivator among students.

I would prefer that students in the high school environment develop problem solving skills using mathematics so that once they get to college they have a foundation which will allow them to properly understand and do labs.

The problem with lab style classrooms for high schools and low level undergrads is that it is simply to expensive for most schools, even though it is better than using separated lecture/labs.

[TimothyC]

In high school I found that the biology and chemistry labs were jokes for the most part, while the AP Chem and Physics (taught by the same teacher) labs were much more involved (Everything from testing the local river and creek water to building two way radios). Everything comes down to the teacher. My Bio Teacher also taught AP Bio, and put most of his time into that class, thus regular bio got shafted and my basic chemistry teacher was a fundie who gave us a half an hour of social commentary (always derived from some current event, although he did try every once in a while to connect it to chemistry) a week.

[sketerpot]

I go to a fairly good magnet school in NYC, and the labs are either worksheets or study periods.

I went to a pretty nice semi-rural school in Nebraska, and I know what you're talking about. Chemistry lab was done in a thoroughly uninspired way, and I never saw the point. Okay, so we heat up water and record the temperatures while wearing latex gloves, aprons, and goggles---big deal! What do we learn from it? We get to play with fire (woohoo!), but that's it. Uranium235's example of burning Gummi Bears would have been better.

However, when labs are done well they can be a really good thing for science classes. In my physics class, the teacher got out a small Van de Graaf generator when we were studying electricity, and he taught us how it worked (creating a voltage difference between the dome and the ground), and then we talked about why it did certain things when we played with it. For example, if you put a rabbit skin on the dome, the fur would repel itself and therefore stand up, the skin itself would stand up until it was flat because it had the same charge as the dome and so they repelled each other, and eventually the repulsion became great enough that the rabbit skin flew off the dome. We got charged ourselves and figured out how to equalize charge differences between ourselves without getting shocked with static electricity (it involved using metal rods that just happened to be there), and we had loads of fun doing it. That is a good lab. The key thing, though, is that you need good teachers for good labs. Just having equipment there doesn't cut it, although it is nice.

Sometimes a teacher will use the limited resources and a bit of creativity to make a real lab, but usually that's not the case. My bio teacher used a tool chest of tweezers with different heads to simulate the evolution of the beaks Darwin's finches, but teachers like that are the exception.

That's very cool, and that's what I'm talking about. Find good teachers, and all else will follow. Get bad ones, and all lab spending will be in vain.

Actually, good teachers can also lead to having more advanced classes. At the high school I went to, there was one science teacher who decided he would teach physics and physiology classes even if only a few people took them. That was a great opportunity, and they were excellent classes.